Exhibition 2 – opening 30 May 2023
Urban Diversions (Urban Diversions)
“…the city does not tell its past, it contains it
like the lines of the hand, written in the angles of the
streets, on the bars of the windows…” – Ítalo Calvino
This exhibition refuses innocence and resorts to very conscientious experiences of territory that permeate the urban landscape. Inhabited architecture occupies a large space in the imagination of these artists. Desvios Urbanos speaks of identities that are not compacted within restricted notions of nation, but rather of small realities and stories that often become invisible: the collective, the urban, the social, the historical. It becomes a matter of reimagining the many ways in which territories can be taken over and inhabited.
In Kader Attia’s video La Tour Robespierre (2018), a shot of the facade of a building in a French city alludes to the aesthetics of kinetic art to show windows and balconies of a building with utopian architecture that captures an ambitious moment in modernist social housing projects and , why not, also, of society. In Attia’s film, this architecture is represented by a moving image as if filmed from an elevator that keeps going up, creating an extremely peculiar portrait of community life, a fascinating and hypnotic visual composition.
In Vide et Eau (2012) the opportunity to observe urban balconies and windows from Attia’s perspective is expanded to a metaphor of life and its constant balance between the complexity, strength and movement of society, out there, versus the intimacy and individuality of each one of us – a counterpoint that is present in all the works in the exhibition. In this video, the artist writes “life and vacuum” on the steam condensed on a window, the transparent layer that separates warmth, comfort and protection from the city that continues to rain outside. The drops that drip from the writing on the glass mitigate the fragility of a simple and potentially unpretentious act, but also so intimate and capable of expressing internal tensions in many of us. Continuing the game of inside and outside, Osvaldo Gonzalez Aguiar uses translucent adhesive tape to intervene in the windows of the gallery itself and fix, in them, some elements that mix his own creations with the external urban landscape that the same windows would reveal. The Continua gallery is located on a bridge over Avenida Pacaembu, so that the windows where Aguiar builds his compositions float over the busy avenue, with views to both sides of its flow.
André Komatsu, in turn, relies on intimate and discreet spatiality, with his installation Luz obscura, abyss bland (2023), to talk about the forces of the city, sometimes oppressive, sometimes strong only in their potential to build the social fabric which constitutes the true bond of any architectural project. The only element that makes the work possible is the light that takes the viewer out of the abyss and confronts him with the rawness of barbed wire or construction mesh, elements that are always present in cities, especially in the megalopolis of São Paulo. The work invites us to observe the city, which is present in our daily life, but which we no longer see, due to the excess of presence that numbs the inhabitant.
Architectural structures are more present in the work of Attia, Aguiar and Komatsu, the work of Susana Pilar brings attention to the smaller scale territory that makes up the urban landscape – the human body that inhabits it. In the context of the Desvios Urbanos exhibition, his work Resistência (2019) offers a counterpoint and an invitation: to observe the body that, as a territory – and microcosm of the urban territory – carries its own marks of displacements, deviations and setbacks. Pilar’s work portrays moments of a four-hour performance in which the artist tests her own body’s resilience by resisting, standing and in the same place, the wind produced by an industrial-scale fan. In the video, the body struggles against an invisible force as daylight, visible through the windows, falls, and attention gradually begins to divide with the windows, which suggest the strength of the wind, too, outside.
The novelist Ítalo Calvino describes the city as a complex symbol of “the tension between geometric rationality and the tangle of human existences”. This tension imposed against the human condition, undeniably found in urban environments, also proves to be the common thread between these works in this exhibition, where the social factor of the urban environment does not allow us to forget the human aspect.