«We are free. Freed. Liberated from the prison they called Institute for Scientific Research. Tonight we rise with the desire for a new science. The new world has no place for the science of our ancestors. A violent imagining of the structures of the world. To envision a new future we have to destroy the words with which we explain this world». Excerpt from Prólogo of Fogo Posto (2023), with a sci-fi undertone, or a mythological narrative of the coming exhibition. A kind of manifesto for a new future, not according to a rational and scientific logic empirically, but based on another construction of the past, i.e., History, not founded on a Eurocentric, white and patriarchal structure, but on the representation of all bodies, living and non-living beings, according to imagination and magic, refusing even the words with which we give meaning to the world.

Fogo Posto (2023) by Diana Policarpo & Odete, at Lehmann + Silva, the second installation by the artist duo, after LYSIS (2021), is the result of a common thought and life experience, leading to a multidisciplinary work, where the combination of multiple artistic practices, such as moving image, sound, text or drawing, as well as the establishment of a set design in the exhibition venue, whether in the layout of the different screens, the sand-filled floor, the sound design, or the sporadic and dramatic lighting, add a theatrical edge and provide the viewer with a possible path that takes them to a cinematic realm. In the environment generated on the gallery’s first floor, a triptych of videos brings together the narrative that cuts across the entire exhibition, the story of Lyra and Dafne, characters who initiate a fictional political movement in LYSIS (2021). Now, in Fogo Posto, we see in one of the videos the characters living in an experimental commune, in a world after such a movement, where rational thought no longer exists and magic is no longer a misguided locus, addressing issues related to the history of reproductive medicine in patriarchal systems, self-determination over the body, or reflections on institutional and constitutional statements. On another screen, we can grasp in a more poetic, abstract and experimental way a new meaning given to birth and rebirth, in reference to parthenogenesis (growth and development of an embryo without fertilisation). In the third video, a sorcerer gives a “lecture” in a lab, exploring themes common to the audio-visual installation, such as the power of medicinal herbs, astrology and magic, as opposed to synthetic chemical elements, science and rationality as oppressive patriarchal powers of the new world. Throughout the moving images, we see, as in a fictionalised documentary, the characters’ testimony, but in contrasting colours that go beyond an aesthetic of the “real”, as well as images that fade into others, symbolic drawings, and a constant questioning, rather than simple findings of what should be elaborated.

In the gallery’s basement, the atmosphere is lighter, the walls are lined with posters and drawings, developing in another way Lyra and Dafne’s narrative, as well as that of the new community. Another way of presenting the archive of their story, which began when a bacterium from distant times was discovered, taken to a laboratory where it mutated, later to escape and lodge in human bodies, revealing another past and thus a new future to humanity. Vibrantly coloured drawings, detailing cells and plants, mythological beings, small lightings, deconstructing scientific drawing, as well as the techniques used over the centuries to illustrate History and stories. According to the artists’ text supporting the exhibition project: In a radical sense, the exhibition could be seen as an archive of the history and resistance of this community. Documentation laid out not in a linear logic, but through different means, plasticities and approaches, possible through the plurality, narrativity and experimentality with which the duo of artists develops their practice.

Fogo Posto: Diana Policarpo & Odete is at Lehmann + Silva until July 31, 2023.