Cartographies of Gaia: poetic heterotopies in the art of Walter Miranda
Mirian de Carvalho / RJ - Critic of Arte - Member of the Brazilian Association of Critics of Art - ABCA
Walter Miranda's artistic production brings relevant issues to the field of contemporary artistic expressions, especially from the exhibition entitled Cartographies of Gaia, presented at Centro Cultural Correios, in São Paulo, and at Palácio das Artes, in Praia Grande, 2018. In Cartographies of Gaia, the motif in focus is the world map unfolded in various images, in which the artist performs spatial interference in countless planispheres and terrestrial globes, in order to deal with threats to the life of the Earth and to all the pulsating lives here, in face of the growing environmental aggressions, through the ages.
To highlight the thematic drama, Walter Miranda brings the works together in three interactive modules: Requiem to Gaia: two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces; Foucault's ICU: installation; and Little Blue Planet for Sale!: performance. In this mix that encompasses dramaturgy, the artist leads strangeness to the order of the spaces in each work and the entire show, and invites the visitor to get involved in the ambience through synesthesias and through the conceptual (https://youtu.be/DAEkMU6WrAk).
In the module called Requiem to Gaia, which includes paintings and three-dimensional pieces, oil painting distinguishes continents, oceans, poles and interferences in maps. Various painted materials and small and medium-sized utensils are accreted to the painted areas, such as keys, matches, computer keyboards, electronic circuit boards, revolver bullets, pencil shavings, padlocks, coins, loudspeakers, credit cards, barrettes. acupuncture needles, watches, straws, ground glass, rubber shavings, seeds, sea shells, animal shells, glass domes and countless other things, featuring heterotopias.
In the paintings, ranging from 36.8in x 22.8in to 96in x 96in, textures appear that, along with the painting, reveal and or suggest depths, grooves, grooves, overlaps, contiguities, porosities, roughness, forest fires, etc. Observing that the utensils added to the painting are sometimes painted. Concerning the contour of the pictures, there is also strangeness, since the planisphere is diversified in rectangular, circular, elliptical shapes, among others, as in the three pictures called In Totum 6, In Totum 7 and Romantic Cartography, in which the first two resemble lozenges and the third approaches the shape of a heart. Stands out in this snippet, the cartography configured by latitudinal sectors of the globe, in Universalis Cosmographia II.
To the visitors are also given the opportunity to perceive maps at unusual angles, using cutouts, inversions and mirroring. Applied to these diversities, Mismatch I, Mismatch II, Mismatch III show visions of the Earth sectioned by horizontal, diagonal and vertical cuts, respectively. And, amid the cartographic inventions, South America is positioned in the North, in a happy tribute to Torres Garcia, in The North is Here I and The North is Here II, observing that, in the second frame, the map is shown in mirror, angulation also observed in Reverse of the Averse and in the painting entitled In Splendid Cradle, in which the map is positioned lying down.
In the same module, showing painted parts joined to multiple objects, three-dimensional pieces also highlight the problem of planet destruction, and are configured by unusual techniques and formats. Then, the Tower of Babel rises, in an electronic material architecture and topped by a painted aluminum globe. In the same segment, Book of Gaia I, Book of Gaia II and Book of the Harbor are pieces composed of computer boards, with writing symbolized by the grouping of diverse utensils. In this ambience characterized by the junction of differences, Walter Miranda inserted the Doomsday Machine, where the Earth is crushed by a meat grinder. And, in the midst of this mixture of the diverse, there are other works that present the hopeful movement of life overcoming destruction, such as Peace on Earth among Men of Good Will!.
In all arts, a poiesis is subscribed, which, to spaces and other poetic spheres, intersects instances related to spaces and other domains of the socio-cultural fabric. This dynamic is reflected in the ambiguities inherent in poetic images, deconstructing the linguistic sign and the syntax common to discourses. To this deconstruction, a new language emerges, which set up spaces that are opened to differences. At the literary level, strictly in poetry, such spaces are receptive to chaotic enumeration: serialization of different and even contradictory elements. This figure of speech is present in the essay by Jorge Luiz Borges who, in a chinese encyclopedia, classifies animals in the following order:
a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) domesticated, d) piglets, e) mermaids, f) fabulous, g) dogs at liberty, h) included in this classification, i) who move like crazy, j) innumerable , k) drawn with a brush so fine of camel hair, l) et caetera; m) that have just broken the jar, n) that look like flies from a distance. (Apud Foucault, 1967: 3).
When highlighting this mixture in Borges's text, Foucault discusses the concept of heterotopy, as the positioning of diverse and close things, in a given space, which becomes unnameable and unthinkable, becoming unfeasible in the geographical and social planes, due to the differences that cause “contagion” (Foucault, 1967: 3) for the diverse. In the philosopher's studies, in the face of disciplinary power, which submits bodies and can determine withdrawal or seclusion, heterotopies will be focused on other works, which address the banning of differences, as has occurred throughout history.
To this picture, the author adds the emergence of biopower, which, being somewhat disciplining, acts through training: “Therefore, we are in a power that is in charge of both the body and life, or that was, if you prefer, of life in general, with the pole of the body and the pole of the population ”(Foucault, 2005: 302). Biopower presupposes norms and models related to the workforce and production, and gains importance from the Industrial Revolution and, in the course of the 19th century, to a greater degree. The extension of these two powers confirms the impossibility of grouping by the diverse, in the same place, since everything must be standardized. Such a question, pertinent also to the field of language, had already been anticipated by Foucault in The words and the things: “Heterotopies undoubtedly disturb, because they undermine language, because they prevent naming this and that, because they break common names or they get tangled, because in advance they ruin the syntax” (Foucault, 1967: 6).
By conducting his analysis to the field of power, and not to the field of poiesis, the philosopher refers heterotopias to the domain of “no place of language” (Foucault, 1967: 7), which opens only to an “unthinkable space” (Foucault , 1967: 4), which confirms the segregation of the diverse, that is: the diverse, considered to be disorder, is excluded from speech and thought. However, defined in this text the poetic bias, I emphasize, this is exactly the desirable and effective scope of the chaotic enumeration: founding heterotopias that scramble the syntax of repeated and or ideological discourses. And, thus, they allow us to say and make thinkable materialize the unthinkable mixes in the socio-cultural hierarchies that position individuals in fixed and standardized places according to social stratification.
In this regard, if we consider the social function of artistic production, poiesis is open to ontogenesis and the inclusion of all kinds of differences. In the dynamics of poiesis, heterotopias found spaces open to the agglutination of diversities, such spaces are inscribed in the non-place of language, because poetry erupts in the non-place circumscribed to images, where the intertext and the unsaid speak. Like poetry, in Cartographies of Gaia, heterotopias take the place of the pictorial and the non-pictorial, just as they take the place of the conceptual and the non-conceptual. And, in the same perspective, in the installation and performance integrated to this exhibition, the scenery and scenes expose the staged and the unstaged. It is a dynamic that, in Photography, allows us to register the unclicked and the unfocused, as revealed by Antonioni in the film Blow up.
Walter Miranda sets up the entire exhibition through heterotopias, which conduct a dialectic. To the game of oppositions, the artist highlights the relevance of environmental sustainability as opposed to irrationality in the use of technological advances that produce electronic waste, deforestation, forest burning, oil spills in the waters, polluting gases, global warming, ozone layer destruction. In the context of dialectical confrontation, poetic heterotopias affect the syntax of speeches based on ideologies, which ignore policies and standards of environmental responsibility.
Persisting in the agglomeration of the diverse, Walter Miranda integrated the module called Foucault's ICU into the exhibition, This is a scenographic installation alluding to the illness of the Earth. And, in the interactive cycle that makes up the event, the artist included the performance A Little Blue Planet for sale!, exposing developments of the conceptual (https://youtu.be/n4J0vlpmjkk). By resorting to unusual technical procedures for painting, Walter Miranda, through poiesis, favored the agglutination of diverse tools in the organization of spaces. It should be noted that, in this writing, the notion of poiesis applies to the procedures implicit in human work, which, traversing thoughtful strata, creates transformative dynamics of matter, technique and technology, generating the poetic dimension in artistic work.
In Cartographies of Gaia, the shock in the syntax of such discourses begins when the artist removes things fixed in predictable places. Positioned outside the classroom, outside the atlas and the Geography book, and configured in different ways, the world maps expose contradictions that start from the technique to constitute a poetics of space. And all the modules of the show interact in a space that resignifies itself through antitheses. In this way, the contrast between dismal and light colors, between shadows and luminosity stands out, endorsing the symbolism of the opposition “death x life”.
In addition to the opposition involving the luminous and the gloomy, tensions arise from the various pieces of the show. Amid the tragic, there are lyrical movements that emerge in several pieces. Thus, to the picture called Technological Imbalance, which suggests the death of the Earth, the lyricism of life rises in the symbolism and the intense color of Columbus Egg: a terrestrial "globe" in the oval shape. In a subtle way, a primal scream reverberates in Fecundationis Artificiose, since, surrounded by keyboards and mice, the Earth is transformed into a blue egg, illuminated and alive. Although through the artificial, the auspicious sense of the luminosity of blue arises, with the expectation of the fertilization of a great world map welcoming life.
In this fertilization, all works interact in a transitive belonging. Each of them completes the other, in an ambience conceived as a scenographic space, leading the visitor to inhabit a large world map, where he can act without submission to the biopower’s control rules. Faced with the essential contrast, which opposes death and life in this great world map, the body, called upon to choose its destinies, has the option of supporting the pulsating life in poetic heterotopias to dismantle the syntax of the dismal speech of death.
Only life allows diversities. Only poetry makes it possible to name and say the unnameable precious. Once, Cecília Meireles said: “Life is only possible reinvented”.
Cartographies of Gaia: this is the reinvention of life in the poetic heterotopias created by Walter Miranda.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
FOUCAULT, Michel. As palavras e as coisas: uma arqueologia das ciências humanas. Trad. Antônio Ramos Rosa. Lisboa: Portugália, 1967.
------------------------. Em defesa da sociedade. Trad. Maria Ermantina Galvão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.
MIRANDA, Walter. Cartografias de Gaia. São Paulo: FWM, 2020.
