Excerpt from the text of the exhibition I would prefer not to, from Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story of Wall Street, held at Plataforma R evolver in Lisbon.

Maria João Gamito

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"Silent Books titled the book / installation by Carla Rebelo. The numbered blue sheets, from two books, about 40 cm high, densely filled with handwritten records of houses and commercial establishments supposedly in the district of Lisbon, and without any indication of origin, date or functional framework, unfold like a folio, completely filling the floor of a place of passage.

Book / installation or artist's book, this piece, like all of Carla Rebelo's pieces, is a response to the question of the place. But in this case, and according to the artist's words, it is also an answer to his need to create a place for Bartleby, after all not very different from the one that the clerk inhabited in the Melville tale: a corner behind the tall, green screen in the lawyer's workroom, where he stood for a long time watching a blind wall and where he remained after removing the screen. And finally, it is a device for objectifying writing in unexpected correspondences subtly defined in the commitment of the scales and the relations they establish between the real space and that of representation, and in the understanding of the object in its etymological truth, as an obstacle or barrier placed before the eyes.

The pages of the property registration books, carefully torn from the books where they once had a function, are articulated as screens or walls that prevent passage in a passage place, making the place absurd and obtuse the object that inscribes its unreason. . This unreason is both that of the real impediment to crossing the passage and that of the objectification of the written record, which, already distant from the monotonous task that copied it and immersed in the absurdity of the copy whose meaning was lost, still remains, now as a screen or metaphor on the walls of the cities that belong to two places and two times and that in both refer, not to the labyrinth where men are lost by the action of a monumental exercise of reason, but to its inverse form, that of the spreading, irrational spot and entropic.

The walls of Carla Rebelo, noisy and encrypted like the walls of contemporary cities, arise from the writing material that registers them and thus allows them to access a permanence that is that of the wall as the power of the image, of all images for all men who, like Bartleby, look for them in this elementary as well as essential act of turning to a wall in return to themselves and their cause. Three walls of a place of passage is the place that Carla Rebelo found for Bartleby. In it, as in the work that precedes it, the clerk stands, facing a wall, between the book that unfolds as the perspectives in a city and the book that opens to read the city and its perspectives. "

Maria João Gamito