It is difficult to resort to words in the realm of the unknown. In this space, which is not exactly void – or perhaps it is the opposite, i.e., excessive, euphoric and crowded – all it takes is a small stumble and one is back on the surface. In a quick (mis)encounter, one hits upon a shaky concept, makes sense of it and is hurled out of the amorphous depths. In fact, there may not be an ‘outside’ to the vastness of the unknown, only a small ‘inside’, lit up and more or less porous, where signification is possible.

Indeed, writing pushes the boundaries between these two gaps, always with one foot crossed within the domain of knowing (or only just – since its opposite is actually the nature of all things – not-not-knowing). Time and again, it is able to perfectly describe the opaque experience of the unintelligible: in Clarice Lispector’s words, ‘(…) it was good. “Non-understanding” was so immense that it surpassed any understanding – understanding was always limited. But non-understanding had no boundaries and led to infinity, to God. It was not a non-understanding like a simple-minded person. The good part was having the intelligence not to understand. It was a bizarre blessing, like being insane without being crazy. (…) To understand was always a mistake – I preferred the breadth that was so wide and unfettered and error-free represented by non-understanding. It was bad, but at least you knew you were in the full human condition’[1].

Even an image – at the risk of lumping together visual forms of surely distinct ontologies – is closer to the grammar of the symbol, of representation, while retaining the mystery of its motivation and carving. Even in its totalitarian stability of showing and presenting, the image conceals a slippery, partial, transmuted concept. On the other hand, the eyes always want to find out. Vision is apprehension, it takes hold of the object presented to it and is quick to frame it according to the reality norms.

According to the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, tactile experience is of a different order. ‘Caress is about not taking possession of anything, it is not about asking for what is incessantly moving away from its form towards a future – never sufficiently future -, it is about asking for what is escaping as if it were not yet there. Caressing is searching, probing’[2]. This question is about how not-knowing and not-not-knowing are combined in the body. How do they emerge or mask themselves in a gesture? When it comes to a performative creation – where issues of seeing and moving, the exterior and interior of the body are all at stake – how, when and where is it possible to retain the unknown?

This is the volatile and enigmatic happening pursued by João Fiadeiro. In an interview for the project Composição em Tempo Real: Anatomia de uma decisão (2017), a book that reflects and captures some of the Portuguese choreographer’s creative strategies and practices, Fiadeiro stressed that he is precisely looking for ‘forms that emerge without an author’. Authorless, perhaps, because they do not have a centre, a vision or a script. Authorless, too, because they are born from a relational experience, at some point in space-time created between body and body, body and world. It is also authorless as it extends an intentional approach towards the invisible, the unpredictable – a movement almost secret to all the agents involved, which ‘[s]ubverts the relationship of the self with itself and with the non-self. An amorphous non-self pulls the self into an absolute future, in which it eludes itself and loses its position as subject. Its ‘intention’ no longer goes into the light, into the meaningful. All of it is passion, it settles (…) in the elusiveness of tenderness.”

Accordingly, Fiadeiro’s work is based on the moment of surprise. Not by chance, the set of proposals he is presenting at the MAC/CCB, from May until September this year, is what he calls ‘a retro-prospective’ – in other words, a whirlwind of the gap between everything the artist has already produced and what, in an ever more distant future, he may yet be. In the exhibition Restos, Rastros e Traços, the visitor experiences the echoes of the artist’s work and his own conceiving and putting together of the exhibition in question, to reveal and embody the living memory of his creations, partnerships, doubts and experiments.

Arranged over three rooms and a small annex, works from over three decades of Fiadeiro’s career find a way to be frozen in time, brought into the here and now. Little by little – for instance, confronted with the subtle variations in Márcia Lança’s body and face in three photographs by Patrícia Almeida, or with the series I Am (Not) Here, in dialogue with Helena Almeida’s imagination -, we understand that each act, each decision, is continually made and remade. Made in real time, even in the artist’s physical absence. Between not-knowing and not-not-knowing, it gradually opens and vibrates a space where both promise and threat coexist.

Restos, Rastros e Traços, part of João Fiadeiro’s Introspectiva programme, will be on show until September 22 at the MAC/CCB in Belém, Lisbon.

[1] LISPECTOR, Clarice. (1974). Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres. José Olympio, pp. 42-43.
[2] LEVINAS, Emmanuel. (1961/1980). Totality and infinity. Edições 70, p. 236.