Tempo = ação/espaço (Time = action/space)
Temporada de Projetos 2005-2006, Paço das Artes, São Paulo – Brazil
The André Komatsu´s project is less a finished work then a process that develops itself in the time. It doesn´t become a narrative, since he doesn´t have characters or events that have a relation to each other to form series. It is only about two moments: the first one, the fire on the structure of a small wooden house constructed outdoors and, the second one, the collect of leached ashes and their transference to a box which is inside of the exhibit space.
The work does not form a closed system where the change from a state to another one always become clutter, although part of the house on fire disapears in heat and smoke. The energy loss, the destruction of the architectural structure and its tendency to ruin are important in this process. In the meantime, instead of the valuation of the decline or destruction, the artist interests are in the continuous change process of objects and space. After freely occupying the building´s exterior, the residues of this process are impregnated in the clothes of the public. And after carried to the “Paço das Artes” interior, any air moviment tends to make the ashes continue to disperse.
The spatial premises of the Komatsu´s work are not only a quantitative understanding of the space, like if it was constant, fixed and completely measurable by some unit of measure. Otherwise, its notion takes place in a space where nothing is against the time. It is exactly about a mobile, qualitative space that tends to be perceived in its ‘come to be’. The architectures projected by the artist are always uninhabitable or inaccessible. They are not comfortable spaces, conceived as ideal proportions inspired on the human body´s scale. Are pressed, barren places, and, before searching a harmonious relation with the spectator, or considering a participation, they are aggressive and refuse any direct contact.
In one of his videos, where the artist collects ruins and fragments of constructions from the streets around the city and tries to add them to his own body using backpacks or pockets, it is evident the inappropriateness between the human body and the rude substance. Even though, in some works, he tries to attribute a new function to the rubbish, it is clear the opposition between these dejections, the architectural spaces from which they result, and its relation with the body.
The inappropriateness of certain constructions when related to the body had been formulated for the artist in some kind of na inhospitable sentry box, a control and war architecture that Komatsu projected for its individual exhibit in the Cultural Center São Paulo Program of Expositions. Closed in itself and exactly inaccessible, the work was about a threatening space that camouflaged itself with the white of the panels made to organize the exhibition.
In the meantime, while in this experience the asepsis was a disguise strategy, here, in Time = action/space, it can be understood in inverse way. The wood combustion can also be a hygienic cleaning way, but the transposition of the resultant residues of this process to the inside the exhibit space inverts this process. The work functions as a contaminating agent who takes the world´s life dirt to inside of the aseptic and neutral exhibition space.
Working with the relations between the action in the space and its correspondence with the time, Komatsu seems to understand the pair construction and desconstruction as non-separable things. Before creating frozen and definitive spaces by fixed relations, he deals with the transformation process of the ruin in constructions and the inevitable action of the time that tends to corrupt them and to degenerate them.
Cauê Alves, October, 2006
Cauê Alves is doing his doctorate in Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, member of the Publishing Body of the Magazine “Número” and curator of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo Engraving Club. He is professor at the School of Communication of FAAP College and of the Architecture and Urbanism course at the “Escola da Cidade”.
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