BEYOND the RIVER BANKS

Vale and Vale Cultural Institute present

For the sake of life on the planet environmental preservation is among the most pressing concerns in today’s world. Throughout history, the relation between humankind and nature has taken various paths. Some of them allow us to renew our gaze and find other perspectives. This is the invitation made by Vale and Vale Cultural Institute to the guests of “The Brazilian Pavilion” at EXPO 2020 DUBAI: to relive the ways taken by different Brazilian communities, registered by great names in photography. The exhibition held during the universal expo in Dubai can now be seen for the first time in Brazil at Memorial Minas Gerais Vale.

In the captured images, water shapes the landscape, gives form to daily lives, and leads creative and resistant ways by perpetuating local and collective knowledges and identities. Water is a constitutive part of the subjects and, therefore, of their their education and culture. Water shapes the ways of living – how people work, dwell, eat, move, rest, party, live and die. Water springs from the seas and rivers, from travelers’ saddlebags and cooks’ pans, from children’s and old people’s tears. The displayed images make up the documentary panorama of those who inhabit the margins and, going beyond them, deepen the basis of what we define as a nation. They are portraits of humankind in the world as protagonists at their daily toil. Have a good visit!

VALE CULTURAL INSTITUTE

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on the LIQUIDITY of the THOUGHT and EXPERIENCE of the COMMON PERSON

Gabriel Gutierrez

(…)

Like everything, the real is thick.

That river is thick and real.

Like an apple is thick.

Like a dog

is thicker than an apple.

As the dog’s blood

is thicker

than the dog itself.

As a man

is thicker

than a dog’s blood.

As a man’s blood

is much thicker

than a man’s dreams.

(…)

João Cabral de Melo Neto,

O Cão Sem Plumas

The thought of the common person, in the world, runs like a river course. The topography and the path are imposed on it. Waterfalls, dams and gaps delimit the field of reflection and practice, which advances along the crystallized riverbed of the absences. Whether calm, after a meander, or turbulent, gushing from the height of the ravine, the river always pushes forward, as it does not know its destination and recognizes the risks of its passage. Liquid, it fills the spaces up to the outline of its banks, establishing the limits of the dry land. Just as the common mindset is also liquid, agglutinating and absorbing what it finds along its way. Even though it is configured by its banks it corrodes them, changing the world around it.

Just as the water finds its path in the experience of its motion, the common people trace out their lives in a forking path between presence and experience, and their thought is presented as an unknown that allows them to encounter the origin of things. This continuous autonomous process suspends the historicist time, as each instant is the opportune moment for originating. The exact time of the thought of common people precedes the writing of history and bends the solidity of that which was registered as official. This does not mean that the common people are outside history, but rather that they define it as a historical agent, as they are prevented in the systematic organization of the world from occupying their place as an actual narrator. João Cabral de Melo Neto ends his poem O Cão Sem Plumas with this certainty, with the inflection point between human life and creation:

Thick,

because the life that

struggles every day

is thicker

(as a bird

that struggles every second

to maintain its flight)

Not everything is given, and the hidden part of existence is connected to the impersonal sphere, of that which has no owner but instead belongs to a whole. For this reason, the common individual is not sufficient alone, and his or her work takes on a greater scale — of the collective, or of the landscape, in their proper measure.

For not being stuck to the field of representations and the accumulation of data, for not knowing its destiny, for not being outside itself in an aerial flight, the popular thought is work.2 It responds to experience with the exercise of reflection, and, in perpetual negation, it folds onto itself to signify the relationship between the individuals in the world, the motion of the creation of knowledge. In this case, being in the world means conceiving the world, conceiving oneself and thinking of oneself in the world. There is no choice: absence is the raw material for the creation of the signs and meanings of the world. The only possibility for self-direction is to consider the gaps and make oneself present — that is, to experience the void and then, based on it, to critically presentify the things. The relationship between the individual, his or her environment and work are the basis of the dialogue between the real and subjectivity. Idea and practice are indissociable, and establish the situation of crisis, which requires decision-making. It is within this sieve that culture originates and thickens.

The river feeds the land. The tree branches and roots dip down into it, and the cattle herds and caravans head to its shores. The common mindset, for being presented as the structure of thought itself, feeds all the great achievements, the great embroideries, the heroic paintings, the magnificent kitchens decked out in fine porcelain. Everything originates in the common people, because they are who do the work. The origin of the things belongs to the hunters, farmers, bricklayers, seamstresses, factory workers,… — it lies in work as an ideal and practical thought of those who move all over the earth, like in the synthesis of the primordial paintings legated to us on cave walls. Thus, culture arises in the exercise of disruptive, unrestrained, irrepressible thought, just as does also the human dimension of life.

Last but not least, the common mindset is tragic, because it knows about death. The relationship between the common person and the world defines him or her as a tragic individual, as each is ambivalently aware of his or her responsibility concerning the world, and of his or her inevitably finite condition. To know death is to know the landscape, the Other, and the self which are present, though not knowing them completely. Like a highwire acrobat, the common person engenders his or her existence on the tightrope: everything below is a precipice — risk, doubt, anxiety and beauty — and the balance needed to arrive to the other side is in each turn of the wheel of the unicycle and in the counterbalance of the small umbrella that would never soften a fall, because whoever is on the tightrope of thought knows that the only reality is the fall, foreshadowed by the weight of anyone who might try some tricky means to cheat it.

BEYOND the RIVER BANKS

The images selected to compose this catalog were first shown at the Brazilian Pavilion, constructed for Expo 2020 in Dubai. Like a manifesto of what we can call essentially Brazilian, from the moment they were captured they all transpire the experience of the common person in his or her existential epopee. Intentionally, the images portray people who live in Brazil. In their day-to-day life, they prepare their meals, they bathe, they celebrate a wide range of symbols and meanings, they commune together. Above all, they establish an original way of life with the landscape. Through abundance or through scarcity, they express in gestures, objects, paths and encounters the impermanence of their thoughts and their physical being — that is, the suspension of the experience that is legated to all those who are to come. As in a prayer, which is always unique for whoever is praying it, they are not images of given facts, but beads on a long rosary that is woven and unwoven, signifying and joining times and spaces.

The perpetual movement, registered by the gaze of the various photographers whose work is featured here — Brazilians from various backgrounds — provide us with a tangible award, allowing us to be reflected in some corner of the countryside, in a body painting, wearing similar clothing, or refreshing ourselves with the water which, although it is ever the same, satisfies our thirst.

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POSSIBLE ARTICULATIONS between EXPERIENCE, TRANSCENDENCE and POETICS

Ubiratã Trindade

The human condition is revealed by our awareness that we are touched, at each and every moment, by the world. This condition produces, organizes and confers authenticity to our subjectivity. The way we relate with others — all the others — is a product of this experience. The place where we live, the landscape that surrounds us, gives us attitudes and is, above all, the womb from which we spring. Tangible experience precedes all elaborated knowledge. Knowledge is the outcome that comes after the direct relationship of our senses with the environment.

The profound relationship with our surroundings is also what confers materiality to the idea of a genesis. We cannot refrain from giving meaning, from creating. Everything is waiting for the triumph of saying something. It is from a symbiotic relationship with the world that we are born. The things form us, they organize our gestures and desires, our way of feeling and responding to different stimuli. Everything depends on where we are, on where we step — and on the density of the materials that our hands reach.

In our experience with the world, with the original materials, we understand from early on the place of divinity. It is always in a violent awakening that these greatnesses devastate us with the perception of their insubordination. Even though small, the desire to know them and control them moves and conditions our existence. Full of meanings, we head off toward what drives us, in a continuous circle dance, as though in a bountiful existence.

With the temperament of the waters, we promise to decipher its mysteries. Touched and moved, in a state of childhood, we dive into experience, without knowledge and open to the new possibilities of feeling and returning. We classify its qualities and heights in order to give a name to the enchanted beings and saints, and we impart to each of them their allotment of power, in order not to displease any of them and to be able to rely on each one as much as necessary.

Devotion is a creative sacrifice, the creation of worlds. It is to hoist a flag, a feather, a bead in the place where life is lacking; it is a sowing of meaning. The art of filling emptiness. We head off for the encounter with happy waters, to end our hurt. We head off to encounter the gods who are drowned and reborn; who are incarnated in animals; those born in never-seen depths and who cry at a certain moon. Or those simply aloof from everything. And these frighten us when we remember them, for a fraction of the time of our stolen distraction, in the games we play in the twilight.

Celebration is devotion — a synthesis elaborated from the entire collective construction founded on the experience that unfolds in creative profusion. It is the act of celebrating that shows us new ways of dealing with the intangible based on what we have. It presents us to the world as unfinished, waiting for the treacherous inventions of everything that intends to be infinite.

Wrapped in the aura of who enters at the exact moment, in the imminence of the end, we carry the body of the universe in a shallow, thin plate, with very little of the skill of acrobats; and, convinced that we can do it, we do not teeter. We get drunk.

The gods are enlivened and much more than protecting, they want to become a part of things. For being so immoderate, they flood and bury the bodies — our bodies — because they overflow from themselves. They consume everything in front of them, because they celebrate like never before. It is always the first time. And even if they leave marks, they ignore them, because they are talking about the present.

Because we are small and fleeting, the dust of clay, we sing to be happy, and we feed them to pacify them for a few moments. In this meantime of eternity, we dance for the great ones, awakening in ourselves some sort of power that removes us from ordinary life. We create the background of beauty.

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the SUBJECT and the LANDSCAPE

Vladimir Bartalini

When we say subject and landscape we already assume a separation: on the one hand, the subject, on the other, the object. The subject is, therefore, the subjectum, the subjacent, that which underlies what lies, which rests on itself. Once the subject as the foundation on which everything rests is established, the things, the beings, the world — in short, everything else which is not that founding subject — is an object.

The landscape would therefore be an object supported on a subject, dependent on him or her. It would also be an object on which the subject exercises an action, an intervention; or an inert and neutral surface on which the subject projects his or her feelings, values and intentions. Eventually, the landscape becomes an object of contemplation, whether in-loco, on a canvas, in a photo, or in a poem.

This interpretation would lead to a hasty reading of the phrase by Fernando Pessoa,1 in the note that precedes Cancioneiro: “The entire state of the soul is a landscape.” If sad, the subject would represent his or her state of soul as a dead lake; if happy, a sunny day. The landscape would therefore be nothing more than the mere projection of the subject’s feelings. A few lines further on, however, after admitting the existence within ourselves of “an inner space where the matter of our physical life is stirred,” the poet assumes that the awareness of this inner space is simultaneous to that of the outer. We thus become aware of two landscapes, an inner and an outer, which are fused and interpenetrate one another, mutually influencing each other: “our state of soul, whatever it may be, suffers a little from the landscape we are seeing […] and, also, the outer landscape suffers from the state of our soul.”

If, instead of separation, we wish to refer to the indissociability between subject and landscape, it would be more fitting to say subject- landscape, without a conjunction, as there is no relation of independence nor of dependence between the terms: subject-landscape, with a hyphen, since this diacritical sign not only joins, but also modifies the value of the terms. We form ourselves and modify ourselves as we form and modify landscapes, and vice versa.

It is easier, however, for us to admit this fusion in the written word than to convince ourselves, through thought, that we are a single whole within the landscape — even though our psyche (or our soul) does not doubt this and even desires this union.

The landscape very well embodies this desire to join what is separated, or what thought (or a certain way of thinking) separated when it instated and deepened the divorce between the subject and the vast world, the scission that the poets (of lines, of light, of colors, of sounds, of movement, of material, and of words) and the thinkers/poets strive to knit up.

Man’s unity with the world takes place at the level of his own body and “appears in our desires, in our evaluations, in our landscape.”2 “It is not that men exist and space exists beyond them. Space is not something that is opposed to man; it is not an outer object nor an inner experience.” 3 We are, simply, here.

When it comes to landscape, however, “being here” does not mean being stuck to some single place. The landscape always implies a horizon, a beyond, an opening to the world and a constant gliding which never stays put. In this sense, the landscape is an exile to which we are led at each displacement. Perhaps this is what Agamben4 refers to when he says that the landscape is unappropriatable, just like the body and the tongue.

The landscape is unappropriatable not for being distant, outside the reach of our hands, but for being too close, too intimate with me, because it constitutes me, just as my body constitutes me, without my being able to break away from it since it imposes a necessity on me that did not arise from my own deliberation. My body thus becomes strange to me, preventing the clear distinction between “the voluntary and the involuntary, the self and the strange, the conscious and the unconscious.”5 The same thing takes place in the poetic gesture, when the tongue, dominated and made a stranger by the writer him- or herself, begins to be a stranger to itself, dominating him.

The landscape is therefore familiar and strange to us at the same time, since, for being so intimate, we yield ourselves to it and are lost within it.

The landscape dwells in us like a fluid, pervading all through us (landscape painting proves this with the vastnesses of the water and sky). But ParaAlemDasMargens- it is not just an environment, it is not part of the “natural environment.” Insofar as it constitutes us as subjects, it touches and moves us; it confuses and shelters us; it rests, it endures; it underlies.

The sea is a fitting example of this fusion. It impregnates the entire atmosphere, it announces its presence in the still distant mangroves, in the sprawling sugarcane fields, it adds its salt to the molasses. Like sugarcane rum, it inebriated the boy Joaquim Nabuco: “Further away, the mangroves began, which stretched right up to the Nazaré coast… During the day, through the heat, I dosed in a siesta, breathing the aroma that spread everywhere, from the large boilers where the molasses was cooking.”6 Since his early childhood, it left marks that were definitively imprinted on the experiences of the adult man: “I have often crossed the ocean, but I don’t want to remember it, it is always in front of my eyes, instantaneously standing still, the first wave that swelled before me, green and transparent like an emerald folding screen, one day when, crossing through a sprawling coconut grove behind the shanties of the fishermen, I came upon the seashore and had the sudden, thundering revela ion of a moving, liquid land… It was that wave, fixed on the most sensitive film of my childhood Kodak, which wound up being my eternal snapshot of the sea.”7

The presence of the sea is absolute, it fuses the bodies, the things, it confounds reason: “old pavings foggy with tropical humidity. Steps going down to the black sand; with papers, trash. The silence like in the cities of the North. Young people are there wearing flesh-colored jeans and dirty white knit shirts that cling to their skin, as they walk along the balustrade — like Algerians condemned to death. And the sound of the sea, which does not allow one to think…”8

In Chinese tradition, one of the ways to say “landscape” is shanshui, a mountain of water, constancy and movement, resistance and subjection. But who is the subject-agent: the mountain that is opposed to the water, or the water that models it, which conforms it while being conformed by it? Water, even the most crystalline water, is murky with distinctions. It is the universal solvent, and the ocean, the destiny of the waters, is the resting place of the beings in vertigo, who have “the destiny of the water that flows.”9

Immersed in the landscape, the subject no longer commands the action, he or she merely acquiesces, serenely. When it suspends thought, the landscape, especially the aquatic one, modifies not only the subject, but also his or her qualities: it sweetens the ocean. “…That is how this immensity drowns thought: and my shipwreck is sweet in this sea,” say the lines of Leopardi in L‘Infinito.10

“It is sweet to die in the sea,”11 echoes Caymmi from another shore of the Atlantic.

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1. Fernando Pessoa. Obra poética. Edited, introduction and notes by Maria Aliete Galhoz. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar S.A., 2005, p. 101.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Fenomenologia da percepção. Translated by Carlos Alberto Ribeiro de Moura. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999, p. 16.
3. Martin Heidegger. “Construir, habitar, pensar.” Translated by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Ensaios e conferências. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes; Bragança Paulista: Editora Universitária São Francisco, 2006, p. 136.
4. Giorgio Agamben. O uso dos corpos. Translated by Selvino J. Assmann. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018.
5. Ibid, p. 109.
6. Joaquim Nabuco. “Massangana,” Minha formação. São Paulo: W.M. Jackson Inc. Editores, 1948, p. 228.
7. Ibid, p. 230.
8. Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Beira-mar. Luzes brancas, esmagadas.” Poemas. Translated by de Maurício Santana Dias. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015, p. 181.
9. Gaston Bachelard. A água e os sonhos. Ensaio sobre a imaginação da matéria. Translated by Antonio de Pádua Danesi. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2002, pp. 6–7.
10. Giacomo Leopardi. L’Infinito (1819–1821). Translated to Portuguese by Haroldo de Campos (translated here into English by the editors).
11. Dorival Caymmi. Suíte do pescador (1957).