Papel Pinel visiting Ernesto Neto’s installation TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape. Leopoldina station, Rio de Janeiro, October 11th, 2012. Photo: Anita Sobar

The body of memories: affective bonds stitched in the time we are together. Papel Pinel visits oBichoSusPensoNaPaisaGen [TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape]
Bianca Bernardo

Hi, great to see you; welcome, my name is Bianca Bernardo. I am really happy that you’re here. Almost everyone came. How was your trip? Do you recognize this place? Let’s walk a little? We are in an old train station. The skeleton of its monumental architecture is apparent. Support beams unveil drawings of subtle forms, dancing shadows at sunset. It’s beautiful here. Don’t you think? I remember catching the train here, but it’s a long time ago, really long. In fact, whenever my thoughts bring to mind the image of the old Leopoldina station I feel the brush of dust in gentle whispers of abandonment.

Off the top of my head, I try to count the years gone by. The distance of time is measured with every centimeter of iron and marble, transporting the body to that other city that exists beneath my feet — the city that grows over the city, at once unaware of and recognizing itself in the multiple layers of occupation and organization of public spaces.

I’m standing in the doorway, waiting for the group. For some reason, all this information flows through my body of memories. Outside, the landscape is barren, gray. Perhaps, it was not always so. Before the scrapping of public transportation that existed in the Rio de Janeiro of the past, the Leopoldina train station throbbed as the central heart of the railway connecting different parts of the city.

Nonetheless, there are always areas of the city that are planned to be eminently in and out of place: designated spaces for social exclusion, where certain groups of individuals are understood in this way, and inevitably condemned as such. Among invisible bridges, asylums maintained by the homogenizing discourse of madness and its distinction from authorized normative standards of the sensible, and the scrapping of the railway as a result of territory targeted by capitalist speculative interests, go hand in hand. How can we overcome the biased, oppressive control system to ensure the transformation and survival of our subjectivity?

A gentle breeze kisses my face as I think to myself quietly. Beautiful day to meet friends. The encounter, like all of us, tells a story.¹

Papel Pinel’s visit actually began more than a year before, on the day we first met. We were sitting at a table, choosing new partners for IrradiAções (“irradiating actions”), one of the ongoing programs of the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.² Among the options, I chose the challenge of working with Papel Pinel, a project fostering citizenship and income generating opportunities within the mental health institution, Philippe Pinel Institute.³ As an ongoing program, the proposal for the IrradiAções was to plan for a series of encounters between the partner institution and MAM.

Over the course of a year, we alternated encounters at each institution, building an intimate relationship with the museum, while positing a reinvention of belonging to the mental health service of which the group were users.

For the first time, I passed the gate of the hospital. Where does madness spill over into the city? Where does the city hide madness? I saw some people in the sun crossing the small courtyard. They wore uniforms; their skin was as worn as old tree bark. Like the marks that lovers leave when writing their names, each one anonymous with sad and vacant eyes in search of life; I saw many corpses.

That first big building on your right, almost at the end of the hallway you will find the room. Dr Esther, the project coordinator, was the one who presented the group. On that day we talked a bit about what I was doing there; nothing was for sure, only the desire I had for us to get to know each other, to awaken a common interest in spending time together — for a gesture of affection opens many places within us.

I’m at the door, waiting for the group to arrive. A fundamental question, one that aims, not only to tear away the exercise of mediation from conservative notions about this activity in exhibition spaces — inside and outside of museums — that, in general, have a conception of mediation as a service of mere interpretation, encoding works of art in repetitive, institutionalized speeches, often pre-stipulated by curators, but also one that acts as my guide in this text spurred by the desire to speak of the experience itself: how do we define the Art experience? Where does the place of reception begin? How do we read between the lines of a little essay that hopes to catalyze the potential of mediation as activation and provocation? Where does the body of our memories begin and in what ways do we carry memories from one experience to another?

I am interested in thinking about where the context of reception meets a creative dimension – in order to think about, practice and expand the processes of the production of subjectivities and of the very encounter with Art.

Lia, Sami, Daniel, Elise, Carol, John Batista, Ricardo, Esther. I am very glad that you are here. Almost everyone came. How was your journey? Have you ever been to this place? What is it? There’s something new; this was not here before. How might our eyes describe it? A large structure with crocheted colored strings crisscrosses the space of the old station and hangs in the air. After a tour around the work, we find a possible entrance. We take off our shoes, store our purses and backpacks.

Lia looks at me and in her eyes I see that she feels a little afraid of the challenge of climbing that giant structure. Let’s go Lia; be brave. We’ll go up crawling like babies on all fours and when we feel safe, we will stand. Slowly, holding ourselves up by the soft walls of the work, one after the other, the great tongue-like path of the animal susPensive swallows us hole. I think it looks like a tree house, or maybe it’s a labyrinth? A spaceship, the interior of an animal, cells, molecules? That Japanese artist that we visited a while back, was also very interesting. We remember our childhood, the houses of our childhood, when one jumped the fence to steal fruit, or to hide away and flirt. How to see again as a child the adult world, feel free to let go and play, laugh, curl up and sleep, sing, listen to and tell stories … Inside Neto’s work we inhabit the landscape; we are the landscape. Bianca, we could spend the whole day here. We look for people who are beneath us. How do you feel? Very good, comfortable. I was a bit afraid but that’s passed. Vertigo? Not much.

As children, we discover the places of memory like empty houses. Through the encounter, the experience of our creative dimension happens between the nets constructed by us (and by the knots) of memories.⁴ Through varied metaphors, memory, as an activity of psychic life, is defined by Freud in terms of the apparatus, emphasizing ideas of the capturing device, of transmission and of the transformation of energy. This psychic apparatus has value as model, as fiction. Drawing on these theoretical proposals, the psychic apparatus expresses itself as open to the possibilities of new meanings, making it possible to create poetic thought about artistic proposals in the context of reception.

Consider memory as the relation that enables, from each new encounter, the reinvention of individual or collective history through the different meanings manifested in each relation. “It opens the possibility that memory, rather than being recovered or redeemed, may be created and recreated,” writes Jô Gondar, “from the new meanings that are constantly produced both for individual and collective subjects — since they are all social subjects.”⁵

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¹Translator’s note: In Portuguese “como todos nós” means “like all of us.” But here as “nós” also means “knots,” in this sense the “us” here also suggests the encounter-human being-knot as synonymous referring to the individual “knots” (nós) of the crocheted nets of Neto’s TheAnimalSusPensiveOntheLandGenscape
²http://www.nucleoexperimental.wordpress.com
³http://www.sms.rio.rj.gov.br/pinel/media/pinel_papel_pinel.htm
⁴Translator’s note: As noted previously nós in Portuguese means “us” but also knots – in this sense the “we/us” created by the encounter also reflect the “knots” (nós) of the crocheted nets.
⁵Jo Gondar. “Quatro Proposicões Sobre Memória Social.” http://www.scribd.com/doc/37483519/GONDAR-Jo-Quatro-Proposicoes-Sobre-Memoria-Social