Abismar-se do vivido

Abstract

Abismar-se do vivido is a drawing project, made in collaboration, by artists Graça Magalhães and Eliane Beytrison, based on the artists’ stay in the village of Álvaro -- almost entirely destroyed by fire in October 2017. The objective would be to take the drawing as an iconographic, politically participatory reference. The project addresses the following question: can drawing be an integrative action in the landscape? The hypothesis would be the following: the recognition of the place revealed by the experience of drawing, confronted with knowledge and led by small flickers, clues, reappearances, remote identities, vulnerable survivals, would make it possible to unveil and fix the landscape. The approach would be through Maria Zambrano, according to which there is a need for the subject – in this case the artist – to ‘save’ the lived event by fixing it, so that it is not lost in the abyss of the lived, “to save it from being a dream, from falling into the condition of a dream if it does not leave a mark, if it simply passes and goes away, to save it from being dreamed if it does not fix itself.”(Zambrano, 1994: 25). The objective was to ‘seeing’ the territory as a condition for representation, while ‘being’ would be essential. When passing through the territory, there was the impression that it was not appropriate for the time of the event. The devastating fire of 2017 had left that village completely destroyed (less than ten adults, only one school-age child). What is it all about when we talk about abandoning a territory? It was about recognizing that communities leave traces, testimonies and with them interactions linked to the multiplicity of time, what is told and what overlaps, resists, survives. A powerful presence that will become a part of us. In this case, the territory and the landscape are not only a problem of ecosystem balance, they are also a source of perceptive stimuli. Methodologically, what was thought to be created in situ was later developed (from memory) in the studio. The work proposal derived from what Deleuze classifies as an ‘act of resistance’ (https://youtu.be/2OyuMJMrCRw); in this case, the memory that emerges from the subject and not from models of representation. Images resulting from passing through places, revealed by the technical use of materials, making the artist “part” of the drawing, himself ‘watching’ the act of creation. These landscape drawings resulting from referential discontinuity, which arise from the experience of gesture confronted with memory. The encounter between what is fictionalized by memory, and what can be found through the “miracle” of absence as the essence of representation.