“(…) from the depths of the opaque I write, reconstructing the map of a sun that is nothing more than an unverifiable axiom for the calculations of memory, the geometrical place of the self, of a myself that the myself needs to know myself, the self that only serves so that the world continually receives news of the existence of the world, a device that the world has at its disposal to know if it exists.” Italo Calvino. From the Opaque in The Way of San Giovanni. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.
A notebook, a GPS and a camera are the three fundamental elements for the artist Marcelo Moscheta – with whom I chatted last Sunday (07) – in his travels around the world. Usually passing through inhospitable places, the Paraná native has already embarked on solitary and immersive expeditions from the Brazil-Uruguay border to the Arctic, from the Atacama Desert to the margins of the Tietê River. Moscheta seeks to be in uninviting places that provoke some discomfort, but that point to some survival instinct, immersing himself in an existential journey through the landscape, far from the noise and immersed in the depths of time. “What is existence compared to this world?” he asks me.
I don’t know… But for him, existence involves having these explorer roots in his work, in the search for intense contact with his soul and spirit. “Isolated” on each trip, without disconnecting from the world. “There is a question of documenting the experience so that it can be better thought about and decanted in the studio space. “These trips are very much about creating a diary, feeding myself with the history of overcoming man and the environment, geology and topography, in an attempt to understand it all. Little scientific projects alongside artistic ones, walking together in this way of trying to translate the man-world experience. In science there is an illusory “precise” knowledge of space. “This overly assertive knowledge of the world is an idea and not reality.”
GPS devices (Moscheta has been voluntarily tracked by them since 2007) can somehow bring to his work a precise displacement, with his body functioning as a pencil in the trajectories of each territory, in the representation of space, reinforcing these layers of rational and sensitive understanding of the world.
“Maps are graphic notes of experiences to be remembered. Unmapped land is unowned land.” Lucy Lippard, “Overlay,” The New Press, 1983.
From his travels, from the pieces of Earth that he temporarily inhabited and explored with the expansion of time and feeling, Moscheta carries a stone, a branch, a plant, a piece of dust. All these souvenir elements of the space he lived in that he takes from a trip to his studio in Campinas are inexhaustible sources of inspiration.
His works are rarely executed “in loco”. They go through the necessary maturation process to become works and leave his sketchbook and transform. Sometimes they come directed to participate in a work, other times as an aid to recovering memory, as a creative trigger, or simply accumulated and catalogued there. Yes, because whenever he arrives from a destination, he labels, catalogues and stores all the pieces as if in an archive of the Earth, a museum of the planet.
Carrying pieces of the world is to apprehend the territories, interconnecting them in the studio, creating cartographies in each piece of his creative space. The eyes carry emotions, colors and textures. Matter is solid. Real. Present. Tangible and encourages and rescues what has already been forgotten and what can be created. Moving natural elements, crossing borders, without limits, is allowing new meanings to the elements and to those around them.
As a way of cataloging some concepts, I asked the artist about some key words in his work:
Horizon: the possibility of encounter, the line that balances the world.
Territory: field of action, place of infinite and particular conflicts.
Earth: is belonging, we came from dust and to it we will return.
Border: is the limit of identity.
The son of a botanist and a craftswoman, linking scientific information to his work is something that is common. There is a search to decompose the landscape in a certain way, by grabbing these elements and reclassifying them to the limit of this poetic.
Just like nature, his processes go through cycles with a beginning, middle and end. Explore, discover, dive, recreate and bury. “It’s not me who determines the end of the cycles, it’s them, the stones, the elements. There’s a certain idea of exhaustion of the poetics of the object.”
These are territorial and personal boundaries that he crosses with each project. Ever since he was still in Maringá, where he lived with his parents, he felt the need to loosen the edges of this home territory, in a desire to cross the world, history, geography. In fact, his steps crossed borders, landscapes, histories and geographies, as he always wanted, with everything recorded by GPS (or Zuckerberg) and who knows who else.
Moschetta explores the landscape, lands on the ground of each journey, taking in everything around him, respecting the time needed to sharpen his gaze and feelings, eliminating anxiety and pre-established images prior to the experience.
The experience was almost always in Marcelo's absent body. But this has been changing and being questioned in his works since 2015, when he did a residency in Italy and acted directly and manually on the object to transform it into the work. Moschetta took the stones from the slopes of a river where a battle supposedly took place in 208 BC, hitting them against each other and, with the fragments, created acts I-V of the Trauma series. In this process, his body acts on the landscape. The dry cut in the stones, the acceleration, the breakage, the rupture, the trauma, were only possible with the artist as a fundamental agent of this transformation. What is the body in the work? The action of man on an element of nature makes it art, an artifact. Moscheta, who films his entire process in a kind of performance, wonders if the recording would not be an essential part of the work. Certainly.
He, who has always inhabited a planet that did not yet exist or an Earth that collapsed, begins to think about what body it is that travels and inhabits the landscape. Before, it seemed like a very abstract, generalized body. Now there is a desire to delve deeper into the idea of the landscape inhabited by other beings, by humanity, by people. Where does the Earth begin and where does the Self end? (Planalto Central, Year Zero)
The solid and the paths invented in the desert or at the North Pole, where getting lost is part of the experience, are gradually giving way to the fluid, to the path already traced by the waters of the rivers. Unlike the wandering and permanent nomadism of the thousand possibilities of traveling the earth, the river already exists, there is no way to create a new dotting. This path predates our existence. It is another being.
Moschetta explores the landscape, lands on the ground of each journey, taking in everything around him, respecting the time needed to sharpen his gaze and feelings, eliminating anxiety and pre-established images prior to the experience.
The experience was almost always in Marcelo's absent body. But this has been changing and being questioned in his works since 2015, when he did a residency in Italy and acted directly and manually on the object to transform it into the work. Moschetta took the stones from the slopes of a river where a battle supposedly took place in 208 BC, hitting them against each other and, with the fragments, created acts I-V of the Trauma series. In this process, his body acts on the landscape. The dry cut in the stones, the acceleration, the breakage, the rupture, the trauma, were only possible with the artist as a fundamental agent of this transformation. What is the body in the work? The action of man on an element of nature makes it art, an artifact. Moscheta, who films his entire process in a kind of performance, wonders if the recording would not be an essential part of the work. Certainly.
He, who has always inhabited a planet that did not yet exist or an Earth that collapsed, begins to think about what body it is that travels and inhabits the landscape. Before, it seemed like a very abstract, generalized body. Now there is a desire to delve deeper into the idea of the landscape inhabited by other beings, by humanity, by people. Where does the Earth begin and where does the Self end? (Planalto Central, Year Zero)
The solid and the paths invented in the desert or at the North Pole, where getting lost is part of the experience, are giving way to the fluid, to the path already traced by the waters of the rivers. Unlike the wandering and permanent nomadism of the thousand possibilities of traveling the earth, the river already exists, there is no way to create a new dotting. This path predates our existence. It is another being.
text for the blog entretempos. Folha de São Paulo
