Instituto Benjamin Constant visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 5th, 2012. Photo: Anita Sobar.

The body of an encounter
Bernardo Zabalaga

Strength comes from a good connection between the part and the whole.

Guilherme Vergara¹

There’s a space where the artwork of Ernesto Neto opens itself up to thought and experience dislocating more stable concepts of sculpture or installation. For the group of blind and seeing visitors that took part in the guided experience of the artist’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape on the October 5, 2012, it seemed that the work was a catalyst to enter another space-time, above all because it was possible to inhabit the work.² This inhabiting or being-together was one of the most marked aspects of the visit, the creation of a collective that, in opening up to being together for a while, even if just for several hours, enabled each person who participated to allow him or herself to be effected and to create bonds.³

Bonds are inaugurated from the moment the team (comprising artist/educators and researchers) in thinking about the visit, plans, constructs and discusses the best format to create a differentiated space-time experience.⁴ The challenge was to allow that the same open and creative premises that guided our actions were also those that guided our planning. For this we had a straightforward approach: develop an initial idea that can readily be re-elaborated by the team where the formal aspects were flexible and could thus conjure a framework that, at once, fostered the presence of experimentality and saw action itself as a vital conducting thread and support. All this followed an overall guiding principle: action conjures itself in the present and risk is part of the game.

Instituto Benjamin Constant visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 5th, 2012. Film stills: Gustavo Cruz Ferraz. In partnership with Cognitive and Collectives Research Group UFRJ

From where does this necessity to create a collective come? This necessity, although implicit in a careful structuring of any group dynamic, does not happen a priori or come as a given intrinsic value of any group arriving at the entrance of a museum or gallery. A collective creates and inaugurates itself out of understanding, strangeness, tension and distension between individuals. It is the motor of a differentiated space-time that allows us to create the symbolic bridges that at the same time connect and traverse everyone and no one. A collective also allows a fusion between the generic and the specific that opens the senses to experience, unfolding itself into a clear feeling of belonging and of the value of action. The group that came together for the visit to the Suspended Critter found themselves connecting unconsciously to ancestral experiences of circles, of the tribe and of an exchange without a specific or hierarchical focus. Inside the work, everyone’s code of being and living loosened up, the impetus was to let oneself fall, lie down, stretch out, lean in and laugh. The symbolic wove its way into subjectivities enabling that the informational and sensorial experience became part of the net that supported their bodies. It is this intangible quality that creates bonds; it is the extra component that facilitates, that the fluxes and states of making and being expand allowing for a new body to reveal itself. The encounter becomes a body in itself through cultivating this sense of the collective and unnameable relation. As Suely Rolnik suggests, in speaking of the proposals of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark: “the conquest of intimacy is like an unnameable bridge from where forms emerge” – this is the creation of bonds.⁵ The ground zero from which all creation expands.

Given the size of the Suspended critter the visit had to be planned in a gradual manner and any perceptual exercises, at least in the beginning, needed to follow a more logical route than I had experienced on other occasions leading such groups. From early on in the team’s planning it was clear that there was a shared desire to catalyze micro-understandings and poetic and sensorial explorations of the artwork. To assist in this process and, particularly, to plan for those with diverse visual deficiencies, at the beginning of the visit we talked about the various elements that made up the Critter, this suspended and amorphous creature that sailed over our heads and dwelt, sometimes lightly, sometimes monumentally, in the large entrance hall of Leopoldina train station. In stages, the group manipulated samples of each of the work’s materials, clarifying specific aspects of manufacturing, such as the numbers and quantities needed to make the crocheted structure and the amount of people involved in the process.

Instituto Benjamin Constant visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 5th, 2012. Film stills: Gustavo Cruz Ferraz. In partnership with Cognitive and Collectives Research Group UFRJ

The visit route then began with touching and listening to parts of the work that were closest to the ground. First this meant exploring what was exactly above our heads. Then we measured the work’s distance from the ground, exploring and recognizing the variation of heights with canes. I remember that we seemed to really quickly move forward, almost as if pushed by a gravitational force, to enter the Critter. The day was warm and bright, the mood was up and the group, though slightly shy and cautious, was quickly swallowed into the structure.

Inside the Critter the invitation was clear: in pairs participants walked and investigated the corridors and pathways, all in a playful and relaxed manner. They could stop, sit, lie down, chat, and flirt. . The constant search for tangible results, drawn from such an experience, or the use of more classical forms of visitor engagement were suspended: the natural and poetic desire inside the installation was to just be there, nothing more. A sense of implicit permission was instituted, an extended timelessness and a self-authorizing that opened the group up to sharing whether in words or by the intimate act of simply resting the body within the net; this was already a happening.

I remember having the distinct feeling of giving up any attempt to guide or lead the movement or conversation. The collective was relaxed, rested, suspended. The time was no longer one of having to. It was as if delivered to our luck, we were taken by that gigantic mass elsewhere. The conversation went back and forth in a constant process of becoming. Leaving the work was slow and coy. Every curve and deviation was an excuse to play on the net, to fool around, jump and laugh. A childlike joy captured the group, and we all went along for the ride, kind of motivated by a pleasant friction, giving in to the playful spirit.

Leandro: “I felt as if I was Spiderman, climbing spiders’ webs.”

Rose: “We do not see the obvious, right? So what happens? When we do not see the obvious, we relax and enjoy, that’s it. ”

Instituto Benjamin Constant visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 5th, 2012. Film stills: Gustavo Cruz Ferraz. In partnership with Cognitive and Collectives Research Group UFRJ

Once outside, the idea was to see how we could continue to experiment and discover the richness of the experience. Ernesto Neto’s studio had provided a number of materials. We were interested in letting the group organize themselves experimentally toward discovering a collective body. At one moment it was the rope that held us, next it was the net that covered us, then to the right, then to the left, all in movement, rhythm and free impulse. The path was to bring to the body outside what had been the experience inside the artwork. Everything was possible: agreements and adjustments were made on the spot, the group paced their times and movements, freeing themselves in the process. It was as if, unlike the momentum within the work, outside the group’s desire was now responding to a more active, playful engagement with the world.

The experience raised a lot of questions about what it means to create a collective with the blind and seeing when experiencing art. To begin to understand these questions we need to explore the variations in how a collective is formed and the kinds of connections that are made through the art experience. The sharing experience is necessarily multiple and simultaneously fragmented. Within the complexity of what it means to create a collective body with such characteristics, a strong point is a sense of strangeness and difference that seems to be a necessary part of the participants’ experience. This suggests that one of the key premises that should guide such an encounter is to allow the experience of art to enroll in a fragmented multiplicity. Opening up oneself to the unknown and to the other within ourselves via multiple sensoriality — desires, meanings, and cognitive abilities in decisive transit and crossing. The art of being, the collective as a multiple artwork, the vibration of the group as the understanding of our place in the world. And the void.

On that day, this vital collective potential was amplified and sustained by the very dynamic structure of the work. It created the space to be and to generate action, but not from a force that came from the outside pushing for an inner response. It was as if all the momentum had been generated with a germ established in the preceding impulse. The flow corresponded to the will of the collective at all times. The feeling that remained was like one that corresponds to a game of forces in equilibrium, neither too heavy nor too light. The effect as the result of the stress applied. And another thing: childhood memory and free and loose play. Remembering Rose’s words at the end of the encounter speaks volumes: “So relax and enjoy, and that’s it.” In constant movement, the group opened up their perception to an experience that, in its quality, sailed and floated above the ground, always remembering to draw on the necessary tensions and harmonies to be with the work, as with all artistic creation. Another body was formed, ephemeral and fleeting. A body which when carefully nurtured, little by little, made itself present. Between crossings, arrivals and departures something unnameable remained. Maybe at the next meeting it will come back.

The body of the encounter. Instituto Benjamin Constant visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 5th, 2012. In partnership with Cognitive and Collectives Research Group UFRJ. Film: Paulo Victor Catharino Gitsin. Editing: Bernardo Zabalaga. Music Pili Pili

–
¹Comment referring to the individual knots in relation to the net as a whole made during the encounter by Luiz Guilherme Vergara, the program’s coordinator.
²The terms “blind” and “seeing” are being used here drawing on the research practice of Virginia Kastrup, coordinator of the Cognition and Collectives Research Group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro: “We use here the term “seeing” to refer to a person that possesses full eyesight within normal parameters and the term blind to refer to those that have a partial or total visual deficiency. There are other terms used in this area of study and practice such as “visual deficiency”, or “special needs.” This has generated much debate in different areas (education, psychology, accessibility) with diverse arguments for and against, there is no consensus. As a general guiding principle, one could say that today we tend to use the notion of a person with visual deficiency (including blind and poor vision), a blind person or simply blind (Moraes e Kastrup, 2010). Our choice for the use of the term “blind” or “blind person” has been used through my research and justifies itself by the fact that it is the term most current among these people, avoiding characterizing them based on the question of deficiency.”
³Translator’s note: Bond (social, affectionate, friendly etc) or link perhaps best translate the Portuguese/Spanish word vincúlo, however neither quite grasp, perhaps because of other uses and meanings, the rich sense of connection, affection and commitment that vincúlo implies.
⁴ The artists/educators were myself Bernado Zabalaga and Bianca Bernado in collaboration with the coordinator of the Experimental Nucleus of Education & Art operative at Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janerio from September 2010 to May 2013 and the Cognition and Collective Research Group at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.