Escritos/Writtings
In this atmosphere of interpenetration, the thought of projection finds its most urgent reverberations, namely that of publicness and its very essential “environmentality.” After all, as air and wind that envelops, moves, and transmutes, projection is symbiotic to images’ collective and spatial dimension; in its atmosphere and interplay of distortions of internal and external in and out of themselves, projection necessarily acquires and orients to the very environment it forms and transforms.
Even if images today are flexible and manipulated, and even if passive spectacle is over and we have all become producers of images, we are always reacting against already established image-myths, and suspicion, revolts, and fragmentations only actualize their exhausted bones. But rather than attempt a media theory, here I still write to merely answer the question: Who pierced the eyes of Assum Preto? The myth matters because, as Barthes puts it, the myth is a perpetual alibi...
It is no secret to anyone anymore that there is a motherless Yanomami child sleeping on the upper floors of a gallery on the island of Manhattan. But no inhabitant of the West Village can hear the child snore, and none of the visitors have the least idea of her dreams while staring at her mute face. The child sleeps inside the gallery for many months without a cry or whimper, while spectators from around the world come to gaze at her. She has grown up, I believe, in many galleries like this. And amidst their silent, ordinary splendor of grayness, their suspended panels of picture after picture where the child’s people are frozen in the indeterminacy of their wounds through Claudia Andujar’s aperture, the galleries and exhibitions seem to ignore that a child sleeps without a mom to wake her up...
It is only possible to speak of independence, beyond a political or economic gesture, when it is revealed that the only common experience is the denial of experience—the end of experience, where one can no longer navigate, where separation and mystery are retained, and a sovereignty of each self is assured even if only as an instant, a space, or a way of life...
Brazilian authority becomes trapped in producing potlatch after potlatch, transforming its legitimacy into a promise while constantly governing in the name of the exception, in the hope of consumption and expenditure, of enjoying a sacrifice so extraordinary as to erase its spurious and deficient character. It is this debt that allows the colonizer to coexist with the settler insofar as the colonizer can continue to explore, consume, and enjoy through the potlatch, and the settler can see in the colonizer’s enjoyment and expenditure the future birth of law and name...
There is a light hovering over the end of the world, only visible at the very edge of the world. A torturous cross rather than fire or flame, this light hurts more in its distance than its encounter—already impossible without a name for summoning it. This light is conjured within the blindness of the night’s currents, a night that dresses the castaways of Iberian galleons as stars. This light is not a guide, though at the end of the world, it was prone to misuse, whether as astrolabe or compass...
Brasília is sleepless. It has been for over a week now. The insomnia may last one more hour, three more days; it may last its lifetime, as the doctors, jurists, and astrologers of the South say this sleeplessness has no end date or deadline. It is out of time. Brasília, in her fine lines, in her atemporal buildings that glance at themselves through now desolated, shattered windows, that breath the now uncleanable smell of excrement left last week in the vast rooms of the Senate—Brasília is the sleepless night...
In the passage between the 19th and 20th centuries, two exiled men meet in Vologda. Within the already convulsed tsarist Russia, both men are pariahs, waiting for the empire’s collapse, while trains come and go, delivering promises of apocalypse in and out of Vologda...
Há perpassando os filmes do chamado Ciclo Baiano de 1953 até 1962 um pouco do Gregório de Matos que suspira em seus versos mais famosos: “Triste Bahia! Ó quão dessemelhante.” Não se trata aqui de julgá-los macambúzios ou compará-los com o barroco do poeta baiano que espera o juízo final nu com sua cabeleira postiça entre as muitas bananas de seu escritório no Brasil Colônia. O que os versos de Gregório de Matos e os planos nos filmes de quase três séculos depois têm mesmo em comum é que eles compartilham pairando no horizonte fantasmagoricamente o que o poeta chama de “a máquina mercante”...