A phonograph that also happens to be a gas cooker; a bed that stores an upright piano underneath the mattress; a dining table where the crockery is permanently pinned to the top, turning it into a post-meal decorative feature. Every piece of household furniture in the short film The Scarecrow, directed by Buster Keaton in 1920, has a double life; often multiple lives. A true master of comedy cinema, Keaton offers us a shimmering sequence about modern domesticity at what would perhaps be its most effective, whilst leaving us with a haunting question mark: when the plate rack is turned upside down, it unveils a sign printed with the sentence “What is home without a mother?”. A most eloquent socio-economic remark, compressed into a brief, silent film essay. Moreover, this question penetrates us intimately and dwells there where our home, family and emotional memories are masked and eternalised.

I graduated in Cinema, but only came across this Keaton masterpiece through Isa Toledo’s Casa Commedia exhibition. The Brazilian artist, whose life is also double or multiple – with an English mother, Isa has lived in Dubai, Berlin and, for many years now, Lisbon – describes this scene as she goes over the constellation of archives, objects and intertextual references responsible for her second solo exhibition at Galeria Miguel Nabinho. In 2021, she debuted her solo works on these white walls with the exhibition pick a card any card. Both that show and this one, as well as her entire body of work, echo a very special gesture and pattern on the part of the artist, who is always reading, writing and rewriting, saving, collecting and reminiscing. As we listen to her expand on her own creative processes, with remarkable clear-sightedness, the words she stitches together – whether on the ribbons of a red shoe, under a mirror, on top of a telephone, or on the inside of metal kitchen utensils – slip into other directions, merging and breaking apart in unexpected combinations; they could be obvious, but they are not.

Like Keaton, Isa has perfected the comedy routine, extending the question posed by the film-maker in The Scarecrow with another serious layer of wit: in We have to stay here (2023), the sentence becomes “What is home without a mother another”, hinting at psychoanalysis with a Freudian slip (saying a mother when she meant another) that broadens the original restlessness, widens the comedy and, finally, lengthens the house. Laughter is just this mechanism capable of widening paths and building bridges between one and the other, between the subliminal interior and the abrupt exterior, between the private and the social. The artist’s own way of creating and making opens up to this impromptu behind the exhibition, connecting her personal interests to the pieces on offer, objects referring to neighbourhood life, to the trades found in her surroundings. “I started spending a lot of time reflecting on what was in Baixa, where I live […]. There were mainly the stamps made at Franco, the engraving made on any kind of metal, the embroidery I do at home with threads sourced from local haberdashery. And then there was Casa da Bandeira, for instance,” she says in a filmed conversation with Miguel Nabinho. The “delight”, to which the artist identifies the purpose of the joke, could also be this living body of the streets, of the mundane or random encounter, of the powerful acts of those who offer gifts, cook, tell stories, remember the dead, laugh together.

Everything we see refers to a situation on the brink of the household – ultimately, on the edges of the known. The steel trays are an invitation to a shared banquet; the two telephones, connected by a wire, are having a conversation; in front of a long table, the stamps are tracing and gathering the marks of several hands, uses and subjectivities. Freud, who looked extensively at the subject of humour, argued that a joke – from the German witz – is “the ability to spot likenesses in disparate things, that is, to discover unnoticed similarities”[1]. The result is an individual drama transformed into an existential tragedy, “saved by humour; a realisation that nothing was serious outside of our imagination and symbolic fields”[2]. In other words, breaking out of the house, from the private to the social, provides us with a new, necessary and joyful vitality.

Casa Commedia by Isa Toledo is showing at Galeria Miguel Nabinho until 16 March, 2024.

[1] FREUD, Sigmund. (1927). “O humor”. In: FREUD, Sigmund. (1974). Edição Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicológicas Completas. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, v. XXI, pp. 18-19.
[2] RIBEIRO, Maria Mazzarelo. (2008). “Do trágico ao drama, salve-se pelo humor!”. Circulo Brasileiro de Psicanálise. Revista Estudos de Psicanálise, nº 31, October, p. 109.