Breathing Syncopes

The ground was always holy. And there was nothing we needed to build…. and it wasn’t easy. We were so entangled. Got liberation and accumulation confused.
– brontë velez, “The Well” on For the Wild:
The Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy

The water from the river Alva, Chão do Rio (River Ground), in Coimbra District, Portugal, flows into the river Mondego that flows into the Atlantic Ocean, that connects with the Mediterranean Sea; it becomes one with other water bodies, changes compositions, energies, rhythms, expressions, altitudes, currents, crossing countries and continents. It dilutes, transforms, evaporates, freezes, absorbs, nourishes, and witnesses.

There is a sequence of the film Ulysses Gaze by Theodoros Angelopoulos that I return to very often, where a statue of Lenin is being transported by cargo boat through the river Danube to reach Germany. During the three minute sequence, there is a poetic invitation to reflect on change, identity, acceptance, decomposition, and how the new urban configuration created by the physical absence of this statue would be transformed by a next generation. It does not signify a miraculous social change, correct past wrongs, nor compensate, and it certainly does not credit reparations. It creates a void; to be filled or not, to be debated about and cared for in the future. There is a tendency to hold on to statues and monuments in urban settings as if they existed forever, as though their construction wasn’t part of a traceable decision and political agenda, funded by a ruling power to promote and form memories and cultural identities. During the last years I have been working on the project Calibragem with Frame Colectivo, an architecture, urban research, and art studio in Lisbon, PT creating a toolset to gather images both in urban and rural settings that form the perception and identity of European territories. A series of recordings captured by a room-sized pinhole camera, reversed naturally by physics, invites the spectator to contemplate on familiar routes and complete the up-side-down imagery with their own stored memories. While the brain tries to identify the image location within these routes, the mind starts to recognize known structures. In Lisbon most of these structures identified by the viewers are directly linked to the glorification of the country’s colonial past (monuments, buildings, squares) or contain colonial references in their architectural forms and urban expression (symbolism, naming, etc). The most well-known is the padrão dos descobrimentos (monument of the discoveries) facing the river Tagus, erected as a temporary structure for the portuguese world exhibition in 1940 during the Salazar dictatorship, reconstructed in 1960, and reopened in 1985 as centro cultural das descobertas (cultural centre of the discoveries). Portugal’s pride of its colonial past and its refusal to address its continuous violence is such that the Memorial in Tribute to Enslaved People,¹ a project that won a Participatory Budget voting in Lisbon 2017, and has its final form since February 2020,² seems to have been indefinitely postponed. In comparison, the completion of the statue of padre António Vieira, a 17th-century Jesuit missionary active in Brazil, took two years between the decision upon the artist (2015) and its unveiling (2017). This is a clear example of a political will continuing to promote the ruling power while hindering the creation of another kind of representational expression much due in the public sphere. This is by no means a unique (portuguese) characteristic; in most territories, semiotics and semantics in public space are utilized to define what is to be celebrated in the respective territory and what is to be denied. There are too many monuments to mention, but here is a list of similar structures that were brought up during the sharings in the Chão do Rio residency from fellow artists:

Columbus Monument, 60m, Barcelona, Spain, 1888
Birth of the New World, 110m Arecido, Puerto Rico, 2016
Monument to George Boole, Lincoln, UK, 2022
Monumento às Bandeiras, 43,8m long, São Paulo, Brazil, 1953
Equestrian statue of Leopold II, Brussels, Belgium, 1926
Barão de Mauá, 8.5m, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1910 (repositioned 2017)
Statue of Winston Churchill, 3.7m, London, UK, 1973
Victory Column, 67m, Berlin, Germany, 1873

In western anatomical terms, a visual blindspot is a region in the eye that lacks photoreceptor cells in the retina, so the light falling at this spot does not form any image. At the same time, it is in this region that the optic nerve passes through the optic disk and out of the eyes, and where the blood vessels enter the eyes. We are able to see because of the blindspot’s structural function in connecting our eyes with the rest of our nervous and cardiovascular system. By understanding this duality, and applying its nature to our will of holding on to the existing, we can look at the concept of conceding/surrendering as a possibility that allows for a whole spectrum to emerge—creating space for more parts to connect, express, create, and nurture, with all our contradictions. On the podcast For the Wild: The Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy,³ Ayana Young and brontë velez discuss, among other things, different kinds of power: the kind that is accountable to consensual pleasure and the kind that is accountable for climate collapse; and in this sense the importance of acknowledging power as a complex and multifaceted force instead of demonizing it, and rejecting it as a whole. I feel there is a double invitation in the podcast: to step into the creative energy as a kind of power that allows for movement, imagination and breathing, and at the same time surrendering another kind of power that longs for and perpetuates status, resources, and societal ideals as separated, individual desires through pleasure and humbleness.

…I began to ask myself what kind of monuments had been imposed onto my internal landscape, that are impacting my subjectivity in a conscious or subconscious way.

Combining these concepts and invitations in my own process of understanding my relationship to power, I began to ask myself what kind of monuments had been imposed onto my internal landscape, that are impacting my subjectivity in a conscious or subconscious way. Using a similar spatial language to the statues and monuments mentioned above, I created three collages of golden figures that represent core desires in myself connected to societal ideals imposed by religion, patriarchy, and capitalism. The three figures carry unattainability, perfectionism, addictions, dismissiveness, numbness, extortion, distortion of erotic energy, control, and power abuse.

Their banality in artistic expression becomes a huge relief. The headless statue of Venus de Milo with a medusa on its feet, the young girl from Wall Street being prayed upon, a relaxed standing white man with tentacles, they all represent and reproduce false notions of reality.

By familiarizing and de-familiarizing myself with these images and what they mean for me, re-politicizing them and giving them agency, they begin to transform—from an unidentifiable dense bundle, they become porous and oxygenated, allowing air to circulate, cracking and reacting to the environment. The space between creates sequences of voids and volumes, of rhythms, of light and air. It shifts the focus from the desire to eradicate or shut down emotions into cultivating gratitude for feeling their whole spectrum, without treating them as property, but witnessing them, letting them dissolve.

As a visualization exercise and metabolizing ritual in an everyday setting, I proposed to myself an interaction with ice blocks, connecting with the water as an element of cosmic intelligence and knowledge, formal transformation, connection to other human and non-human entities, and of sensual layers and energy fields outside and inside ourselves. In solid state, the ice blocks become an abstract form of an archive, similar to a statue or monument, that carry in them a specific moment in matter with different sources resulting in completely different ice structures. First, they become sound memories. The river Alva: a constant washing that connects to the will to be guided by its stream, to lose control, to rest on the stones, to nurture and nourish. The Mediterranean Sea of the Toroneos Gulf: a reminder with a soft beat, that allows for floating on the back for hours, dissolving in its salts and iodine. The Atlantic Ocean in Sintra: a rhythmic punch that requires action and constant movement. During the four hours the waters need to regain their liquid state, I witness them transform, and I transform with them. It is a meditation on their routes and the celebrations, prosperities, dreams, displacements, occupations, civil wars, extortion, death, life and rebirth they carry with them. It is a humble contemplation of climate change and the ruling powers that brought us here. And it is a sensual offering; forms that emerge through the process, cracks carving ways like rivers, sudden swifts in structural vulnerability, and translucence that dissolves into a mirrored surface.

In the video “Climate Crisis, Fragmentation and Collective Trauma,”⁴ Uncle Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, and Bayo Akomolafe invite us to learn to listen, to recognize that we are not coherent entities, to gravitate towards incompleteness, and to accept that the only possibility we have to find our way is to get lost together. As I pour the melted water from the river to the snake plant in my house, I thank and celebrate all water bodies, humans and non-humans in Chão do Rio and toast to shame-free spacialities, ancestral beings, joyful sheddings, sisterhood, and humbleness.