“The problem of a minor literature, but also our problem, is this: how can we extract from language itself a minor literature, one that can reflect on language and make it weave along a sober revolutionary line? How can one become the nomad, the immigrant, and the gypsy of one’s own language?”[1]

The exhibition Canções para um burro morto, Mauro Cerqueira’s first solo venture, currently on display at CIAJG, shows the institution’s interest in representing peripheral pathways and expressions. It may be seen in dialogue with the exhibition Chão, open simultaneously on Floor -1; if Chão[2] investigates the unearthing of hierarchical layers of perception, this one, presenting us the work of Mauro Cerqueira, curated by João Terras, seems to seek out places beyond the established strata, out on the margins. While the city itself is a social realm of ongoing semiotic stratifications, Mauro Cerqueira’s work appears to focus on nomadic processes which, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, elude precisely those organising agencies: “With the nomad, by contrast, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relationship with the land, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes deterritorialization itself. (…) They are vectors of deterritorialization.”[3] It is this nomadic figure that drives a constant movement of flight, anonymity, and escape from the sedentary structures that build and stratify.

Showing an interest in parallel and marginal movements, as well as mythic and speculative narratives, Mauro Cerqueira incorporates a variety of materials and formats that, while connected to the urban landscape, present it as an aggregate. Through stratification, it naturally produces settings that become peripheral and alternative. The first gallery space, featuring large painted boards pieced together using everyday materials, bears similarities to the verticalising action in Chão, not only unfolding that gesture but also building upon it to craft a new style of painting that resists imposed normalisations: “The need not to control language, to be a foreigner in one’s own idiom, so as to attract discourse to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’” [4] By referencing arte povera, Mauro Cerqueira seems to convey comparable concerns, challenging institutional values with unconventional and modest materials. However, this restructuring does not only rest on the matter used in shaping the forms, it also emerges from the imagery they construct, depicting a life and an art raised from a necessarily peripheral viewpoint, along with the gaze linked to it. That reference becomes evident in the mirrors that occupy one room and form the fundamental material for the production of several pieces. Because of their reflective surfaces, mirrors inevitably incorporate the surrounding environment into the visible object, yet, arranged in a dark space and individually lit, the opposite effect predominates: the manipulations performed on them reflect outward, onto the gallery. By approximating the room to a cinematic dark hall, accompanied by the video installations, these mirrors carve out areas of light, reshaping the area. Distorting and rebuilding their environment, they continuously call attention to the peripheries they generate, which call for a renewed gaze. This perpetual reformatting of space also shows in the other objects in the exhibition, involving wheels, cement, or various materials retrieved from the everyday urban setting.

If the materials point toward the imagery they reference, then the video pieces that come with the exhibition seem a natural development, documenting the lived realities and expressions of communities and groups linked, for example, to music and skateboarding. Whether through cultural experiences forged on the margins or the use of video to expose urban policies, these works reveal the political substance of the artist’s practice within a space of continuous rupture. We can recall the concept of “minor art” as used by Deleuze and Guattari. They argue that “the literary machine takes over from a revolutionary machine to come, not due to ideological reasons but because it is determined to fulfil the conditions of a collective enunciation that is missing somewhere in that milieu: literature is a people’s affair.”[5] The figure of the dead donkey, which gives the exhibition its title and appears in one of the featured videos, further accentuates the donkey’s association with passivity and mere observation. Its condition as a creature lacking agency also underlines the anonymity that runs through the entire exhibition as a central element of the community, which escapes the extreme individualism of capitalism. In this sense, the works here serve as songs, narrations and gestures that manifest the presence of a collective realm, one that produces a minor art within its own group experience.

Canções para um burro morto is on view at CIAJG until April 27.

[1] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2003). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 43

[2] See the exhibition Chão and the text Chão, at the José de Guimarães International Arts Centre, written by Mariana Machado.

[3] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023). A Thousand Plateaus, p. 444-445.

[4] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023). A Thousand Plateaus, p. 440.

[5] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2003). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 40