‘For a very important and inevitable phenomenon is occurring simultaneously on Earth that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts’.[1]

Curated by Julia Coelho, Marta Mestre and Renan Araujo, the group exhibition Chão is found on floor -1 of the CIAJG. It starts with a curatorial movement, a shift in the exhibition experience from its traditional eye-level horizontality to a lower plane, using the floor as a standout surface. Overall, the architectural design of the space and the artistic objects selected help to reposition the perspective, fragmenting the hierarchy that horizontal perception invisibly implies. By reconfiguring the usual museum setting, it is proposed a space that is ‘cut, crossed and pierced’[2], where spatial restructuring materialises a reorganisation of perception.

Diogo Passarinho Studio + RAR.STUDIO’s exhibition design immediately points to this movement. Drawing on the collection of materials from previous CIAJG exhibitions that were then stored, the structures comprising a renegade floor take centre stage in the exhibition design. Spatial manipulation entails bringing up the neglected structural base, which needs to be seen and considered. The architecture of the exhibition venue, not having a preconceived identity with organisational assumptions, occupies the central place in the exploration that shapes the exhibition. Works such as Gordon Matta-Clark’s Claraboya (Skylight) and Carmela Gross’s Buracos clearly emphasise space and architectural construction as susceptible to restructuring that goes against predefined provisions. The very photograph of the remodelling of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile shows a changing space which, instead of presenting the usual stability of an exhibition facility, reveals its constant remodelling dynamic.

Hence, the floor fulfils its function as a basal stratum in which the underlying structures conditioning perception and the relationship between subject, object and space are consolidated. Deleuze and Guattari’s stratification concept seems to emphasise this relationship: ‘We are never signifiers or signified. We are stratified.’[3] The concept of strata and of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, taken from a geographical background, find a quite literal expression in this context. If the relationship between a structure and its dynamics is constructed through successive stratifications, the ground fulfils the role of the initial stratum that allows for subsequent structuring. To lift the floor is to strip it bare and rewrite this process.

Trisha Brown’s pieces, Spiral and Walking on the Wall, show the role of the floor itself being played by different elements. Having ditched verticality, the space and the bodies embrace the attempt to reconsider the support and the axes that define movement. The ability to introduce a material exploration into the very process that axiomatises all the others leads, in line with Deleuze’s thinking, to the ‘difference-in-itself’, the very pre-representational element. Not only do the works selected refer to this interest, but, as already stated, their spatial layout promotes a shift in perspective that precedes the work itself. By placing works on the museum floor, the very structure systematising the audience’s relationship with what they see becomes a transformation agent for the objects in question. The exhibition thus acquires the power to explore the very concept of space, curatorship and exhibition design. Ricardo Basbaum’s diagrams, occupying vast walls that surround the entire exhibition, likewise outline connections that reject linearity or representational interpretation. According to Deleuze, the diagram, rather than consisting of a representation by similarity, is ‘the operative complex of lines and zones, of a-signifying and non-representative traces and stains. And the role of the diagram, its function, as Bacon says, is to ‘suggest’. Or, more strictly, to introduce ‘possibilities of fact’ (…)’[4] This interest in using the diagram not in a representational way, but in a rhizomatic fashion, is evident in the way Basbaum’s works are formed and provide continuity to the other surrounding works. Using an ambiguity and absence of literality that is clearly intentional, his diagrams present words, concepts and relationships not intended to be decoded, but somehow ‘aesthetically assimilated’: ‘Signs are not signs of one thing; they are signs of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, defining a certain threshold reached along these movements’[5].

As the formulation that encapsulates the entire exhibition, the diagram perfectly succeeds in conceptualising the proposal presented, and the whole of it is diagrammatic insofar as it promotes conscious thinking about stratifications, in a movement that is not meant to be captured, in this sense referencing the very sedimentation of the CIAJG’s space. Using the floor, the survey of the hierarchy of perception reveals any preconceived assumptions and affords the power of thought and creation to be constantly rewritten, restructured and re-signified. Deleuze writes: ‘To think is to create. No other creation exists, but to create is above all to engender, to ‘think’ in thought.’[6] If creation is necessarily offering a stratum for future sedimentation, it is also the very act of creating that allows these stratifications to be disassembled and reassembled at any time. The exhibition offers us the opportunity to constantly rewrite the ground we walk on.

The exhibition Chão is on view until 27 April.

[1] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023) A Thousand Plateaus, p. 46.

[2] Exhibition texto.

[3] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023) A Thousand Plateaus, p. 77.

[4] Deleuze, G. (2011). Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, p. 172

[5]Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023) A Thousand Plateaus, p. 78.

[6] Deleuze, G. (2000). Difference and Repetition, p. 252