THE DUE TO WATER

Becoming Water exhibition text

at the Marquis of Pombal Palace, Oeiras in 2016

We are a family owned and operated business.

Maria João Gamito

We are a family owned and operated business.

I ncontáveis silk yarn, cotton and various materials, eight chairs, a semi-detached them, forty-one flat mirrors, a cage, nine artist books and the water passage of the rumor are the elements that Carla Rebelo put in touch this exposure, involving them in the movement of things to things and the inevitable change that each time makes them appear as something else in the future of all of them, or in the rumor that gives them to see and hear.

And above all, it will be a rumor, or rumors: the mnemonic rumor of running water, but also that of the mechanical cadence of the metamorphosis of machines, here understood as devices, inventions or resources manifest in the absorption of objects and in the obliquity of images ; the rumor of the conceptual, spatial and temporal webs in which these objects and images coexist, protecting the reference to the figure of the Marquis of Pombal - owner of the Palace that hosts the exhibition - and the rumor of his reform measures; the rumor of the optical objects belonging to the collection of the Gabinete de Física, constituted in 1772 as part of the reform of the University of Coimbra (currently the Physics Museum of the University of Coimbra), and the rumor of the images fixed by the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert, in the context of the inventorious disposition of the same century; the rumor of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the rumor of the myths alluded to by various stucco paintings, tile panels and sculptures that decorate the Palace and, underlying them all and as they are prisoners of the eternal present of their passage, the rumor of the memory that it brings both the memory of the Muses' maternity and the knowledge domains that they embody, as well as the river of forgetfulness that must be drunk before each reincarnation, which would be nothing more than the return, as something else, to the becoming of water or the rumor that makes it see and hear.

Installed on two floors of the Palace and in a small space at the foot of the lake, defined between two araucarias in the garden, the exhibition is conceived as a subtle site-specific where, at first glance, the sedentary nature of the pieces that as such define it seems to contradict the nomadic vocation - one might say metamorphic - of things that are incapable of fixing intransigence in a unique way. But in this project, metamorphosis emerges from the resonance of the multiple narratives that reverberate in the pieces, making them reverberate beyond the spaces that contain them.

In the Marquês Hall and in its antechamber, the flow of water within the limits of the wooden mill, which occupies them for almost seven meters, is shaped by silver silk threads that resonate in the white cotton threads born from a structure circular base suspended from the ceiling of the Dining Room. Sketch of the weave of a loom or transparent lightness of a curtain, these threads wrap around the interior occupied by a chair from which someone has left, leaving the instruments compatible with the two directions of an inert movement. This architecture that descends from the ceiling to house the suspension of the landscape contained in any waiting, has its equivalent in the design of lines constructed with various materials dyed red that end in the stones that connect them to the garden soil and the modification of the landscape of places incomprehensible in territories to be deciphered. Penélope and Ulisses in the double absence or in the double deferral that eliminates rest and activity to prolong itself in the long stretches of white cotton threads that, in the Game Room, suggest tables woven in the obscure connections of seven chairs brought back to the geometric elementality of the statues that hide the illusions in which analogies and hopes are deposited.

In the Sala da Música, thirty-nine mirrors, mounted on wooden bases and placed on the floor, represent the blocks, designed by Eugénio dos Santos, in the reconstruction plan of Baixa de Lisboa. Above the mirrors, drawn in black ink, the outline of the city before the earthquake is visible. And Lisbon, often figured as a Fénix Reborn in representations of the time, is now Eurydice to which is finally added the reflection of Orpheus, painted on the ceiling stucco. Vision and mirage unite without contradictions in the amnesia of the mirrors that the inscriptions corrupt and the light projects on the walls.

At the World Cup, a cage, built with small pieces of wood embedded in a dismountable hexagonal base structure, literally refers to the construction system called 'pombaline cage', applied in the reconstruction of Lisbon. But it also brings into the house the loft that exists in the outer space, now reduced to the transparency that surrounds the interior from which a chair was absent, as if its appearance depended on a predetermined point of view. As in the room where the four surfaces of a double piece, built in wood, await the floor that produces the images. Faces of the Marquis or unstable portraits that the movement activates, this incompleteness - which results from a concealment - extends to the room where two mirrors complete two drawings, thus generating the brevity of a third drawing, whose appearance depends on a point in space and the presence that occupies it. And it is also in space that the lines outlined in the nine artist books - nine books of synthetic images - materialize that temporarily make the Sala dos Reis a library. Decorated with tile panels representing Apollo and the nine Muses, this room unfolds in books that evoke Science, History, Lyric and Poetry, Music, Tragedy, Geometry, Comedy, Dance, Astronomy. It unfolds, like all the others, in the fugacity of the presence that fluctuates, without ever being concluded, in the noise of the water that in the corridors of the 1st floor leads the observer to the exhibition.

It is in the relentless coming of water that Carla Rebelo finds the incessant metamorphosis of things that never come to an end, because only he and his eternally present time can they belong. In this sense, this exhibition is still the staging of the exhibition machine itself, in which, attached to the thing that it looks at, the observer is the circumstantial element that the water has just absorbed.

Maria João Gamito