No amount of effort I put in
will ever move this mountain
fatalism is the evil of those who have everything to lose
the benefit of those who think they are powerless
uh uh-uh-uh

I assign myself a heavy task
to be everywhere all the time
by the end of the day, a pile of shrapnel
which I carefully reassemble in the evening
uh uh-uh-uh-uh

Perhaps something slips out with each collection
in the fallacy of believing that I am complete
if I neither stop nor give up
if I try hard I will succeed
(…)

— Sallim, Linha de Tempo (with Leonor Arnaut)

Acloc O’clock provides a very clear coherence on the incoherence, inconstancy or inconsistency of the contemporary being – within a global world driven by capital and Western ‘morality’. I soon understood an analogy between the exhibition and Sallim’s song, which appear to harp in unison on the elusiveness of full identity against the necessity or imperative of productivity – and the subsequent condition of being liminal under the stability of the self. Uma Certa Falta de Coerência was in charge of curating this seventh edition of the Território cycle, devoted to material culture, put together by Culturgest and Fidelidade Arte, where the exhibition is hosted.

Institutional oppression is apparently the preferred research territory for the cultural project of André Sousa and Mauro Cerqueira, the curatorial duo. This is indeed confirmed by the works of Babi Badalov, Jac Leirner and Stephan Dillemuth. We are welcomed by a large screen with a looped video by Dillemuth of what appears to be genital self-mutilation in the lobby of the traditional-style building. In fact, the rest of the artist’s works in the exhibition – as well as the bulk of his output – are based on a evisceration of the body, the intellect and the ego, embodying the powerlessness of the individual when faced with the force of the official arena. Dillemuth cages masked mannequins and stationary clocks in another room, with a bizarre, carnivalesque visual aesthetic. This is time when trapped, peppered with blind circus dosages and the human-boar that allows the institutional blight and the tearing of individual identity through the segmentation of the social struggle which is, after all, one: the class struggle, in the plural. On the previous wall, the same artist also presents a series of canvases, Futurspective Respective, in which we recognise degraded urban surfaces, like a future archaeological exercise in which the durability of materiality is questioned, because, in fact, it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ – in my opinion, this will be the case, excluding the hypothesis of collectivism.

‘In the city where nobody wants to be late, time is scarce’, says a short piece of prose that replaces the exhibition text and serves as an extension of the show itself, rather than a suggested interpretation of it – actually, the consistency of the curatorial and poetic narrative is such that adding more information would be superfluous. To be fair, the paragraph opens with the explicit statement ‘in September, the clock starts ticking again’. An explicit remark because the word choice is not accidental, it is the neo-colonial capital empire that splinters individual identity under the institutional one. Acloc O’clock opened in September, the same month as we return to the daily drudgery of labour, and, in the commercial district of the capital, Chiado, it forces us to slow down the protocol clock, or at least to consider the possibility of deflecting it.

In turn, Babi Badalov presents I don’t know what I want what I don’t want, criticising the megalomaniacal textile business, from fast-fashion to haute couture. The industry eats up everything: water, the artistic aura, the poetics of individual style and the entire global labour order – according to a neo-colonial scheme, as suggested by the Paris-based Azerbaijani artist. Anti-kitch, anti-fashion, ‘anti-zara’, Badalov resorts to the written word, with Eastern calligraphy, to craft a visual poem, borrowing from institutional walls and industrial textiles. In the centre of the wall, where the poem begins, we read ‘language is geography’ and this appears to be the essence of his protest – where all else is being standardised, exiled, displaced and decontextualised (especially when it comes to the textile industry), language is still a weapon of resistance, one that is still vernacular, still a place where dialogue is possible, or rather a place where demands can be made, without the fear of being absorbed by the industrial bogeyman (yet!) – in a rebellious aesthetic, as if he were painting the walls and garments of the revolution.

Jac Leirner lastly offers a series of sculptures in plastic layouts or in structured schemes of collected objects. On both occasions, she reminds us of ‘memories of a journey and a time anchor’. Whilst in the former she seems to be building a library of images with the objects themselves, criticising their superficiality and quantity, in the latter she stresses the importance of material culture in individual and cultural memory. In a truly global world, where travelling across borders can be done in a matter of hours, is the anthropology of material life the perfect method for rebuilding invisible journeys and constructed affinities? For the artist, it depends on (her also) personal archive, since an institutional one, with all the weight of capital, cannot accomplish the work of memory. She does so using taxi drivers’ business cards, souvenir pencils, masks and stickers – in a conflict between the preciousness and worthlessness of a certain material culture: ’trés chic. Boring. Bêtise. But why? Sympathy and outrage coexist in the city and in those who have survived the grindstones of pain and doubt’. If you fail to collect the bitcoins lost on the floor, do not worry, the artist also carves a slit in the walls where she exhibits her works and, if you manage to tear them off, you get to take half the walls home!

The transgression of Uma Certa Falta de Coerência is in fact trans-border, as it already has one foot on the quicksand of the institutional arena. Nevertheless, this liminal position keeps making it possible to avoid conventions and to denounce institutions: ‘and then people realise that losing a few sheep to the wolf is better than having their crops destroyed by wild boars all the time. The wolf is not evil and can be mistaken for a foreigner who returns home without anyone recognising it’. Is Uma Certa Falta de Coerência the Wolf of the institutional arena?

Acloc O’clock, curated by Uma Certa Falta de Coerência and with works by Babi Badalov, Jac Leirner and Stephan Dillemuth, is at Fidelidade Arte Lisboa until January 3, 2025.