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

Becoming and aesthetic accessibility: a guided experience with the blind and seeing
Virgínia Kastrup

Let’s together visit the artwork of Ernesto Neto’s oBichoSusPensoNaPaisaGen [TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape], installed in the old Leopoldina train station in the center of Rio de Janeiro. We are a group of 16 comprised of seven with visual deficiency and nine with full eyesight. Some see well, others are blind and others have poor vision. We are a heterogeneous group: people from Benjamin Constant Institute rehabilitation center for the blind, artists, educators, university students and researchers in the area of aesthetic accessibility. The group we have brought together is made up of different experiences — seeing and not seeing, efficiencies and deficiencies, levels of schooling, and familiarity with art. Some have knowledge of the artist’s work, others are connected to music – a composer, an instrumentalist, and a singer –, two participants are blind people of German nationality traveling in Brazil and there is another couple with visual deficiencies of which one, a man, has just returned to Brazil after living in the USA for two years. Some are excited, others just curious, others simply accept our invitation and are present just to see what might happen.

The group from Benjamin Constant arrives by van, together with the interns that are part of my research group on collectivity and cognition at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The group is warmly welcomed at the entrance to the Leopoldina station. For those who see, it’s already possible to make out a gigantic net made out of colored crochet, hung from the roof of the station. We talk about the title of the work: TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape its unusual size, and make our way to a place near the work to talk more.

Experimentation, curiosity and apprehension

We chat more about the work: what it is about, its form and its size. The artist’s assistant engineer explains a bit about the work and its process of creation. We learn that it is 42 meters long, 12 meters wide, hangs five meters from the ground and weighs a little more than a ton. We ask what materials make up this creature? Altogether, it is a ton of grey plastic balls and crisscrossed threads of crocheted cotton. We learn the work took three months to finish and relied on the help of more or less twenty women. Together working collectively, they have given life to this big creature.

To create the mindset and prepare for the guided experience we gather together in a large circle. We distribute various small balls, the same that make up the floor of the structure, and a piece of the material that forms the skin of the big creature. We are close together, all of us, passing along the little balls and the material. It’s fun, as some end up with more balls or take their time in passing them along.

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

Coming closer to the work, the blind people measure the distance that separates the work from the ground with their canes. The tallest of them stretches up trying to hang from the ropes. Suddenly, we begin to hear sounds from the work, coming from the people walking above. Some say it seems like the sound of rainfall, others think that it’s like the crunching sound when stepping on small stones in the street. We all think about this sensation. Someone suggests that the little balls could be raindrops and the floor of the work a kind of black cloud.

We talk about it seeming to be a giant snake flying over us. Flying over something. It seems to bring together, in a paradoxical manner, heaviness and lightness – something in suspension. We remember the title. Someone says that they are afraid of falling, as the work suspended in the landscape, is in fact literally suspended in the air. A young woman with low vision puts forth: “If these ropes break we’ll certainly hit our heads.” The material is fragile, but its entangling makes it strong and able to hold weight. Let’s go into the work? Let’s go there; let’s go together

Entering the work

At the work’s entrance there is a kind of corridor or tunnel, with an inclination. To climb it, we swing from side to side. It’s like an escalator. It is a woven fabric, a web, soon, it is possible to climb securing ourselves by holding on to both sides of the “walls,” so as not to fall. When leaving we sense the difficulty of access. It is necessary to either use our hands in order to climb or go crawling on all fours, like a cat. Several people say that they are feeling a little afraid of falling. “Will we be able to do it?” A blind woman says: “Fear isn’t something that’s in my vocabulary.” Another evokes a kinesthetic corporal memory and says the net reminds her of the slope of her mother’s house. We continue in single file. Laughing, nervous, holding hands.

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

We form couples of the blind and seeing. In one of them, a young blind man, very animatedly, goes without fear to the top of the creature. A young man with full eyesight is much more cautious and discomforted. Other times the situation is reversed. Some go up running, jumping and talking out loud, others walk with more reserved care, facing the experience of entering the work slowly. Pooped out, we have managed the first stage: we are there, inside. Or better, we have entered the outside-inside of the net; it’s not a geometric figure defined by spatial limits separating the interior and exterior. Like a fishing net, what defines the net is its knots. We speak here of closed boundaries, but also of a full openness that could grow on all sides and in all directions.

A halt in movement: time of reverberation, metastability, and becoming-animal

On entering, the change in equilibrium is clear. The floor of the work swings a bit. We have to get used to this. The creature swings. Will it be safe? Walking inside the work, we are sure that we have been dislocated from our normal stable condition. We are experiencing a condition of metastable equilibrium. As Simondon (1989) notes, metastable equilibrium derives from an internal difference in an individuated form that can be understood as a difference of potential. The stabilization of form is momentary and does not abolish metastability. It is not a question here of the tendency toward equilibrium, as conceived in the Theory of Form. The tendency to equilibrium is the principle of the cancelling of forces, whereas the idea of a metastability speaks of a permanent tension, securing the processuality of forms. Neto’s Animal proposes an experience of metastability that, in everyday life, presents itself when we ride a bike or when a child tries to take its first steps. It means an equilibrium that finds itself in movement.

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

In the middle of these corridors, we discover a kind of small room that invites us to stay awhile. We sit in the work. It is not about stopping our movement, but rather a pause in movement. The free associations of each one of us contribute to make up the territory. Bodies lay in the net. Some people take off their shoes and most lay down tranquilly, without fear and without being reminded that we are suspended in the air at the top of a thing that weighs a ton. Nothing is rigid. The work accommodates itself to each body and each body accommodates itself to the work. Nothing has a definite form. We can stop and stay wherever we want. We can perceive that it is a web, as we can now see inside and outside.

We think of other names for the work. Names such as giant earthworm ¹ ,space ship or social network are suggested. We feel like a free group, letting the experience of entering the work wash over us. It reminds us of a hammock, lace, spider’s web, trees, living things. Cells, spiders, cocoons, proliferating. Yes, it’s like proliferating fungi. TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape is micro and macrobiology; both gigantic creature and microscopic critter. It reminds us of a digestive tract.

We experience a de-acceleration, a free time, propitious for reverberations. It’s good to love, chat, think. We can stop and stay. We ourselves are critters there above everything. Who is who? Who is blind and who is seeing? Who knows art? Who knows the work of the artist? Who has already read something about this work? It seems that none of this makes any difference at all. For a few moments the limits of identities become undone to privilege, an encounter bathed in an atmosphere of becomings.

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

It is useful to recall that Deleuze and Guattari (1980) distinguish the concept of becoming from other notions like identification, imitation or metamorphosis. Becoming is not imitation, nor identifying with something or someone. Becoming–animal is not behaving like an animal or any such thing; it is not imitating an animal. The becoming happens via a deterritorialization and ignores already constituted forms, allowing other regimes and other territories to come into the state of being constituted. Becoming is also not to be confused with metamorphosis. It is not a passage of one form to another. Becoming comes from a type of involution, being a movement of dissolution of individuated forms, without being a regression to old forms. What defines becoming is an activity in the molecular, dense and invisible middle-way-point.

What an experience!

Little by little we begin to look for the exit. A few embrace as they find their way out; many are barefoot. “Ah! We did it!” was one expression overheard. “What an experience!” It brings to mind John Dewey’s (1934) ideas of aesthetic experience. For him, aesthetic experience is something that creates a difference in relation to daily routines. Experience is not interrupted by action, as often happens, but it is a consummation of movement, of a process. For this it possesses the possibility of completeness with a beginning, middle and end, culminating in the sensation of the unity of experience. The feeling of unity is relayed by a singular quality that pervades the entire experience despite being comprised of a variation of parts and movements. An aesthetic experience is, at its core, intense and impactful.

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

Let’s move to the place where the group met when they arrived. We start a conversation. A young blind man says he adored it: “I often like to go beyond, climb the mango tree, guava tree, I adored climbing trees. I was searching to see things from another angle.” A young woman remarks: “At the beginning it was really funny, I felt like a child. The work offers many possibilities. It can be many things.” A young man comments: “At the start I didn’t feel safe.” Another retorts: “I was like Spiderman securing his webs.” Another young woman describes the experience as “something ludic, unknown, euphoric.” “Childhood isn’t over, it’s with me.” The young man from Germany with poor vision repeats incessantly, in English, that he adored it. The other young man, also with visual deficiency, who had lived in the USA, chats to him and they exchange impressions, and with the help of translation, share their experiences with the group. As someone with poor vision, he is impressed with the work and the experience of accessibility. “How can I explain this to my German friends?” A woman with poor vision suggests: “It’s enough to take photos.” To which he responds shaking his head: “No, No.” Someone else comments that even though we have the same information about the work, the experience is different for everyone. And often we can’t translate this into words.

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 woman with poor vision lies down on a bag of the plastic balls similar to the one of the creature and stays there for a good while. She seems totally relaxed. One of the group’s mediators passes her hand through the woman’s hair. This touching, intimate scene between a mediator and a visitor would rarely happen at an exhibition. But it happens in that moment. Everything seems, at times, a game, but the work has revealed its strong power of transport.

Before ending, it is important to note two aspects that serve as points of analysis for this guided experience with the blind and seeing, whose goal was to stimulate aesthetic accessibility. The first are the becomings prompted by the work – becoming-animal, above all, but also becoming-child and becoming-imperceptible. A second point of analysis that can be highlighted is the creation of a sense of group that was experienced that afternoon. The intense and unique experience created a curious intimacy between the people that were there. This experience of “groupness” recalls the very collective process of the work’s creation. Both of the two points of analysis refer to the uniqueness of the strategies that were used to create the conditions of access to artworks for people who are unable to see. As Arnheim (1990) asserted, blind people are capable of aesthetic fruition, if the appropriate conditions are created, ones that should go well beyond purely verbal description. By this measure, a multissensorial work like TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape shows itself as being truly rich. On the other hand, the encounter that brought together, the blind and seeing, seemed to have been, for those who could see, an opportunity to think of the power of the invisible in experiencing a work of art.

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

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Referências bibliográficas
Arnheim, R. (1990). Perceptual aspects of art of the blind. In: Journal of aesthetic education, v.24, p. 57-75.
Deleuze, G. e Guattari, F. Mille Plateaux. Paris, Minuit, 1980.
Dewey, J. Art as experience, USA: Penguin Group, 1934.
Renault, L. M. e Barros, M. E. . O problema da análise em pesquisa cartográfica. Fractal – Revista do Departamento de Psicologia da UFF, v.25, n.2, 2013.
Simondon, G. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris, Aubier, 1989

¹ Translator’s note: In Portuguese “minhocão” is a quasi fictitious giant earthworm like creature and used on occasion for constructions that have a worm like shape such as the elevated highway in São Paulo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minhocão_(São_Paulo)