An interview (not imaginary at all) or asymmetrical dialogues
Conversation with the curator Daniela Castro about the exhibition Imaginary Dialogue
05/12/2015
Preamble
The exhibition Imaginary Dialogues by Guilherme Cunha is an invitation to go beyond the five senses through experiential poetic investigations. His poetic research, solidly based on scientific study, proposes an in-depth investigation on the construction of perceptual models and platforms of knowledge production that make up the social structure. Do the body’s physiology and the organic operations occurring in it determine the thinking process? Is thinking a collective process? Can humans suspend their “humanness” and achieve the dimension of what is being? To these questions, which encompass the fields of philosophy, science, and art, the artist offers dialogues as answers. The works exhibited here arouse in the visitor a distinctive openness to dialogue as they operate at the molecular level; they evidence the voice of vision; amplify the intimacy of heartbeats sounds, expose the limitation of words, map brain impulses, and show us that the world’s colors are the colors of the world as thought, and not of the world as a physical entity. Is there a distinction between the two? By the end of the exhibition, the visitor will have the opportunity to experience them.
Asymmetrical Dialogues
DC – Daniela Castro / Interviewer
GC – Guilherme Cunha / Interviewee
The artist’s notes * – footnotes, added by the interviewee, identified with a “(*)”, presenting references and further complementary considerations.
DC – About the exhibition…
GC – So, the exhibition is the result of research into the construction of perceptual models, platforms of knowledge production, and systems of thought; it is also the result of a desire to better understand the social structure configuration in order to attempt to understand how we act, react, and build not only the idea, but also the different notions of reality, and how this will finally or fundamentally guide all the processes of social configuration. If we think about all human activities more closely, we’ll see that, deep down, they reverberate in a collective context, in the political structure – precisely in the set of collective decisions, collectively made for the good of such collectivity. So, actually there is this whole process of interconnection among things. When we stop to reflect on the structure of society and how we were taught to answer the questions of life, to read life, to understand the world in which we live, all those things are based on models, on ideas… DC – Codes… GC – Codes, ideas, models, and answers that change according to time, location, geography, the ways human beings will form concepts of pleasure, likes, dislikes, no matter what they are, how he or she will respond to nature. These answers will somehow reflect in the make-up of society. Keeping this in mind – the fact that society is an idea and how those ideas are created, how these models are created – the exhibition stems from consideration of other possible platforms for the production of knowledge and perceptual models. This idea of Imaginary Dialogues is in some way an exercise of poetic reflection to try to elaborate a framework of experiments that stimulate the need to conceive another model of society. For example, while I was studying this issue of perceptual models, I was struck by a class which was concerned with how people are born in one context and grow up learning that it is natural to react or respond to certain stimuli and how we learn with the gestures of others. I remember that during the World Cup, my niece, my little goddaughter, who was three, four years old, would be out of context when a goal was scored, not knowing what was happening; and then I realized that at the time of a second goal, she began to imitate people who were in the room because it was the first time she was being confronted with the situation of an emotional explosion in face of…
DC – … the television screen…
GC – … the screen, the ball entering the goal. And she didn’t quite know how to respond, whereas after the second one, she had already noticed that there was a positive answer on group’s part…
DC – If she imitated those gestures…
GC – If she imitated… exactly! Then everyone hugged her – “that’s a girl!,” and so on – , and the father also – “yes, goal,” and so on – , then she felt that care, that involvement with the situation and, from then on, that behavioral notion was introjected…
DC – … a super abstract idea mixed with physical stimulus. Let me say a few things before we begin the interview already begun (before we format the memory card); you were saying that what stimulated you in this research is the reason why we have this need to build knowledge, to give shape to these responses and stimuli which are socially shared. This reminds me of a book, to me a fundamental work by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1996): The Ethics of Ambiguity. [1] At the beginning of the book, she argues that for all human beings, the process of birth, growth, and death is natural, each one has their own ways of protecting against death or of making this process effective in reproduction, making it less aggressive, environmentally speaking. The little toad survives and procreates; it has this poison it shoots at its prey so it can stay alive as long as possible. In the book, Simone de Beauvoir tells us that humans are the only beings for whom the process of birth, growth, and death is intelligible, since we know we are going to die. Therefore, our survival method consists in making life an exercise of meaning production. We can only produce meaning so we can convince ourselves that everything is worth it, even knowing that we are going to die. Otherwise, we could just go about killings ourselves, you know? Thus, this so to speak “natural” form of protection of human beings is the production of meaning and knowledge – which is wonderful. It follows that this becomes a field open to speculation and experimentation for this empirical exercise of meaning production. That’s where art gets in. I must have this book and I could lend to you, though it is my most cherished one, my baby, Felix’s brother. Another thing I would like to say is: we are “speaking” a text and knowing that it is going to be printed verbatim, and this compels us to try and speak in a somewhat more eloquent way, anticipating the punctuation and verb agreement, that is, we control the oral language because we already carry the weight of the pace of written language in our minds. Our own conversation corroborates your point about the programming of stimuli/responses. However, we are aware of that in this dialogic exercise, which is not imaginary, it is a very real dialogue. It seems to me that we are already exercising the thesis of your exposition here. Anyway, let it go… However, I would like to call attention to the fact that when you say we depart from an idea of society, we tend to employ our imagination to figure nature as a kind of origin for the projection of an ideal society, as in a straight line: nature at the point of origin and a line going from it and ending at the idea of society. I would like to offer an alternative design for us to continue our conversation, that is, an elliptical one, because from the moment we say that we are born and start to be programmed to react in a certain way to certain conventional stimuli, it seems as if nature is out of this programming process, and it is not…
GC – Not at all, this is inherent to nature…
DC – For sure! So, what I want to offer as an image is this ellipse, a vectorial shape. And it is not Möbius’s strip. This is also the text’s movement, you get that? Our conversation is not an originary point for readers to quote and use as support in the future. We leave the Cartesian plan and enter a vacuous plan, a plan without gravity. We depart from nature to project an idea of society, but inside it we “boomerang” and project an idea of nature protected by this social idea. In your research you throw it all up and this becomes your field of action.
GC – It is interesting that you’re bringing up this reflection. Picking up from what you said, and continuing in this line of thought, when we imagine nature expanding, let us assume, towards outer space, the galaxy, universe, cosmos, we realize how tiny human beings are, and those very human beings act many times with pride and presumption, as if human life or the product of the human mind, of human knowledge, were not also linked with the cosmic context. And then you think of the organic superstructures: you imagine the sun, a black hole, and then now we think of our stomachache (laughing), you get it?…
DC – Or lack of sleep (laughing).
GC – Yes, lack of sleep (laughing)… when we see a bird, then you hear the bird sing and realize that if we remove the sound of our speech, we are moving our jaws in similar way to that of birds, vibrating the vocal chords and emitting sounds that are restricted to 24 phonemes. In an infinite spectrum of sounds, of light and the electromagnetic spectrum, we use only the combination of 24 of those sounds in our field of cultural activity as a mechanism or tool to produce meaning! We are disconnected from nature by subtraction, or at least we think we are disconnected, or we are still led to think that way, but when we look at the societies found in nature – ants, termites, herds, wolf packs – , and the way other animals are organized, it becomes evident that human beings, despite having more complex mechanisms of communication, deal with death in a more visceral manner. Since our communication structure is more complex, we become subject to a great fallacy, which leads us to a certain presumptuousness; it is as if we were controlling, coordinating these processes of social design, this tracing of the orbits of human activity, of collective effort. We have this illusion, almost as if it were a mirage, which has absolute control over it. But if we evaluate this question more closely, we’ll see that if the Earth’s axis changes one degree in its angle, all the agriculture of the planet is affected. An alteration of one degree on the other side would also result in an alteration of the whole climatic configuration of humidity, winds, and tides. I believe there is a disharmony between our perceptual model and this supposed idea of detachment – this belief in dichotomic, polarized rupture between human beings and nature. There is a degree of artificiality in the product of human action, in the manufacturing of the transformation of matter in the world… this provokes an impression of disconnection… we don’t live in trees… But I am more and more convinced that this is also inherent to nature.
DC – mmhmm…
GC – The bit,[2] technology, the networks, and radio waves also have to do with this – especially because the wind and tide currents, psychic waves, and many other interconnected and active forces in nature are beyond human control and understanding. One can only utilize and feel the impact of those forces. So I believe there is a certain mirage in the air concerning our perceptual model that generates error or illusion of control, you see?[3]
DC – Let’s move on to your work…
GC – Right. So, the exhibition consists of six[4] works. Artificial Atmosphere is this air sculpture which is also a speculative exercise: what is there in this space? It is a sculpture of recomposed air, air that is obtained from the atmosphere, purified in the structure of each molecule, and then re-bottled. This air has cellular regeneration properties, which may aid in healing and in post-operative recovery. The cylinders stay open inside the room, releasing this air, which is to be inhaled by the visitor.
DC – The sculpture, which is not visible, operates on a molecular scale. I recall talking to you about this, that this work is related to a very complex discussion in artistic field – a complexity derived more from the misuse of certain words – as it has, evidently, a very significant healing dimension. When we lament, that would be the word,[5] about the fact that art has been co-opted and instrumentalized by the market and/or by a capitalist elite that transforms it into a corporative tool of social ascension, anyway, all that, what we lament is exactly the loss of a certain ritualistic aspect of art. This is the complex point, as it is not necessarily a religious ritual… maybe it is at the etymological level of the word, of religare, in the sense of re-connecting with life. When you come into contact with a work of art that touches you in a certain way and that makes you perceive, even if for, say, a millisecond, all the programming involved, the automatic responses to such social stimuli which we have been discussing, then we have a religare process. This a “healing” process, so to speak. Therefore, what is most amazing about this work is that you foster this experience without a visual component in a world where there is an inflation of visual stimuli. There are the serialized bottles, obviously, which are super sculptural and which are immediately connected to moments in the history of art, but they are not stylized, that is, they are not stylized in their assembly structure. The work in itself is invisible.
GC – The feeling that I get is that people who visit the exhibition ask themselves: “what am I doing here”? By asking this question, they have, at the same time, an effective participation in the work, as it operates in the molecular field, which is what is beyond this process of visual stimulus, this specular, spectacular, immediate contact. It is an impulse that generates frustration because you cannot have a direct connection with the work, simply because you can’t see it, but your participation is effective, it operates at the molecular level. The truth is that the work acts inside the visitor and it inevitably leads him/her to question their role in being there.
DC – This is a political space…
GC – Yes. What am I doing in this space? What part do I play in this space?
DC – And what is this space, what fills it in? I can’t see it…
GC – Exactly… and what I often find curious in this exercise of thinking about other possible platforms of knowledge production – still following this problematics of the nature of meaning – is that the person is implicated in it. It is not the place that gives the coordinates; without the individual it does not exist… the work triggers this kind of questioning…
DC – I believe all your works follow this path: … the works cannot function if they cannot count on the visitor’s body…
GC – Exactly.
DC – Or any body, the one belonging to the guard who stands next to the work, the one belonging to the cleaning woman, the bodies of the museum employees…
GC – Whoever is there breathing. What I find cool is that this thing gets a little out of control, out of our direct control, you see? And that’s because it is outside the visual field, outside a field of immediate sensorial reach, this field restricted to the possibilities of our reach, of what the arm can reach. It suggests this mental dimension of the human being; this is what I had in mind…
DC – A molecular dimension…
GC – Yes, this presence of a mental body. The self that is in the mind, the body that is in the mind,
DC – I see…
GC – This created body… the idea of the body is also a mental construction. Because time inexorably causes the body to decay we are constantly changing, but our time perception scale is different…
DC – We have to control this time. According to what I quoted from Simone de Beauvoir, if this time isn’t idealized, it becomes difficult indeed, we are just human beings. If we have the real, daily perception that we are decaying, we can’t bear it. And chiefly because of the human presumptuousness to which you referred earlier on; it is clear that it is an exacerbation of a repressed, unconscious fear of death – all that is still linked with a modern project, which is super paternalistic, chauvinistic, and, therefore, insecure, incomplete. This project is still running at the expense of a lot of blood, war, death, domestic violence, rape, etc.
GC – A lot of pain, for sure…
DC – A lot of pain, we are still at a very violent stage.
GC – Of a programmed violence, isn’t it?
DC – Of a programmed violence that generates a lot of profit for that capitalist elite which instrumentalizes art, etc. If we can step back and take a detached look at it, we’ll perceive it is also a process, an exercise of making meaning about life, in an extremely violent way, precisely because the fear of death is violent, the fear of degeneration is violent.
GC – I see, like a symptom, right?
DC – I do not mean it as a symptom because the symptom is violence. I mean it as part of the structure of a certain model. Artificial Atmosphere invites us to breathe the same air in the same place. It is a question of scale for sure but transposable. The fact that we are there, breathing, alters the chemical structure of that space, you see? That’s why I say it is not a symptom, you know? If you breathe this air, this work of art manifests at molecular level and, from then on, the visitor wonders about the structures of that space, of the place which they occupy at that moment, so it (space) is not a symptom. In this case, it is regenerative.
GC – It’s almost philosophical, a self-discovery process, but imbricated in an organic context, in an environment conducive to the healthy manifestation of the cell. The other day, I heard someone say a sentence according to which: “in the society in which we live, your being able to express your affectivity and love has become a privilege”.[6]
DC – Perhaps this is what I am calling “healing”, or regeneration for lack of a better word here. Because, if you can express love for someone else of for other things, that means you have already perceived the complex structure that separates one self from another. I would now like to close this discussion to move on to the next work, quoting our dear old Karl Marx, who wrote a text called “Private property and Communism”, from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripsts (1844).[7] He says that capitalism forces us to live with the culturally constructed idea that the human being only has five senses. In communism, once human beings transcend themselves as well as the objects and things around them, then they will understand they possess infinite senses and that there is no hierarchy among the human being, objects, and things that they produce. There is this mystical idea that in communism we would live an explosion of the senses.
GC – He talks about this other potentiality, other possibilities of information exchange or of knowledge exchange, pointing out the limitations imposed upon us, implying that we can only express ourselves through the five senses. This becomes a script we have to follow – restricted, partial, and limited – about the understanding of our very presence in the world. This is a broadening of our capacity to participate in the society which has, according to Marx, been constrained by a totalizing and reductive model of social configuration.
DC – Which is horrible today, we live a retrogressive process, we are living the fascism of consumerism.
GC – Exactly…
DC – People communicate, love, exchange ideas, all for and by means of consumerism, it’s crazy.
GC – In Module of Intra-organic Communication, people communicate through their heartbeats. It’s a simple process: There is a cardio microphone[8] which captures the heartbeat, but which is in an inverted module in which the person in an acoustic cabin hears the heartbeat coming from another cabin. Thus, it is as if they exchange the sounds of their heartbeats.
DC – Is it true that when a couple of lovers is lying down in bed together to sleep, you know, cuddling, after some time their heartbeats reach a balance, beating at the same pace?
GC – A balance?
DC – Isn’t that true? Maybe not, right? Is this my mind’s fancy?[9]
GC – To tell you the truth I don’t know, but while I was doing this work, I started to notice people crying; people sitting on the bus and then, all of a sudden, they start crying, for example. Someone walking down the street and, as I walk by, I see the person beginning to cry . … there is a fragility embedded in this work… I guess I threw it out to the world and ended up finding these resonances. There is this thing about not having the chance or the voice, you know? A kind of intimate discomfort with the resistance to these fallacious models of exclusion… the non-presentation of other answers… This discomfort with the lack of a place and perspective. What you mentioned about life being mediated by consumerism is cruel…
DC – That reminds me of a situation I experienced recently in Japan. I was talking to the curator of a museum in Yokohama who travels around Asia and the world. She told me that during a period of very intense travelling, she went to her acupuncturist and he said the human heartbeat hasn’t changed much in the last centuries. There were milimetric, nanometric alterations, whereas our behavior has changed dramatically in the period of a century. So, the medical prescription was to be alert to the rhythm of the body, since, in order to understand the world from a historical perspective, the rhythm of the heart needs to be taken into account.
GC – Now, that’s surprising!
DC – So I think this work offers an intimate, bodily dialogue that undermines the deep-seated idea of the body we have in our minds, which, in turn, is linked with an ahistorical[10] time – the time in your work is quite physical, it is the time of music (thtump-thtump-thtump-thtump). This work cites the artificiality of this programming of external responses to stimuli. It is indeed really beautiful; it’s beyond the physical structures of these chambers, after all the heart has chambers.[11] These two wooden boxes that, like the previous work, do not represent a work that elicits visual contemplation; rather, they almost prevent it.
GC – The idea that the physical structure of the work is there just to make the possibility of that activation, event, and experiment, feasible.
DC – Just as Artificial Atmosphere operates on a molecular layer which reaches each and every visitor regardless of their gender, physical constitution, belief, sexual orientation, this work is also a dialogue that reminds us of the fact that we are in the world constantly exercising the production of meanings, the very meaning of life…
GC – And you can’t see the other. Because you can’t see the other while the dialogue occurs you feel as if you were inside the heart, the sensation; the idea of building a box, an acoustic chamber is because the chest[12] is an acoustic chamber.
DC – Absolutely…
GC – So, just like the skull in the process of hearing, of auscultation, the heart resounds through the body as a whole. The toe does not ignore the heart, and it is not only because of the mechanical movement of circulation; when it vibrates, the whole body pulses at that pace.
DC – This is wonderful. Of course we are going to remember John Cage! (laughing). Thank God he does his work in silence,[13] which is…
GC – the hertz…
DC – of the anechoic (soundproof) chamber to 4’33”. He has conducted a research about silence, and he concluded that silence[14] does not exist, because even when you are in an anechoic chamber, which is a room, an environment, designed to stop any kind of sound wave from entering that space, you can still hear two sounds, a grave one and an acute one: the grave sound is the blood circulation and the acute sound is the neurologic system working. Radical, isn’t it?
GC – Just think of the potentiality of his work; it reminds me, … at least in the way I can feel this reasoning (and speaking is also feeling the reasoning)…
DC – Feeling the reasoning, for sure.
GC – … he invites us to reflect upon the causal nature of being human, because you realize, eventually, that the only remaining sounds, the ones that resist silence, are the very sounds…
DC – The sounds of life…
GC – You see? I believe deep down he unveils the cultural, residual, transitory question. As you said at the beginning of the conversation, we have gone a long way in this meditation, in order to build this reasoning, but, in the end, what is left is your own thought, what you feel, what you think.
DC – Sueli Rolnik is a psychoanalytic philosopher and when she talks about art or works as a curator she always exposes the premise of thinking as an artistic practice. She never sets thinking apart as an initial stage of the artistic process, as an end of the work, for the exhibition space; anyway, just a digression…
GC – That’s because, according to Marx, whom you mentioned with regard to the transit between being and object, the production of the object that marks the presence of man in the world…
DC – of the human being…
GC – of the human being, he or she, this molding process of connecting the abstract sphere of thinking to the surrounding is a reconnection…
DC – And, in this respect, we eliminate the discussion about the functionality of the object, that classic, historical and social discussion in the field of art. The discussion about the function of the artistic object, to my view, is jurassic. In this re-connexion of thinking to objects, that hierarchical distinction is eliminated, cut out. To the “Modern Self”, the pen exists so it can transpose the content of my brilliant mind to the paper and posterity. But, here, the pen exists in connection with other objects – the table, the hands, the mind. An Inca object in a museum – with its colonial institutional foundations of the financial elite’s power – is not there as part of a nationalist exercise of Peru’s history. That object is a survivor, it has withstood thousands of years before the existence of modern Peru, before the Nation-State. The one who says this is my dear friend Pablo Lafuente[15], who does this wonderful research about the relationship between objects in the world and objects in the world of art. In this presumptuous model in which we live today, we place that object inside a small box, badly lit, place a small text below and appropriate something in a gross narrative of an originary and progressive history. Because, as a matter of fact, that object is nothing but the symbol of repression, of the shame of being colonized, of having decimated a civilization as sophisticated as the Incas in the violent process of colonization. Hence the aura of the “original”. Going back to the heartbeats, they are much more poetic[16] and powerful in that they open up the possibility of such a sophisticated dialogue from the heart’s natural engineering…
GC – Natural, just like a cloud, one of the most ingenious solutions of engineering for transporting water. Do you want something that is less wasteful, less harmful? Do you know biomimetics[17]? Or bio mimesis, I can’t recall the researcher’s name. It was a North American scientist who made this field popular.[18] I went to watch her lecture at TED. She and her team go out to the field to observe natural processes and try to learn from them.
DC – In order to draw objects?
GC – Objects or the very mechanisms of engineering that can reduce waste or that can generate fewer residues, for example. What she says is that nature, for example, with four molecules of polymer, generate all the insects we know of, with all the refractions of color, light, and exoskeletons, and with zero wastage, because they are 100% absorbed, reintegrated to the system and reintegrated in other forms of life. And we, humans, have synthetized thousands of catalogued polymer molecules that generate much fewer configurations, of forms of employment and with wastage rates hundreds of times higher (laughing). It’s absolutely fascinating! Now I would like to talk a little about the question of Peru you have raised. The process of colonization from and through the object extends to the processes of mental colonization, the colonization of the body, of collectivity, the imposition of a model of perception that discredits the gesture. Today, the pausing gesture, of stopping your utilitarian time, of producing something and listening to somebody else’s heart is also disregarded, discredited, disreputed. This happens because this kind of gesture has not been capitalized. What is the value, the currency of this gesture? What do I gain from it?
DC – The gain brought from this gesture is the greatest of all, this “Modern Self”, this Self with a capital S, this Man Self, this Self which is a project of virility, albeit debilitated and enfeebled, and who tries to reproduce himself in this production of an obsessive, neurotic, utilitarian object, ends up falling apart. This is the greatest gain: you fall apart, you become a sound.[19] This is the trick. So, I’m going to offer a conclusion for the discussion of the Module of Intra-Organic Communication by quoting a wonderful text by French philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy, called L’intrus (The Intruder), published in 2000. If I am not mistaken, he is still alive.[20] He underwent a heart transplant surgery and, as a side effect, developed leukemia. His philosophical production is vast and extremely visceral. I read very poorly in French, I can’t evaluate with much propriety, but some of the writings I have read by him in English are very, very impressive. This text in particular is almost a diary that ends up being a treatise on epistemology, on the philosophy of language, ethics, in which he says that from the moment you know the organ that pumps life inside your body is not your “original”, they cannot refer to themselves as “I”. He knows the donator was a woman, so he can’t refer to himself as “I”, Jean Luc-Nancy, but he says “me-slash-her, Jean Luc-Nancy”.
GC – Wow…
DC – This is so beautiful, from this intimate confession the texts unfolds as a philosophical treatise…
GC – But do you know what is funny and interesting about what you’re saying? The other day I was researching about the body’s functioning and how the physiological organicity interferes in the perception or construction of a self, of the personality, of being in the world. This thing about having your heart replaced and about Jean-Luc Nancy not being able to reconnect himself with his self and becoming him-her… As I far as I could grasp the human being can have more than seven bodies during his life-time.
DC – In the process of cellular division, which constantly happens, the blood changes as well…
GD – Exactly, the body is in a constant process of maintenance.
DC – Oh, that’s beautiful!
GC – It is as if it were from inside out, we are constantly remodeling ourselves… in the cyclical process of cell repositioning, in a given period of time – I need to check this information to be more precise – we are completely another body. From inside out, the body expels the old bodies and remodels itself. The only cells that would be, so to speak “permanent”, the ones that we carry with us throughout our life, are the nerve cells, those directly linked with the brain, with the processes of memory, perception, understanding. Now, as for the rest, we are always someone else.
DC – That’s truly beautiful (silence…): we are always the other of ourselves. Which work is this? Incomplete Mutation[21]?
GC – Yes. This work is a narrative comprehending 390 color names. It’s an exercise of cognitive dislocation. It’s an audio that speaks the colors. It’s about understanding that what you hear is sound, that it’s also a color, but inside the repertoire of accumulated concepts we won’t find those traditional color meanings. It’s a color, but it’s a spoken color, so where is the color? It’s this idea of triggering a perception process by means of an audio stimulus and when you imagine the color…
DC – You can’t grasp it, you can’t hold it, it becomes a flash…
GC – In fact, it only reminds you of a natural process. As far as I could research, many color scholars and scientists maintain that color[22] is a sensation generated in the brain and not a characteristic of objects. So much so that in the industrial process, in order to define what is red or blue, they use a coefficient, which is a standard observer. A professor at UFMG, Alexandre[23] (I can’t remember his surname now) explained that to me: it’s almost like a research involving statistics; they choose hundreds of people and invite them to participate in an experiment in which you have the three RGB lights. Then they ask these people to adjust, in a device, the percentages that to them would be closer to red, green and blue. In this process, it was concluded that practically none of the people identified red, for example, according to the same percentages of R, G, and B.[24] It is as if each one of us lived and perceived a completely different world. There are no two worlds that are equal to one another.
DC – How beautiful your research is, Gui! The truth is that your artistic research is founded in science… let me correct: not the truth is! the feeling is! (laughing)
GC – Which truth? (laughing)
DC – But the feeling I get is that regardless of the scientific research that grounds your works, what you present is a radical exercise of alterity.
GC – Of being another, because this thing of being another is no bullshit…
DC – You offer this air that is going to operate in people’s molecules, and each one is going to inhale the work in a different way; you have one person hearing the heartbeat of another and they realize that their hearts are replicated in so many other hearts that beat beyond the human species. You present a list of 390 colors that could be 3,900 because color is as variable as the pairs of eyes that see them. It’s always a poetic exercise of repetition, of…
GC – Of a dive….
DC – … of a dive, super poetic…
GC – and also of how to classify the world. How do we name the world? You can imagine here on Earth: if we de-contextualize the Earth’s plane, let us say that this excessive “terrestrialness” (laughing) also distorts how much religare we can achieve, how much we can reconnect with this real apprehension of human expression, which is not only about being in the world, it’s existing…
DC – How about this other work?
GC – This is (Neural) Symphony. It inverts the process. I invited the resident conductor of the Symphonic Orchestra of Minas Gerais to participate and perform an excerpt of a musical piece of his choice for the video as if it were a live performance. Then he chose – and I learnt this only later on – an aria from Madame Butterfly, by Puccini, “un bel divedremo”, which means “one beautiful day we’ll see” (laughing). Then I said: “Man, it sounds like a joke, but it is not!” I took the opportunity to explain my practice, and asked him to collaborate with me. He does this whole exercise and at the end I asked – “Hey, Gabriel (Rhein-Schirato), I would like to know what you played just for the credits”. So, he replied: “I played un bel divedremo” (laughing). You see him conducting the piece of music without the sound of the orchestra and it talks about a possible visual contact with music, one day… It is as if he were also creating a field of tension for this thing of how we play the world. Will we see the world one day? No, the world opens up as a function of your gestures…
DC – You need time to contemplate,… to be able to see the invisible and to listen to Madame Butterfly from the perspective of the gesture…
GC – Exactly: this is Imaginary Dialogues, the work that gives the exhibition its name, in which the dive into the invisible is literal. You have two people underwater carrying out a dialogue, a conversation, and then all you have are those grunts: blu°blu°blu° blu°blu°blu°blu° blu°blu°… the video was edited in an alternate way, so while one speaks the other one is listening…
DC – And then the sound takes shape in these air bubbles inside the water…
GC – Right… it takes shape, but what I found curious, after revisiting this work is that for each sentence the volume of air is different, so the bubble of each word is going to be different as well and the way it comes to the world is different… it is as if you’re literally showing the limits of this mechanism of communication, you see?
DC – When the word is not uttered in its natural field, which is air…
GC – Exactly. Thus, the limit becomes evident… then the word appears fragile…
DC – When we say: “ah, for lack of a better word”, it’s because it has reached a limit which is not encapsulated by the air, isn’t it? And in water it is…
GC – And if you stop to think of the word as a limit at its very origins, of the verbal process (silence, whispers)…
DC – Describe the process.
GC – It is exactly this process of verbalization as a limit… you develop a process of sharpening the thinking activity. The word “stone” comes to designate stone. Just imagine, we needed thousands of years of molecular agglutination for the stone to become that hard dense mass, and thousands for the word to arise with the weight and the necessary firmness to designate it. We can develop kidney stones much faster… (laughing). This almost organic process of word production – you are throwing the stone, you are throwing the stone at the world – is, therefore, sculptural: the word is lapidation.
DC – Yes, the word is lapidation… the word “air”, in several languages, is short, it is a sigh, air, air, aire, aria, I don’t know what it is like in Asian languages, but, ultimately, it is mimetic and indexical at the same time. It’s the blow, and the mind thinking of the blow, a juxtaposition of the two things… (sigh-air)… Shall we move to Bra [in-to] Brain Communication?
GC – This work was incorporated in the exhibition in the original set, and it proposes a platform of direct brain communication. It tries to capture the thinking process[25]. It presents a visual design of the electroencephalogram, registered by an electroencephalogram device and projected alternately in the participants’ visual field, so one person can see the residuum of the electroencephalogram of another and it turns out that it triggers a kind of brain …..
DC – Like a dialogue?
GC – A dialogue, a dialogic structure…
DC – Why Paulo Bruscky[26]?
GC – He was coming to Belo Horizonte. I was talking to the team that was promoting his exhibition and that knew this project. They suggested I invite Paulo to work with me. He has been working on this research about brain design since the 1970s[27], and then Bruno Vilela, my friend, artist and producer in the cultural field, and the one who organized Paulo’s exhibition at E.X.A – Experimental Art Space[28], together with Marconi Drummond (curator)… They had been willing to do something of the kind for some time and told me: “You know, that research of yours… that could be a good opportunity to materialize it with Paulo, who is coming over… the connection is quite clear!” So I sent Bruscky a sketch with a very short proposal. He agreed, went there, we did it, it’s 15 minutes long, he was super generous and warmly welcomed me.
DC – The physical structure of this work, given that the performance is over and the objects remain there, is more sculptural. There is more information, but it is still predicated on the economical principle like the other works. You set the table and chair and it doesn’t matter what they are made of; the same applies to the screen, the electroencephalogram… It is not as if you had transformed everyday objects into works of art, and they do not constitute a setting either.
GC – There is no fetish there, of the thing in itself…
DC – Not at all. The objects are exhibited there with transparency, with no interference or subliminal meanings. You have control over what they mean, what is behind these objects…
GC – It is like a drill: it’s excavating, trying to apprehend the complexity of the brain. We are still trying to understand what happens in there.
DC – If I may be allowed to draw a parallel with the construction of a text, I believe this assemblage – with the bottles and heart chambers – becomes the alphabetic structure of the operation, you see what I mean? They are the foundations that support the communication you are trying to establish, the alphabet of your own research. It is very beautiful, as a matter of fact. Well, and then when you exchanged ideas about the experience, how was it? How were the impulses translated into paper? Are the maps of the brain impulses alike, what are they like?
GC – This was a curiosity that emerged: this work has an embedded precariousness which cannot punctuate the complexity involved in the thinking process, in the workings of the brain, in the causal nature of thinking. What they can capture is a residual micro voltage, which is an old fashioned idea that life can be based on this electrical process which we generate and which every structure in nature possesses a certain degree of charge, movement, and vital force.
DC – a degree of charge, of energy…
GC – … energetic, but, which is many times insignificant in comparison with the complexity of the living being, of the life expression… So, this whole paraphernalia that human beings are trying to build to excavate, expand the knowledge about the brain, is a legitimate effort, but still very precarious. I believe this work tries to indicate the presence of an organ that determines our daily life because it controls everything, but we still know how to use the sphincter, the belly more than the brain, you see? (laughing)… because, you see, the child needs a very long time to learn…
DC – to control the sphincter, it’s true…
GC – And the urinary organs, undoubtedly, a very great effort, and we spend the whole life processing what we put in the stomach, what goes through the intestines. We spend the whole life controlling the excretory system, but we know less about mental or about psychic life. And it’s exactly what it comes down to because it is what builds reality, the notions, the ideas, thinking, and perception.
DC – Perhaps we are incapable of understanding much about it, maybe only in communism (laughing)…
DC – Gui, I see in these works a desire to share with the world a real form of being together in a certain place, but of REALLY doing it. It’s not a representation of presence, it’s not a speculation about communication. Deep down, what you offer to the visitors of this exhibition are concrete opportunities to look, listen, breath the other in such an immaterial world which the capital has dematerialized; life has become speculative, but, at the same time it’s a life that depends on the consumption of objects which, in turn, are discardable… it’s kind of weird. And I think that you place your object in this place, the paraphernalia at the same level as the interlocutor, not at his expense, in order to foster real encounters of dialogue necessarily with the OTHER (laughing).. and it’s not refractive… the dialogue does not depart from one Self to another Self and then returns to the initial Self ad infinitum: the selves disperse on a molecular scale… In this conversation, which reviews the works successively, one by one, I see an organic and very human exercise of being together.
GC – I find what you say very interesting because, from the perspective outlined in this research, according to which the world of the other is really different from ours, the effort to receive or accommodate the presence of the other in our lives ends up leading to a remodeling of our very notion of reality.
DC – Of course that reminds me of a wonderful article I’ve read recently and which can be seen as an example of remodeling. The article said that in an African tribe (please, forgive my overgeneralization of “Africa”; I can’t recall exactly which tribe and which place and I acknowledge my ignorance), a child’s age is counted from the moment his future mother feels like becoming pregnant. So, she sits under a tree and stays there until she learns that child’s song. She goes there and starts to listen from the world, the cosmos, the tree, that baby’s song. Once she’s learnt that song, she looks for the man who will be the father and teaches him that song. While they make love to conceive this child, they sing this song. During pregnancy, the mother teaches this same song to other women who will aid her in the child’s birth and while this child is growing, the whole community will learn that song. The mother or any other caretaker will sing this song when the child experiences any misfortune or pain that growing up necessarily bring, and he/she will then be transported to a memory of maximum reconnection with all the things and will not feel lost… Well, drawing to an end now, when this person commits a socially unacceptable act, the community gathers in a circle, places this person in the middle and everyone sings this song together, that is, the idea of social correction does not involve punishment but rather the affective bonding among all the members of that community that are always going to ensure that this person remembers that he/she belongs. Period. He/she belongs to that collectivity, to the history of that community and to the landscape of that place. What we can infer from the analysis of this community’s experience is that when the person is under stress, it’s because he/she disconnects him/herself from this collective body and becomes more attached to speculation than to what is being an individual. Nobody can stand being an individual in reality, it’s very heavy to carry this Self, that’s why we study the West so obsessively! (laughing). You’re clearly connected to all those things through polymers, you see? (laughing): hydrogen, carbon, anyway, this is very beautiful. I’ve never seen anything as sophisticated as this.
GC – this thing about collective forgiveness…
DC – I wouldn’t say forgiveness because that is Christian…
GC – Yes, of welcoming… [29]
DC –… of welcoming for the sake of love. Love is always collective.
GC – … of not considering someone’s presence because nature’s fallible recognition is unbearable, more than human fallibility. [30] When we say “man” it’s also a misuse of language…
DC – A misuse of a politico-patriarchal nature. No, I never say “man” to people in general, I’m a staunch feminist (laughing).
GC – But being… Well, our fallibility does not stop other possibilities, it does not necessarily diminish our potentiality…
DC – In this case, the recognition of the other, as you say, in the social understanding of that community, means that this other’s existence ///////////[31] depends on my existence, //////// So all we can do is welcome lovingly /////////this being, which comes from a song to the mother mediated by a tree… it’s very sophisticated… //////
GC – that’s right, here we fight for the chance and the voice. We live in a system of stimuli ////////and frustration… ////////// noticing the other goes through the method ////// of exploring him/her. [32]
DC – This is the capitalist process… it is ////// bellicose.
GC – … coercive.
DC – As you pointed out before, this is also inherent to nature! (laughing)
DC – Gui, let’s go for lunch?
GC – Let’s go.
_________
[1] The following is the bibliographic reference for the Portuguese version of the text: BEAUVOIR, Simone de. Por uma moral da ambiguidade. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2005. Henceforth, only the Portuguese versions of texts in languages other than Portuguese will be referenced here.
[2] The binary digit; smallest unit of information processed by a computer.
[3] I think more of a condition of complementarity rather than of antagonism with regard to the dynamics of interaction between the human being and nature. In the current epistemological model in several western societies, it is taught that the human being – in his/her way of organizing thinking – has made the transition from the notion of mythic reality to rational reality. Based on this same line of thought, I believe the development of technology marks the emergence of an intuitive form of perception about the way natural structures function, and I’m not dismissing the economic and political questions involved. Our cells may be seen as nanofactories operating in a symbiosis with our psyche, performing the constant task of managing the functioning of our body organs, and also responding to tour mental and emotional environments, as well as to patterns of behavior or habits.
[4] (*) The exhibition comprises 7 works. The seventh work – Studies on the Impossibility of Time – was incorporated in the context of the exhibition after the interview; that’s why it is not mentioned here in the register of this conversation.
[5] Lament = express (oneself) through lament, cry and bemoan; speak with resentment; deplore, regret.
[6] (*) Divaldo Pereira Franco (Bahia, 1927), a Brazilian medium, lecturer, and philantropist.
[7] MARX, Karl. Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2009.
[8] This is the most common type of device for this purpose, which captures the sound only at the front of the microphone.
[9] That happens indeed. Because the body adjusts the pace and intensity at which it pumps blood according to the level of activity of the person in a given moment; if two people are lying down together at the same time with the purpose of sleeping, this adjustment will occur in both hearts giving the impression that they are beating at the same pace; and maybe they are.
[10] Ahistorical – Adjective. 1: that which does not participate in history 2: contrary, antagonic to history; anti-historical.
[11] The heart has four chambers: the left atrium (LA), the right ventricle (RV), the left atrium (LA), and the left ventricle (VE).
[12] The chest is an osseocartilaginous box that contains the main respiratory and circulatory organs and covers part of the abdominal organs.
[13] Performance called 4’33’, and presented for the first time in 1952. In it a performer sitting at a piano is instructed to produce no sound during four minutes and thirty three seconds.
[14] This experiment was conducted in 1950 at Harvard University. In it, John Cage gets inside a soundproof chamber to hear “silence”. Instead of silence he hears a grave sound and an acute one, the former of which comes from his heartbeats and blood circulation, and the latter from his nervous system.
[15] Pablo Lafuente (Spain, 1976) is a writer, curator and co-editor of the publication Afterall since 2005. He was one of the curators of the 31st Biennial Exhibition of São Paulo.
[16] I agree completeley!
[17] (*) Biomimetics: term coined by North American scientist Otto Herbert Schmitt in the 1950s to refer to the field of studies based on the direct observation of natural elements and structures. From ancient Greek: βίος (bios), life and μίμησις (mimesis), mimicry.
[18] (*) Janine Benyus (USA, 1958) published in her 1997 book: “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”.
[19] The sound: thtump-thtump-thtump-thtump
[20] He turned 75 years old in July.
[21] (*) The title of this work refers to the fact that human beings in nature are constantly subject to mutation, even if the periods during which the transformations occur –the different states and stages of this mutation – are very long and out of the perceptual reach of the species going through the process. Human beings are part of this process. As a species we are still undergoing bio-psychic-genetic development. We are not finished.
[22] Color to humans and other animals is a sensation provoked by the specialized organic access to a specific group of wave lengths of the light spectrum. Different species of live beings possess different varieties of ocular cells. The light goes through these cells, which capture only a fraction of the light they are programmed to receive and the brain transforms this signal into color. Since color is light interpreted by the brain, we are led to think of the multiplicity of existing world views: a different worldview for each bio-psychic-physiological organization.
[23] (*) Alexandre Cruz Leão – Prof. of Photography at the Department of Photography, Drama and Cinema of the School of Arts of UFMG (*).
[24] (*) A description of a scientific process based on the perception, understanding and memory of the artist. There may be specific technical discrepancies about the narrated theory in relation to the way by which the artist apprehends the explanation and incorporates it in his process of reflexive poetic research. The artist is accountable for any distortions in this theory.
[25] (*) It is part of the series of experiments in neural poetics.
[26] Paulo Bruscky (1949) is a multimedia artist and poet from Pernambuco (a state in the northeast of Brasil); he is known for his postal art.
[27] (*) Paulo Bruscky (1949) – work: “My brain draws like this.”
[28] E.X.A. Experimental Art Space. In tupi-guarani EXA means “knowledge, wisdom and dream”. http://www.exa.art.br
[29] (*) “Perdão” (Forgiveness) comes from the latin perdonare, in which per- means “total, complete” and donare “give, deliver, donate”. The mention to the concept of “perdão” is linked with the idea of love. According to the Christian precepts, forgiving reflects a mental attitude aimed at preventing hatred and vengeance. It’s an act of not wiling and not wishing to cause any harm to the other or to oneself. It’s the constant exercise of altruism and unselfish love, as we may find in other lines of religious thinking as well. Each system of though classifies this love according to their own codes, just as it happens with any other concept.
[30] (*) Reflection provoked by the following impression: the characteristic flaws of human nature, its vileness and instability, do not prevent the emergence of noble and generous feelings, of intrinsic transformative potentialities capable of expanding consciousness, of the attainment of a certain enlightenment about the meaning of life.
[31] A motorcycle’s engine accelerates and her talk becomes inaudible… it’s the rush of life interfering in the conversation.
[32] Ibid.