Ovid writes early in his Metamorphoses[1] that our world originally experienced a flood that led to a large swamp. All things were gestated in this sun-warmed clay, including you, admirable Python, colossal serpent and Apollo’s nemesis. For where else but the clay, in its wondrous fertility, could have given birth to such a creature? And many other miracles would spring from the mud. The Egyptians, worshippers of the Nile’s floods, regarded it as the raw material for the marshy paradise they called Aaru, the Field of Reeds. And if the ancient Stoics too viewed mud as the principle of all that is, perhaps it was not for nothing that civilisation emerged in the damp soil between the Tigris and Euphrates, in the clay shaping soft polis akin to the clay temples of the magnificent African empire of Mali, which once occupied Guinea-Bissau, whose marshy shoreline is home to the Balanta people.

Their culture is the subject of the documentary Fogo no Lodo by Catarina Laranjeiro and Daniel Barroca, a work that is included in the sixth exhibition of the Territory cycle called The Floor is Lava!, which they have curated at Fidelidade Arte. Initially, Fogo no Lodo appears to emphasise the socio-cultural state of the Balantas following the colonial war that drove out the Portuguese army and established Guinea-Bissau’s independence. But its political tone is only the outer layer of a deeper and more mysterious plane of this reality, unveiled to us by a film that is not just content with documenting, but also interprets, in its eagerness to access the substance and understand the mythical resonances of this world.

Its story, as in Metamorphoses, opens with heavy rain and long cultivation. For many cultures, the deluge is the apocalypse that ends one world for another to be born, and so witnessing the farmers turning over hot mud to flood the rice field is like bearing testimony to the first crop in history, when the back of the Python would surface among the grains. Instead, we watch an anthill whose disturbing overgrowth resembles the monsters of old. This epic approach brings the banal closer to the sublime and turns the daily life of this society into a fascinating drama. We are introduced to a psychic regime different from modern culture, where humans coexist with primordial creatures such as crabs, water lilies and crocodiles, and prophets seated in the mud draw insightful dreams in an arcane language, since the world that will decipher them is yet to emerge.

The exhibition features two of these drawings, both by Victor Bor, one of the few prophets of the recent Kyangyang religion. They are small spirals with countless variations laid out in a force field resembling the volatile energy of flocking birds. It bears a faint likeness both to the art of arabesque and Islamic calligraphy, Guinea-Bissau’s chief religion, and to some mystical Western symbolic motifs. Could this writing be the beast that emerged from the mud? Its chaotic anatomy, illegible to the uninitiated, is nonetheless intuited by the prophets. They are like the glimpse of a mysterious world that is unfolding in the most sentient consciousnesses, as it is still too subtle to manifest itself in matter. Daniel Barroca’s work, Uma montagem de atrações, also reveals the stammering of a feverish demiurge attempting to build the structure of a new reality: his enormous series is formed of variations on the same motif, straight lines in marker and wavering graphite lines composing somewhat bizarre volumes that are never solidified. Nothing stops forming in the mud realm, and both works, exhibited in dialogue, preserve that unfinished, rustic expression ever so typical of the drama of anyone who attempts to reveal something grandiose that is still vague. For Barroca, an aesthetic exercise is a free artistic assimilation, whereas for Bor psychography holds the entire future of a people. The same room also houses a wealth of photographs by Ramon Sarró and Marina Padrão Temudo, showing us all the artistic nuances of Kyangyang, whose objective is to mediate the human experience in this new spiritual topography. The images converge a sophisticated plastic architecture with a gestural simplicity to throb with the force of a world under development.

This renewal represents a rupture with established language, which can only reveal the past. Between the prophetic writing of tomorrow and the present silence of the film’s long sequences, there is also the accounts of the Balantas who recollect the violence of the whites in the colonial war. In Ovid, the flood is a divine response to the fall of a once peaceful civilisation turned violent. Could the war have spurred the storm that opens the film? The film never features the aforementioned white. As an entity that predates the beginning of this world, it is also one of its shaping agents. José Estima’s photographs address the tragedy of this encounter, where Portuguese soldiers stand in ramshackle tents with bayonets on their beds and wine bottles in the mud. Their foolish pride brought to mind the pitiful end of the Python, when the god Apollo shoots the monster with a thousand arrows – his narrow comprehension belittled what he did not know. Classical purism prevented him from perceiving the endless power of the monster, the supreme otherness that has much to teach but is still viewed with suspicion by those who are unwilling to question it. Europe – which, rather than learning, has always imposed itself on the customs of other nations – has greatly nurtured the devastation of the other and its own decline. But if mud, also a symbol of destruction, is a scar of colonial rationale, it is also a pledge of endless futures: life waiting for its final mould. The Balanta drama is meant to inhabit this extended in-between. The film features a dove that resembles Noah’s white bird, the messenger of the post-diluvian future. However, here it is caught by a barb: the new world is taking a long time to be born and the old is taking a while to fade away. The swamp is the territory of transitions. It only remains to be seen whether Balanta can sublimate the fierceness of cruelty and imagine other sorts of fascination that are still off-limits to us.

Socio-cultural factors guide the first two rooms, featuring works by Africans who emigrated to Europe, the first of which is the only one dealing with entirely urban scenes. Within the hybrid nature of this cultural clash, CV TEP narrates brief episodes of the French animation Lascars, but, instead of heightening the conflict and subverting the original images in a narration that ironizes them, the artist reinforces the scatological humour of the original content. Sara Santos presents Manta Sintomática, a dark-coloured embroidery with naif shapes depicting symbols of urban hostility arising from social inequality, and three snow globes with buildings from Lisbon’s densely populated immigrant suburbs. The animation, the embroidery and the globe are also symbols of childhood imagination and nostalgia, this sweet idealising of a lost past that is all too common in exile and which creates here a thought-provoking contrast between the innocence of the forms and the harshness of their content. The second room presents a series of short films made in Europe but with narratives set in Africa, straddling the real and the fictional, and the nostalgia of the previous room is converted into nostalgic sarcasm. Screened on smartphones, signs of the omnipresent mass culture satirise the relationship between African culture and Western intimidation. The strong presence of nature generates a borderline sense of a society that is not yet fully integrated, with room for both regional authenticity and permissive credulity.

The exhibition’s upside-down circuit is hence understandable: its story starts at the end, from the consequences to the causes. Between memory and invention, we gradually escape the time of the city to enter the mythical origins of a people where, in eternal cycles, the end and the beginning come together. By ritualising the seasons of drought and flood, the Balantas have transcended them into death and rebirth symbols, and rejected the linear time of so-called modern progress. The circular layout of the exhibition rooms, fostering the seam between the last and first rooms, subverts our initial interpretations and reiterates this sense of perpetuation typical of the widest instances of existence.

And yet the end is already looming. If democracy is like mud – for, of all systems, it is the most malleable – then the civil war rumours sweeping the fragile electoral process in Guinea-Bissau, also portrayed in the film, sustain the fire that brings the narrative to a close. Could this fire be the outcome of violence that, as in Ovid, will be extinguished by the deluge that starts the film, in one more of the many exhibition cycles? The Stoics also prophesied that eventually the fire would devour everything, so that another cosmos could spring from the ashes. Not by chance did I see, in Retrato de Inverno numa Paisagem Ardida, a film by Inês Sapeta Dias on display in the third room, the birth of a world: the first raindrops in a burnt forest, and new streams being formed over a cradle of ashes. The old forest also had rivers, but here a new water layout is being rehearsed, similar to the delicate improvisation found in Kyangyang’s works, aimed at overcoming its eternal return.

This is perhaps why the only work located outside any room, in the open space of the gallery that lies between the end and the beginning of the exhibition, is a transcendent symbol: a spectre of Victor Bor. Its ghostly form surfaces, through folds, from the flat paper – like a new kingdom emerging from the marshy ground. Co-opted by the Kyangyang language, it recalls the unheard languages of angels or even the magical feel of ancient sculptures on whose stone cryptic charms have been written. Like the world of water born, it stands in an unstable balance between power and fragility: on paper, every drop is a flood and every ember a fire. We must assimilate its message before yet another end imposes itself on the power of the fragile beginning.

The Floor is Lava!, curated by Catarina Laranjeiro and Daniel Barroca, is on show at Fidelidade Arte until August 30.

[1] Ovídio. (2019). Metamorphoses. São Paulo: Editora 34, pp. 63-77.