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Corpus Infinitum at MACBA: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

How to start?

This is the question I raise. And so does Denise Ferreira da Silva, co-author and interdisciplinary thinker in Corpus Infinitum, in one of the exhibition’s main references: her book A dívida impagável (2019). Until September 25 at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Corpus Infinitum attempts to understand what our thoughts would be like if they were guided only by the fundamental elements. The exhibition, also with artist Arjuna Neuman, features experimental footage that explores what can only be described as material aesthetics, which appears alongside negritude[1] as a guide to our critical engagement with modern thought.

The main doubt that Ferreira da Silva uses to shape the introduction of her narrative in A dívida impagável allows for the exploration of other backgrounds and languages which are not based on the sequentially and determinism of colonial ontoepistemology. In this context, the collection of essays on black feminist poetics identifies the systematic failure of justice towards black bodies and territories, which is only visible as a subaltern racial subject. Hence, it is necessary to intervene in the logic of understanding racial violence, as it is essential to “symbolically reconfigure the utter (colonial) violence that sustains the (monetary and symbolic) expropriation of the productive capacity of non-European lands and bodies[2]. And how can we begin again?

The intervention proposes a metaphilosophical critique of the foundations of modern thought (since the late 19th century) combined with a method of aesthetic intervention. For this, a radical change in the understanding of space-time is proposed. This is the only possibility to step away from the objective understanding of subjectivity, perpetuated mainly by Immanuel Kant, and its pure institutions after the Cartesian separation of the world.

If time and space, as they are understood in the modern Western world, were suspended, what would exist? How can we begin our journey without the ontoepistemological linearity that feeds “colonial, racial and cisheteropatriarchal thinking and the callous violence it enables in support of the capital state[3]?

Based on this primordial enquiry, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman present three experimental films, Serpent Rain(2016), 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2016) and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020). Each of these considers the Human (man, subject, humanity) through the four fundamental elements: fire, water, air, and the earth that remains as the essential script of the journey that forsakes colonial ontoepistemological linearity.

To present the trajectory proposed by the artists, we must highlight the production team that allowed the screening of the films. During this MACBA season, the best quality of assemblages is presented, on par with what we find in the best artistic institutions around the world.

But let’s return to our path.

Serpent Rain (2016), which has already been shown at DocLisboa in 2017, is the first of the films exhibited to the public in Corpus Infinitum. In a dark room with a soft floor, Serpent Rain is a prelude to the narrative suspended in the exhibition.

In the film, the artists transcend the absence of time to present the exploitation of bodies and the Earth as two sides of the same neo-liberal rationale, based on the abuse of human and natural resources. According to Ferreira da Silva and Neuman, this exploitation is rooted in our notion of ethical and economic value, closely tied to our linear conception of time. After all, notions of value are justified by the logic perpetuated during the ontoepistemology spread by our linear understanding of time. This is only possible because we prefer the immateriality of time, which we count in dates, hours and seconds, rather than materiality, as by fossils (an example used by artists). This predilection for the immateriality of time suggests an immutable logic of factual appreciation. According to the artists, this can only be transformed if the narrative line we know is extinguished and its value abstracted.

Abstraction is the exhibition’s main procedure of appreciation. As we enter the concave room dedicated to 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2016), previously exhibited at Berlin Biennale 10, we are led to reappraise value, considering the possibility of leading us to what exists without the relationships presupposed by the connections conceived in the linearity of material time through water, the foundational element of four islands presents in the film; Lesvos, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Tiwi.

This intimate reflection leads us to Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020), a film dedicated to tenderness, evoking the radical sensitivity we learn from listening to skin, warmth and echoes. Can tenderness dissolve violence?

To bring the exhibition cycle to an end and offer an external reflection, the film also presents the destruction caused by the rupture of the dam controlled by the Vale S.A. company in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais state in Brazil, 2019. It was the second largest industrial disaster of the century and the largest (culpable) workplace accident in Brazil. This film also questions, through the voices of the bodies that survived the disaster, the way humans presume the value of bodies and nature as parts of capital production.

Corpus Infinitum is a must-see exhibition and is essential in contemporary times. How can we live if we are only able to survive in the immaterial time line created by the logic of modern capital? We must suspend, extrapolate and recreate the path of time. To begin to tell our story, we must begin again.

 

 

[1] The term negritude (blackness) is used in this text according to the semantics of the author Denise Ferreira da Silva in the book A dívida impagável (2019). But there are other terms in Portuguese such as negritude or negrícia that, despite not being semantic synonyms, have the same field of signifiers. To learn more, I recommend the article by Ferreira, F. L (2006). “Negritude”, “Negridade”, “Negrícia”: história e sentidos de três conceitos viajantes. Via Atlântica, (9), 164. Universidade de São Paulo.

[2] Ferreira da Silva, D. (2019). A Dívida Impagável: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Common. p.39.

[3] Ferreira da Silva, D. Neuman, A. (2023). Corpus Infinitum. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Maria Eduarda Wendhausen (Rio de Janeiro, 2000). She graduated in Art and Heritage Sciences from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and is a student of the Masters in Criticism, Curatorship and Theories of Art from the same institution. She also studied at Sotheby's Institute of Art on the Writing for the Art World, From Idea to Submission course. She works as a writer and curator in Lisbon, Portugal. She collaborated with Manicómio in the Pavilhão31 exhibition space and with Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa. Her last performance as a curator, took place at ARCOLisboa2022 with the exhibition CRACK THE EGG of the Millennium bcp Youth Art Prize, in 2022. In 2023, she started collaborating with CentralC as content manager. She writes regularly for scientific and specialized magazines as a freelancer in the field of art criticism, as well as features and academic essays, with the aim of disseminating and promoting to the general public, the multiple facets of art studies and their unfolding in everyday life.

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