The exhibition From the Human Bone Labyrinth to the Rock Axis by Marcelo Moscheta, presented at the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory, was specifically designed for this space and is based on the artist’s walks, observations, collection of materials, and sound recordings made in Sintra. Following a pedestrian route from the Labyrinth of Quinta da Regaleira to the Rock of Cabo da Roca. Walkings that continued through the museum with the observation of various scientific collections, and thus, Marcelo Moscheta constructed his artistic project, his idea of an exhibition. The works presented are made on slate from the Valongo area, drawn with graphite sticks, and produced in various sizes. Some of these slates still bear traces of fossilized remains of living beings. As if they were traces of memories, “the turn towards memory is subliminally stimulated by the desire to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by increasingly greater instability of time and the fragmentation of lived space.” 1 These drawings, small fragments of the present past, of absent memory. The slates broken by the artist lead us to relief, to the landscape, and carry the memory of written knowledge. Installed on wooden easels, built for this purpose, they project us onto blackboards, and onto the comfort of wood as a material, the affection linked to the coldness of the laboratory’s white and the black of the slate. In contrast to the drawings on slate and the idea of a simulacrum of a rock that occupies the room, inside the fume hood, there is the model of the human bone labyrinth, belonging to the museum’s scientific collections. 2 Bone labyrinth, is the bony and rigid outer wall of the inner ear that is surrounded by the rock. 3 Parallelism with the Labyrinth of Quinta da Regaleira and the rock of Cabo da Roca. Quoting Marcelo Moscheta, “the mystery of these works is the surface, the surface is what determines the value of the image, thinking about the idea of surface that starts from a topographic idea of surface and that leaves the labyrinth to meet the rock. The topographic counterparts of anatomical elements.” Between a bucolic stroll and a contemporary discourse of autonomy associated with his artistic practice, in a certain abstraction of the real, Marcelo Moscheta legitimizes his work.
The idea of the imprinted image and the skin linked to the image, the image that covers the skin, but also arises from the skin. “Let us remember that the skin is a means of communication par excellence, a true interface between inside/outside, a membrane of traffic and exchanges with what we usually call the ‘environment’. It is not, therefore, a mere envelope or packaging.” 4 The layers, the surfaces of the drawings, the images, the skin, are present elements in the exhibition. Continuing to quote the artist, “the cycle of displacements is recreated within the exhibition room, in a cyclical transfer between inside and outside, the familiar and the strange, the body and space.” The exhibition reveals a research that leads to other possibilities of investigation. It is precisely in the materialization of things that thought flows and other paths of research are found. The timelessness and ephemerality of the exhibition are transported to an objective dimension of study, where knowledge is to be shared by all, artists, visitors, and researchers. “Art, intellectual concerns, natural sciences, numerous forms of erudition, flourish very close, in time and space.” 5 Methodological appropriation, the point of intersection, and the self transformation are the core, the creation and construction of these artistic works. Complementing the exhibition, we have a sound piece, a sonic journey that reflects the environment traversed, Marcelo Moscheta’s footsteps, the sound of the labyrinth, the noise of stumbling over stones, the falling rain, the sea, the murmur of people. These are sounds that help us experience this journey circumscribed in thought directed towards the landscape and the problematics of its representation, as Marcelo Moscheta tells us, “the landscape can be found in descriptions of human anatomy - creating what I call internal landscapes, it can be revealed and imagined through elements collected from the natural universe as well as be crossed and experienced in the impressions of a body in transit, through iconographic, literary, and audio reports.” The captivation of the landscape, in small graphite and sound records. This exhibition considers the connection of the artww work with the museum’s science collection, in its authenticity as an artistic and study record. “The authenticity of a thing is the sum of all that from its origin is transmissible in it, from its material duration to its historical testimony.” 6 The experimentalism in the approach to the process of organizing art exhibitions relates to the experimentalism of science and in the exhibition as a form of investigation.
