RONDA - CARLA CHAIM
Photos: Ding Musa
[automatically translated]
“Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking of a position; it is the background against which all acts stand out and it is presupposed by them. The world is not an object whose constitution I have with me; he is the natural medium and field of all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not only 'inhabit' the 'inner man', or rather, there is no inner man, man is in the world, it is in the world that he knows himself”. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of perception.
Linda and Rosana, property security guards at Casa Sertanista, perform hourly patrols throughout the grounds of Praça Dr. Enio Barbato, where Casa Sertanista is located, in order to guarantee the integrity of the Casa. This banal and functional everyday action of the institution, carried out regularly and autonomously, was the starting point for artist Carla Chaim to create the exhibition that now occupies Casa Sertanista.
Chaim departed from the perception of reality in that space to create his works, perverting reality to confuse it with fiction, but a fiction likely to be real, or at least to have been, or to come to be. This is how the artist's Ronda is constructed, the present day-to-day mixes with other possibilities, past and/or future, where rites, mythologies, history – and even the history of art – come to inhabit the house.
In her work, Carla Chaim explores possible relationships of an expanded design – in formal or conceptual characteristics – whether in objects, in space, in actions, or in connection with the world. For almost a month, the artist carried out actions in the rooms and in the external area of Casa Sertanista with some objects.
Now, the House is inhabited by an ancestry that seems displaced from its time. In the corners, in the rooms, remnants of the artist's actions are still there, as archaeological testimonies of the actions that those spaces witnessed. They are small treasures, in matter, symbology or engineering. They are the characters of these possible stories, the graphite sphere, the carbon flag, the matchbox, and finally the carbon tape and gold leaf that form two Möbius strips, one intact, and the other cut in the manner by Lygia Clark.
In addition, videos/records of these actions attest to what happened. Presented alongside these objects, these videos reveal actions performed with them. But these videos are in the dark. Not just because they are built in low light, in dark environments or at twilight, but because there is no clear narrative. Instead of shedding light on the objects' history and purpose, they only heighten the objects' mystery, drawing with them and with space.
Unlike Linda and Rosana's round, Carla's round has no purpose. Here, walking through space takes on a ritualistic air, and the black and white characteristic of the drawing, so present in the artist's work, are obscured in penumbra. Penumbra of times of vigil and vigilance.
Douglas de Freitas