CONCERT FOR ARACHNE
2014
REDISCOVERED TIME
With Concerto para Aracne (2013), Gabriela Noujaim creates a memorable closure for the period of his residence in the Nômade project, in studio 2 and 1. In crossed paths from the studio, in Água Branca, to a somewhat retro modernist building in Higienópolis, and also to the apartment where he lived in the central region, on Nestor Pestana street , the experience in São Paulo generated relevant frictions in his work.
We can attest that the carioca artist has in the reenactment and overlapping of times some of the main poetic vectors. The Concerto para Aracne video has both characteristics. The blindfolded pianist, who strums the imaginary keyboards of the piano that actually sits in the lobby of the building, playing from memory a composition of his own authorship, is part of an action and image that presents something of uselessness and mismatch. Katz Rochlitz always seems to be behind the sound record. His performance is somewhat disjointed. The audiovisual capture is impeccable, but it seems to mask something. The perfect and desired synchrony between the times is an impossibility.
As Fiandeiras (2013), a video installation that served as a 'final proof' of the deepening program of Parque Lage, Rio, attended by Noujaim, is also an audiovisual piece in which rhythms, performances, places and times are connected in a somewhat rigid way and in tom mambembe. The precariousness of current work, reinvention of the original canvas by Velázquez (1599-1660) _ The Fiandeiras is a key painting of modernity, dated 1657 and still little remembered in the history of current art _, initially exhibited by the carioca in the heart of the institution's Noble Hall, patent.
Noujaim, however, exposes a more sophisticated and less satirical ironic speech in Concerto para Aracne. As is known, the story of Aracne comes from Greek mythology and carries the challenge, pride and envy present in the relations between men and gods. Athena punishes, in different versions, the mortal Aracne for the empathy declared on the refined embroidery she weaves, objects so perfect that they would cause jealousy to the gods.
Concert... highlights the thin use of an action, but not only through its protagonist.
The place where such reenactment takes place is a place of particular interest within São Paulo's rampant urban development. In the center of Higienópolis, the Bretagne building - as well as Cinderela and Parque das Hortênsias, among others, signed by the same author - is today one of the most popular architectural plans in São Paulo. Its apartments are envied residences within the rich housing fabric of the neighborhood. Artacho Jurado (1907-1983), however, came to be ridiculed by names like Artigas and Corona at the time of launching such projects. With praised living areas, garden terraces and unusual shapes, the buildings of Jurado, in the
over time, they lost their public scope and succumbed to more immediate private interests. Thus, lobbies, bars and club areas nowadays become eroded structures _ although well-maintained, almost a contradiction _, living monuments that denote the failure of collective utopias and less individualistic attitudes. The ‘how to live together’ is less important than the equity data. Vintage furniture boasts a dusty originality, with empty seats and sounds of keyboards creaking against the wood. Pilotis and glazed plans no longer talk about public and private, but about current fears and enclosures among the wealthier.
The national project _ symbolized by its own architecture and resonance abroad, so typical of the 50s, even if by the ‘crooked’ routes of Jurado sketches _, then, has more to do now with the spectacularization of specific and globalized events.
In these liquid times, therefore, Gabriela Noujaim comments, through works such as Concerto para Aracne, malaise and failures diluted in daily life, but which appear strongly in constant interruptions. His melancholy goes through blind interpretations, almost conflicting choreographies _ the Tempo Nu (2012) video is exemplary in this sense _, actions that have everything not to break out _ as evoked by the charcoal resting on the ring of Toque Mais Alto (2007). The sensory windows produced by the artist move, it would not be otherwise, in the midst of the unstable, but probably far from definitive whereabouts.
Mario Gioia, May 2013
* Thanks to the artist, Douglas de Freitas and Carolina Paz for interlocution in the whole process
Concert for Arachne | 2014
Video, 3"
Edition of 5 copies
Work by Gabriela Noujaim and music composition by Katz Rochlitz,
result from the course at “ateliê 2e1”, São Paulo
DISCLOSURE
