If I believed in astrology: You don’t invite 13 to dinner and other superstitions at the Dialogue Gallery
You don’t invite 13 to dinner. At Dialogue Gallery, however, thirteen artists have a seat at the table. Whether through the curatorial approach – whose perspective is guided by symbolic reading procedures both intuitive and analytical – or the works’ diegetic[1] content – offering interpretative possibilities on the different mysteries of life (and death), from the world’s creation to its destruction, from fate to happenstance -, the group exhibition is firmly committed to the uncertain, to the courage of those who walk through the door with their left foot, go under the stairs, crack a mirror and, in the end, do not even knock three times on a wooden surface.
The roots of people’s disdain for the number thirteen are partly common sense. This number breaks the circular perfection of the Gregorian calendar, the celestial landscape of the zodiacal constellations, the symmetry of the divine banquet on Olympus or at the Holy Supper. Maths and music also favour the preceding number: the Western musical system, also known as the temperament system, contains twelve musical notes, as well as the chromatic scale. The Bible depicts twelve tribes as the chosen people, represented by Jerusalem’s twelve monumental gates, guarded by twelve angels; twelve psalms are sung at night; the Holy Spirit inspires twelve virtues – charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, forbearance, meekness, faith, modesty, abstinence, chastity. The thirteenth element can only be the undesirable, the hostile, the one who betrays the sublime order with irreverence and danger. What does it mean to adopt this ungrateful position today?
It is truth that the exhibition text of You don’t invite 13 to dinner places astrology on an equal footing with other beliefs and legends – and, trust me, the arguments over the legitimacy and boundaries we draw between “science” and “primitivism”, “animism”, “pseudoscience”, etc. could go on and on[2] -, but, acquitting the author of this brief oversight, warranted by the thematic and spatial cut-outs to which such an essay must or usually does submit itself, we still need to praise the “unconventional means of understanding reality”[3]. Dwelling in the thirteen and vibrating its distress, its magic, means coming to terms with the problem of the future and the unexpected; it means assessing where and how we place our hopes and pessimism in a supposedly straight and one-way time. The superstition arena is also one that places “human domestic lives and futures in a humiliating relation to nature and chance […], a reminder of one’s vulnerability in the face of incoming futures” and which “implicates both humans and non-human entities as active partakers in a weave of predicted futures“[4]. All in all, opening up space and handing over the chair to the thirteenth guest is to reveal the coy relationships we have with the unpredictable – and even with other possible prediction techniques, within a world glutted with grids, algorithms, and artificial intelligences, but which has abandoned its prophets, shamans, fortune tellers, and storytellers.
Like amulets, each work on display is apparently harbouring a whole range of interpretations that are gradually opened up and multiplied, individually and collectively. Taken together, the pieces engage in a dialogue like lines on a kind of astrological chart – a natal chart was indeed drawn up and read out in the gallery during the opening: Sara Graça in trine with Vasco Futscher and Luke Silva, Alice dos Reis in opposition to Horácio Frutuoso, Tom Solty in square with Maja Escher. The reading possibilities strike me as almost limitless, and I wonder how many unusual and powerful connections we could discover if we looked at and considered any exhibition in this way (and if, naturally, we had any proper knowledge of astrological maths and mythology).
I even felt like scrutinising each artist’s work as a symbol of a sign. Pedro Huet’s A Bola de vidro (2023) would reveal all the pioneering force and the passionate, self-centred redness of Aries; Horácio Frutuoso’s The Lord’s Favorite One (2019) would challenge us with the human – and perhaps Taurus-like – illusions of the Other’s loyalty and devotion. Information point where you should relax in the name of sweetness (2023) and Sara Ain’t Guilty (2022) by Lulu would encompass an element of disobedience and detachment that only Gemini energy, with its excessive and confident creativity, could reveal. RVSP (2023) by Manuel Tainha would bear the imprint of Cancer waters – and, like the Scorpios Ano Duzentos and Ano Dez (2021) by Alice dos Reis, another piece inviting us to dive into the inner depths, it would address the cyclical order of birth and demise, from the infinite to the finite and to the infinite all over again. Calabi-yau (2015) by Vasco Futscher would use Leo’s exuberance and uniqueness to guide us through the enigmatic plethora of space-time’s multiple dimensions and layers; and, just like someone who gets the other person’s sign wrong at the first guess, we would be disappointed to realise that Metamorfoses (2023) by Inês Raposo represents Virgo and not Scorpio, the usual symbol of transformation and healing. Oh, but it was so obvious! We knew it from the start! Who else but a Virgo art could stretch out on a plate to examine itself in detail, masticate its textures, cut itself, swallow itself and, in the end, poorly digest itself? As for Captação da água (2020-23), there could be no doubt: the work is a perfect example of Libra – an air sign, indeed, but also a vessel, a broker of opposites, a conciliatory actor uniting right and left, above and below. Blowing Bubbles on a Porch (2023), by Tom Solty, would become a portrait of Sagittarian lightness, ever spontaneous, volatile and on the edge of exploding; Sara Graça’s In Questa Finestra (2021) would represent Capricorn commitment and elegance through its patient and precise ballpoint pen drawings. Espanta Espíritos (2022) by Pedro Barateiro would overwhelm us with all the typical suspicion of a questioning Aquarius, who, ultimately, is only looking to be part of something bigger. It would also be obvious that Chocke (2023) by Luke Silva is an allegory of Piscean ingenuity and drama, as he allows his emotional oceans to flow onto the canvas, handling watercolour like someone who masterfully navigates other waters. And finally, the thirteenth sign, Ophiuchus, would be the one who, whilst not part of the traditional zodiac – even transferred to the second floor of the Dialogue Gallery -, bewilders us all with its visionary secret: Each Moment Presents What Happens (2022), by the veteran and prestigious Johanna Billing.
Of course, all this would only happen if I “believed” in astrology.
You don’t invite 13 to dinner is curated by Beatriz Neves Fernandes, Joana Oliveira and Sonia Taborda, and is showing at the Dialogue Gallery in Marvila, Lisbon, until December 30, 2023. To be visited with 12 raisins in hand.
[1] Diegesis is a concept in narratology, literary, dramaturgical and film studies that deals with the reality of the elements within a narrative. For instance, diegetic music is found in and embodied by a certain fictional universe, with direct implications for the characters in that scene or drama; by contrast, extra-diegetic sounds or soundtracks are only experienced by spectators and are not part of the world and story that unfolds in the work.
[2] I can mention the work of several traditional astrologers who are also sociologists, anthropologists or science scholars, or, for the European academic audience, any of the brilliant treatises by Silvia Federici or Isabelle Stengers, who rigorously and historically examine the peripheries of the scientific gesture and the ways in which the world is enchanted.
[3] Exhibition text.
[4] Reis, Alice dos. (2019). “Paul the Octopus’ Death and Other Thoughts on Animal Oracles.” in Schemas of. Uncertanity, ed. Danae Io, Callum Copley. Amsterdam: PUB. Available in: <https://schemasofuncertainty.com/paul-the-octopus-death>.