Hy-Brasil is a ghost island, present
in Irish mythology. It was said that the island
was constantly shrouded in fog, except
for one day every seven years, when
became visible, even though it remained
unreachable.
Relations of territorial, geographic and cultural belonging occupy a central space in Eduardo Hargreaves' creative process. The visual artist from Minas Gerais uses drawings, objects, animations, video performances and installations to reflect how the subjectivities resulting from the processes of colonialism and neocolonialism interfere in the construction of the space and place of the individual himself, as well as that of a people and a nation.
The set of works that make up the Brasil, Hy-Brasil exhibition transgresses cartographic conventions to present a territory in perennial construction and deconstruction, rhizomatic, which challenges us to reconsider it thanks to the presence of the arbitrary as a terrain for sharing the sensitive. The fluidity present in Hargreaves' images highlights the denial as a result of exploratory and extractive (re)actions that, little by little, consume landscapes, reliefs and an entire affective geography.
Railway sleepers that once witnessed the transport of these places in the avid search for development, support images in the exhibition space extended like flags, demanding our involvement in order to cross the different layers of the mountains of mines that surround and guide our daily lives to (r)establish a true dialogue with the symbolic and blatant strength of the mountains of Minas.
A labyrinth of images is offered to the gaze –– a sensitive extension of the realm of vision, where the appearance of elements is the object of a constant duality between what we can and cannot recognize. However, with the intention of making what flows far away exist close to him, Hargreaves does not shy away from a confrontation with disappointment. Through a Godardian construction, he travels through the rooms of the cold thing also called memory and, daring to cross the walls of this space where infinity lives, in the desire to glimpse its dissolution, he reaches new landscapes. In this process, there are no coincidences between the location of a territory whose map we consult and the mental image that appears to us, inordinately, at the call of its name as a sediment deposited in our memory.
Aware of the power of photography to preserve and consolidate memories and fragments, because “when it comes to remembering, photography hurts deeper”¹, Hargreaves' work also reflects on the traumas of vision. If the portrait fulfills the duty of keeping alive those who are no longer present, the installation "Comunhão" (Communion) denies us the image as a trigger and axis of these perceptions. When focusing on this attempt, the viewer is faced with a double denial –– of vision and memory. Thus, the artist forces us to give in to keep the non-images alive, urging us to construct a possible meaning, to give them a place, to construct an identity for them based on the emptiness they make clear in their absence.
The border between the concrete, public non-landscape and the abstract, private landscape is constantly changing in Hargreaves' work. In this interstitial space, creativity enters. The refined chromaticity and viscerality of the artist's lines build an impressive emotional topography, an open door towards creative and sensitive imagination. In the contemporary landscape, often reduced to a repository of lives and memories camouflaged under a non-landscape, the Brasil, Hy-Brasil exhibition encourages us to a proxemic trajectory relationship and also suggests the need to reconstruct a sensitive cartography in the face of the horror of landscape that surrounds us.
Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
