Group experiencing Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Documentation by students in the photography course at Spectaculu – School of Art and Technology. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 26th, 2012. Photo: Lidi Cutrim and Kelly Malheiros. In partnership with Spectaculu
Pearl Driver
Anita Sobar
This text seeks to reflect on the context of art as a discursive space for the creative realization of the act of educating, where the experience with the work of art is not limited to the field of art, but is also a tool to understand the world, and– as an artist’s pedagogic project that provokes new forms–is inspired by the observation of digressions that break away from fixed contours.
A collection of experience as a work of art
Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface […]
[I]n the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living […]Hanna Arendt1
Inspired by Ernesto Neto’s TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape, the idea behind our project was to develop a series of actions in dialogue with the artwork and with the architecture of the old Leopoldina train station where the work was installed in order to provoke processes of subjectivation, engaging the public to deepen their experience of the artwork and the city.2
The installation plays a central role in this negotiation, where the penetrable structure welcomes the spectator as the central element of the work, the meaning of the work. In its interior the visitor walks, balances, curls up the body; the aesthetic experience of the creature that we are not opens up the frontiers of what is particular to art and what might be the walk of life itself.
Students from Spectaculu, School of Art and Technology visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 19th, 2012. Photo: Anita Sobar
Does this work give or take away my possibility to exist?
Does the space-time suggested by this work, with the laws that govern it, correspond to my aspirations in life?
Does it criticize what I see as criticizeable?
In reality could I live in the correspondent space-time of the work?
The goal of each action was to create a poetic territory to generate reflective dialogues — with oneself and the world — to collect pearls and expand the reach of the creature in the landscape.
The group in question was made up of young students and alumni of Spectaculu – School of Theatrical Production, an NGO created in 2000 by Gringo Cardia in Cais do Porto (Quayside) of Rio de Janerio, which brings together young people from over 90 communities situated in the outskirts of the city.
Sixty young people were involved in the project — students of art and technology, students of theatrical arts and former students who had graduated from different courses offered by the school that, at the time, were acting as monitors of the installation as well as playing the daily role of mediator with visitors
I took off my shoes, started to climb. Immediately, I was discomforted by the feel of the heavy cotton string on the soles of my feet, a sensation of vertigo to be standing on unstable territory, estrangement, fear — my curiosity made me move on. I could see the work reacting to my body. We were exchanging experiences, responding to each other. So the bug got me. I could feel in it the potentiality between art and life.
Beatrice Martins, student of marketing
Action I: Body / work – sculpture as collective living structure
The installation was an occasion for a sensory experience based on the exchange of the body of the spectator with the body of work in suspended space-time. The idea was to challenge the anthropomorphic character of the work and create a map of the symbiosis between art and life.
The group collectively experienced and shared the work. Afterwards we attributed human characteristics to the work and created one body from the associations in which every young person responded with the body movement of the other, creating an organic choreography.
Where the individual is not merely a spectator, but part of the work as a whole that is collective. If art’s necessity is to help us better understand life, it is only fair then that we become the art.
Lucas Reis, student of photography
The body is art and art has a body. It is essential to think of this work as if it were the human body and to see it as a metaphor of relationships and emotions. Interaction is our dynamic of exchange with the other. It is interacting with another person: leave a little of myself and take a little of the other.
Ivy de Souza, aa student of the photography course
In the creative flow, the group embraced and advanced the work beyond its boundaries, questioning its limits and seeing the process as an existential learning.
RGroup experiencing Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Documentation by students in the photography course at Spectaculu – School of Art and Technology. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 26th, 2012. Photos: Kelly Malheiros/ Lidi Cutrim. In partnership with Spectaculu
Action II: Continuity of the surface – inside and outside mobility
Human marks were embedded within the formal elements of the sculpture along with the need for the bodies’ physical proximity for it to acquire meaning — the viewer became the extension, continuity of volume, surface, and implicit conception of the work.
Drawing on things that the body withstands as part of life’s daily flux, we gave the artwork continuity outside its bounds by orchestrating confrontations between different forces, using concepts that could be readily linked to the work, such as bending, accumulation of emptiness, grouping, density, elasticity, randomness, weight, recoil, resistance, tension and isolation.
The process was a poetic attempt to create a chorus of demands — political protests based on metaphors.
The idea of the artist made us reflect on what is around us, large urban buildings that make up our city – how far can I go and to what city do I belong?
Laís Miranda, student of visual marketing
The life we live — routine imprisons us, the artwork creates a new opportunity, a new reality criticizes the common and the comfortable – provoking us.
Guilherme Pinheiro, astudent of photography
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold refers to the co-existential aspect of inside and outside, as well as a pattern between the flows and forms that stretch across particular historical planes and that belong to the order of the event. Such considerations prompted us to observe digressions that broke away from fixed contours, such as the concept of the nomad, proposed by Deleuze. Nomadic thought considers the event as something that causes dis-accommodation and produces, or constitutes, itself in the mobility of thought itself.
Students from Spectaculu, School of Art and Technology visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 19th, 2012. Photos: Anita Sobar
Action III: The man is nothing more than a breath of air
Group experiencing Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Documentation by students in the photography course at Spectaculu – School of Art and Technology. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 26th, 2012. Photos: Lidi Cutrim. In partnership with Spectaculu
The work of artist Ernesto Neto lended itself well to a relationship of exteriority, where it is perceived only as shape and volume, as a relationship of interactivity. The idea was to give shape to the uniqueness of the experience and share.
Man is but a breath of air.
And the stretch of his years is short and fragile.
It is up to us…
Wisely, to use pleasure to beautify,
the most that we can, our moments.3
After experiencing the work, with caution, we wrote down on a piece of paper a dream that we had thought of while inside and put it into a collective drum – this breath of hope gave form to the sculpture. The intention was to leave the train station and share the dreams with passersby. Provoke, storm and propose other readings to free them from the world around them.
Group experiencing Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Documentation by students in the photography course at Spectaculu – School of Art and Technology. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 26th, 2012. Photos: Lidi Cutrim. In partnership with Spectaculu
For Ernst Bloch, the present is a kind of blind spot and the idea of utopia is sustained by the dreams that propel us; it does not point to the now but searches for the authentic present:
Man is that which still has much before it. He is repeatedly transformed in this work and by it. He repeatedly stands ahead on frontiers which are no longer such because he perceives them, he ventures beyond them.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol 14
And learning, as art, sustains the dream forward. In Pedagogy of Freedom, Paulo Freire suggests that teaching requires aesthetics and ethics — decency and prettiness go hand in hand5. An ethical education often goes alongside an aesthetic one. We are socio-historical beings, and we are able to compare, to value, to intervene, to choose, to break – and we only are because we’re in the process of being.
A collection of experiences as a work of art
The actions were anchored in the idea that art is a means to apprehend and simultaneously reinvent reality. We live in a world of many conflicts that requires us to follow norms of sociability all the time. The “Pearl Diver” project aimed to disrupt habitual ways of being and to make of art’s social and spatial context a means for multiple reverberations, placing the subject in touch with ways of thinking and doing beyond consensus.
Group experiencing Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Documentation by students in the photography course at Spectaculu – School of Art and Technology. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, September 26th, 2012. Photos: Kelly Malheiros. In partnership with Spectaculu
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1 Arendt, Hanna. Homens em Tempos Sombrios. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008, p. 312. English Version: Men in Dark Times. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” Mariner Books, 1970, p. 205- 206.
2Translator’s note: The title of the artwork in Portuguese is Bicho Suspenso na Paisagem and is translated as TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Bicho can mean creature, critter or bug. In various translations, specifically with Brazilian artist’s Lygia Clark’s usage of bicho, the term is translated as “critter” which is mostly maintained throughout here, specifically when referring to the artwork itself. On other occasions where the author seems to want to draw on different meanings, the terms creature and bug have been used.
3Author’s poem.
4Ernst Bloch. O princípio esperança: Volume 1. Trans. Nelio Schneider. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2005 p.243. English Version: Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope. Vol 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996 (First published in Germany 1959) p. 246.
5Paulo Freire. Pedagogia de Autonomia. São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 1997. p.45.
