As fate may have it, the name of the archaeologist in charge of excavating the Templo Mayor, the ontological architecture of Montezuma, the last Aztec emperor, was also Montezuma. Details like this help us understand the scope of a timeline repeating itself over and over again, although never quite in the same way. Was the scientist the metempsychosis of the ancient monarch who, five hundred years later, dug up his own temple? The Aztecs carved their calendars into stone discs as they believed in a cosmic cycle renewed every 52 years. In Babylon, too, astrologers etched on clay tablets the geometry of eclipses and Venus’ arc, believing they could predict their trajectories and the events they would bring, since earthly life also followed cycles – the moon’s phases and the tides, the seasons and the habits of the beasts.

Or was this merely a matter of coincidental aliases, time being nothing more than an unconscious entropy that erodes the integrity of things, and the human being not a pawn of happenstance, but a creature thrown to their fate in a lawless and directionless cosmos? Whereas before celestial cartographies assimilated the cosmic logos to bind human chance to natural perenniality, modernity’s aspiration is different: to overpower an already disillusioned nature, isolating us in a separate world in which only the rules that humans create for themselves endure. It hopes to change the cyclical confinement of a life that subjects us to natural decrees into a linear time, expressed not by the cyclical seasons but by the steady progress of humanity.

Eduarda Rosa’s exhibition Memórias, Pesadelos e Inquietações is sewn between Aztec calendars and industrial sheds, starry horizons and radioactive frowns. The artist uses collage to build a patchwork of images not entirely dissimilar to another figurehead of modernity: the encyclopaedia, aimed at instituting a rational translation of the world, which is both its reflection and its overcoming. Eduarda capitalises on this critical distance and archivist spirit to challenge the cultural symbols of the past and present, and to suggest future ones. Her works are peppered with astral maps prevalent in bygone worldviews, banal objects such as tables and cupboards that acquire epic features in the grand scheme of the exhibition, and apocalyptic images signalling disasters to come. She thus attempts to understand the inner turmoil of the human being who has sought to use the world to transform themselves into a god. But the artist does not praise modernity – it is more of an elegy that is designed to raise perhaps the biggest question of recent centuries: are we the masters of our fate?

Here lies a scientific zeal, a commitment to transparency that keeps the integrity of her cut-outs preserved in a method that differs, for one, from Cubist papier collé, which saw collage practice as the subjective manipulation of forms. Meanwhile, the artist’s rehearsed associations follow the intimate musings of memory rather than the objective filing of lived events. In her work Série A, we encounter fountains of youth, Aztec calendars, industrial pavilions, ships, bridges and planes, furniture and fishing nets, caged animals, fungi and bacteria, exotic specimens, lighthouses and panopticons, anatomical drawings and theatre stages, all displayed in a conflicting concurrence which is a fragile reflection of our zeitgeist. In cut-outs of running horses I was reminded of the modern Mephistopheles, who says to Faust: ‘If I buy six horses, won’t their strength become mine? I can run with them, and be a real man”^[1]. Given the birds, I thought of both Darwin and Villard de Honnecourt, perhaps an unsuspecting pioneer of both the encyclopaedia and Renaissance art, when he started to draw in his notebook not the divine archetypes only revealed from within, but the images of the external world and groundbreaking tool inventions.

Her work Sem Título contains astral maps that preserve as much our attempt to codify the stellar flux as the astonished cosmic delight of the past. I believe that this intriguing contrast reached its apex in the scholastic attempt to rank the hierarchy of angels, whose arcane language also operated the renowned Music of the Spheres, a symphony created by the planetary gliding that is inaudible to meagre human ears. The modern quest for redemption unfolds between the drive for power and its inherent fragility, even keeping the same linear character as the Bible: it starts with the helplessness that snatches the human from the divine womb and concludes with the Last Judgement that unlocks the gates of paradise – its comic arc is only a half-circle, and every bit as utopian as the modern dialectic.

Maybe this is why there is a certain linearity in her Série C, which moves forward in time to use Renaissance cut-outs. There are more contrasts to be found in this: if the figurative collages are in black and white, the artist paints geometric lines around them in expressionless colour patches that seize the corners of the frames to shine out in angles and patterns reminiscent of Gothic stained glass windows. If the scenes are religious, Rosa’s drawings contain the scientific accuracy of a phlegmatic approach to the once glorious miracle of light. This religious connection between the figurative and the abstract echoes the iconoclastic quest of modern artists, such as Malevich, for new spiritual representations outside of Catholic iconography. The compositional handling of the series is also remarkable, beginning with Eve and ending with Adam. Is this a reflection on the male and female archetypes that coexist in human endeavours? Eve as the source of our intellectual endeavours, when, still in humble beginnings, we revered the wisdom of a nature that, rather than opposing, is adaptable. And Adam as the major objective of our urge to control, who relinquished contact with the natural for the sake of a civilising inflexibility. Not for nothing, in one of the works in Série A, we see both matrons in long dresses, one of whom is titanically clutching a globe over her head, and male soldiers with bayonets on their backs and leather boots, standing amid the celestial horizons.

With the threat of ecological collapse, the excruciating whip of the storm tries to frustrate the modern positivist impetus. In her Série: Outros Mundos, there are images of an untamed nature, raging over fragile human structures, such as tentative boats stranded on a blighted beach or bridges overwhelmed by blizzards. The artist draws sharp black spots over them, reminding us of certain modern artists’ appreciation of the Alpine rock formations, geological mishaps whose shattered structure casts a tragic tone over human projects – as in Caspar Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice, which, not for nothing, reveals the wreckage of a ship between glacial spires of Gothic poignancy.

The sequence closes with the quote ‘to the conquest of other worlds’. Are these other worlds the ones that have been altered by the Anthropocene, the natural outcome of the modern project? Intergalactic worlds awaiting our arrival when the present one proves non-viable? Or even the Aztecs’ metempsychotic worlds, born again after the end of this cycle, when the wandering stars return to their original points? More importantly, perhaps, is the word ‘conquest’, which may be understood as both physical domination and the intimate surpassing of those who relinquish control of their surroundings to dedicate their lives to self-control in the face of chaos. Also offspring of modernity, the first mountaineers were proponents of this second conquest, young romantics who set off for the Alpine mountain ranges to experience the expanse of the spirit at the vertigo-inducing height where earth and cosmos meet. Perhaps there they found out whether life is nothing more than a predictable tangle of relationships or whether existence holds a different sort of substance that compels people to mould their own fate.

Eduarda Rosa’s Memórias, Pesadelos e Inquietações is at Coletivo Amarelo until September 7, curated and written by Cristiana Tejo.

^[1] Goethe In. Berman, Marshall. (1986) All That Is Solid Melts into Air. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, p. 49.