Galeria Appleton launched three curatorial proposals between mid and late November for its two venues: the Square and the Box. Despite being profoundly heterogeneous, the projects on show are built around a structural axis – synaesthesia. Perhaps it could be said that this is an intrinsic aspect of all art, but, nevertheless, the synaesthesias that are being evoked in this case distance themselves from the usual core sense of sight – allowing room for various associations, new sensory interrelationships and alternative feeling-thinking structures.

Manuel Caldeira’s works in Miragem, at the Square, in Galeria Appleton, have a certain synaesthetic character. Certainly, symbolic representation in the plastic arts has always been grounded in a tradition predominantly dominated by the visual aspect. Despite this, if plasticity emphasises the possibility of material handling, then touch should be the most important (sensory) sense for interpreting and absorbing three-dimensional creations. However, we are all too aware of how vision is key in our sensory interrelationships, as well as in artistic creation – where representation survives through these synesthetic exchanges. Anthropologist Sarah Pink has warned us about this in, among others, Sensory Imaginations[1], where she discusses the importance of moving the imagination away from a primarily visual sphere towards a sensory one, as she considers the imagination to be a daily practice based on the multi-sensorial element of our real social and material relationships. Therefore, imagination is a process consisting of a range of relationships that articulate information and perception when interpreting physical and psychological surroundings. The tight co-relation between imagination and the space of action (situation) must be emphasised – in this regard, vision becomes a visualisation of an absent condition, a mental and spatial construction between desire and reality, a Mirage. It should be mentioned in this context that Manuel Caldeira’s works for this exhibition were developed with the space available in the gallery as a consideration.

Looking again at the symbolic representation, a mirage, although described as an optical phenomenon (of illusion), is formed through a breakdown of the sensory correspondences that, for their part, are expressed in vision – something that Ana Anacleto poetically refers to in the exhibition text as magic, hallucination or a transcendental evasion of the constraints of reality. Representing this visualisation, or visual projection, turns into an inner process of haptic articulation between the visual device and the material. In turn, interpretation becomes a journey, a process that is dependent on our inner self, leading to a synaesthetic recognition through vision.

Having said that, all that remains is to mention the sensory associations – the so-called synaesthesia – triggered by seeing Manuel Caldeira’s works. To start with, Infinitului I, a long, golden, narrow brass wire, flattened in the spots where it changes ‘direction’ – hanging in the air, it swings back and forth according to the movements of bodies in the room, this motion is silent but can be (fantastically) heard as our eyes vertically scan the piece’s ‘static’ kinesis, in a sharp, piercing tone that sways and oscillates the linear frequency. By contrast, but also on the same subject, Canoa Quebrada and Eclipse open two liminal gaps within the gallery space – like transcendental portals between the white cube and the abysmal interiority of the self(s). The gaps appear beneath tongues of sand (sandstone) leading to a well with an opaque transparency (glass), entailing the leap of faith of diving into individual depths. For their part, these pieces produce a tactile sensation: the visibility of the sandstone grains triggers a touching sensation without (requiring) proximity – the eyes palpate the pieces’ textures, a prelude to the journey that starts when leaving the gallery. In Peixe Pássaro, I feel (in both feeling and sensitivity) the wind, which has carved the stoneware piece as if it were a desert dune. Finally, Miragem, the centrepiece, is a transcendental silence embodied by the rhythm of life – the material gradually adds terrain and dimension (even if only biologically) as it rises. Miragem, also hanging, extends and consolidates its structure as it grows in height. Its shape resembles the curved refraction of light rays, and the water or air pools in which mirages are reflected – sculpting the very phenomenon that sparks the imagination, in a meta-signification, imagining the process of imagination (mirage and hallucination).

All these (sensitive and material) elements – which do not enter the gallery via material means, but rather through imagination (a phenomenon that occurs between the collective and individual imagination) – act as a multi-dimensional portal, prioritising sensory and material association (even if through visual means) over formal signification. While this is an individual sensory interpretation, it should be mentioned that there is a cultural sensorium, a common sense ruling most of our sensory connections. In other words, when I conceived of these associations (from stoneware to sand to touch, for instance), I thought they were individual – but, I found out, after listening to the Appleton Podcast[2] episode in which Vera talks to Manuel Caldeira, that the artist actually meant the analogy between stoneware and sand, since all the pieces in the exhibition came from a trip the artist made to Egypt. In other words, the material lines Caldeira problematised and drew cut across the gallery to create transcendental vanishing points, not individually, but plurally – communicating using the ‘magic’ of synaesthesia, the cultural sensorium, the ecology of mirage and the sincerity of hallucination -, making it feasible to share a co-action that not only feels individually, but also pulsates materially and plurally through perception and representation (of feeling and sensation).

Box, meanwhile, presented another synaesthesia between November 19 and 28 that distances itself (this time quite thoroughly) from the visual condition – an installation in which Loren Connors’ guitar recordings are played through the vision of Dean Roberts and the diffusion (broadcasting and mixing) of David Maranha and Manuel Mota. The Portuguese duo was entrusted with the performance because, unfortunately, Dean Roberts died in August this year in Lisbon, whilst working on this idea with the two – who dedicate this presentation to him, “as a way of celebrating his life and his extraordinary work”. The proposed ‘performance’ starts on the ground floor, with a(?) sound emanating from the garage calling out to us. As we go down the stairs, it unfolds while our vision is obscured by a thickening darkness, step after step. Once we arrive, our bodies find their way around the space using sound mediation, instead of the traditional spatial navigation of built matter. Spatial perception is turned into sound – this is where synaesthesia (again) occurs, within the creation of a ‘soundscape’, a construction for which Dean Roberts was known, and the last one he ever conceived -, despite the aid of (fluorescent) trailing lines marking the spatial gap between the four guitar amplifiers playing mixes of Loren Connors’ experiential music. The constructed landscape stems from rythmos – a pre-Platonic concept opposed to the exclusionary idea of rhythm as repetition and metrics -, a specific feature of the Glitch musical genre in which Roberts was a leading figure. A genre consisting of electronic ‘glitches’, not from the human action that we know is based on error, but from the artificial machine that we wrongly trust to be efficient and perfectly capable. Moving through space also involves a process of reliability and connection with the inevitable failure of the ‘other’ – human, or more-than-human (since the artificial machine, a human creation, is a meta-agency). In essence, this symbiotic gesture asserts the centrality of experience, improvisation and imagination as knowledge forms in their own right.

Wandering was also an integral component of the IRRAR performance, which misspells the word itself – (errar in Portuguese, to make a mistake in English) -, a show by UMCOLETIVO, featuring Beniko Tanaka, Janice Iandritsky, Zetho Cunha Gonçalves, Enano and Cátia Terrinca. On Sunday, November 24, the Box stopped Dean Roberts’ project to host a performance aimed at children and families. Indeed, its title and the collective’s methods are intrinsically rooted in the work of Salette Tavares (1922-1994), poet, educator, artist and lifelong child. Tavares’ Irrar (1979), an experimental text-object, paves the way for a range of practices explored by the contemporary collective, which uses her epistemology as a source of reference. In that book, as in the UMCOLETIVO performance, the reader/spectator is asked to participate, laugh and play with the written and spoken word. The poet-narrator Tavares believed that orality was one of the first instances in which the plurality of sameness was considered, that is, the possibility of evading uniformity, whilst thinking about the ambiguity and creativity of sonority under sameness. Space and the body are also central tools in the performance – as voices experiment with sounds and accents; movements and collages shatter words; and mirrors fragment bodies. The synaesthesia built into this poem-graphic is less direct and more complex, based on rescuing the phenomenological and cultural complexity of the notion of failure, embodying it and triggering it. It continually reveals how friendship, wandering and the art of childhood can shape an ecology of knowledge and forms of resistance to modern productivity and boredom.

Manuel Caldeira’s Miragem is at Galeria Appleton until December 7, 2024.

[1] Cf. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. SAGE Publications Ltd.
[2] Episode 152, “A pintura tocada pela escultura” — A conversation with Manuel Caldeira.