For Marcela and the others

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The pylon taipa of the 17th century present on the walls of the Morumbi Chapel has unknown history. There is only speculation as to the origin of these ruins that support the construction completed by the architect Gregori Warchavchik in the 1940s. They could have been a chapel consecrated to 'São Sebastião', a chapel accompanied by graves for the owners of the Morumbi farm, could still be traces of an abandoned building, a building never completed. Sara Ramo builds in her production a complex set of displaced elements from various fields. Anthropology, politics, sociology, archeology, among many other areas that permeate daily life, are articulated and dismantled, disarranged and strangled, so that the final form of work presents itself as a pane, faultless construction extremely well built. Speculation and truth also merge here, to create a new real.

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In his later works, a complex repertoire of relationship with the unknown, with invisibility and with the symbolic figure of the other, of the foreigner, presents itself as a question. In Para Marcela and the others, she is again related to the strangeness, assuming the helplessness that suffer the figures for which we do not know to look.

 

Divided from always between Brazil and Spain, in 2016 Sara Ramo returned to live in Brazil, this time in São Paulo. Since then the artist has lived with the reality of the transsexuals that prostitute in the street of their residence. From this daily contact, an affective relationship arose where naturally the body appeared as a subject. Differences and changes in forms, and the relation of the existing body to the consciousness and perception of the body itself became a question.

 

From reflections on survival and transformation, delicacy and aggressiveness coexist, leading us to the encounter, and recognition, of the other in us. “For Marcela and the others” is born in this context, assuming the complexity around this relationship. It was from her, and from the investigation of the space of the Morumbi Chapel, that Sara visits and studies also, since she moved to São Paulo, that the work arises.

 

The installation itself are several, occupy the holes in the walls left by the constructive procedure of the pylon taipa, where earth mixed with elements such as blood, clay, bones and excrements of animals is pressed to give solidity to the walls. Sara’s pieces have shaggy, seemingly sloppy, but carefully constructed forms that take hold of several of the cracks in space as if they were monumental. They infiltrate the mud, or leave it, bearing in themselves various materials in the character of ruin, shattered or partially hidden by the mud. They are everyday materials, some of them directly related to the trans universe. Sara treats architecture as body, taipa as skin. Perverts the form and the common use to create a new body that hides and integrates, asks for time, attention and search to be seen, while leaving room for each one to project their subjectivities.

 

The installation is careful, empties and fills at the same time. It refuses the sacred condition imposed by the architecture of Chapel to infiltrate in the gaps, in the holes. Search in the high place the dark and the dirty, to then revert concepts and equate values. Celebrate the courage and strength of Marcela and the others.

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Douglas de Freitas