For those who want to come undone, I create the pier
I create more than what loneliness gives me
I create a new moon brightening up
I create love and I know it hurts to let go
I wanted to be happy
I create the sea
I create the dreamer in me
Cais – Ronaldo Bastos and Milton Nascimento
Laura Belém’s exhibition “I Create the Sea” (“Invento o Mar”) is anchored in and adrift from the music of Clube da Esquina. After living in São Paulo for a while, Belém moved back to “the sea of mountains” of her hometown of Belo Horizonte, where her contact with the surroundings and everything there is in the local biome and presence has led her to engage in a dimension she was already pursuing in her work. Now, she reaches a crucial place with experiences and choreographies with the landscape, moving the human away from the center and welcoming cosmologies that do not separate culture from nature.
The book “The Falling Sky,” by David Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, shows that many of today’s illnesses are the result of the exploitation and destruction of the ecosystem. Laura Belém captures the ethics at play by turning her gaze to the sky, to the flight of birds, to “dancing” with other living beings of the biosphere and listening to the messages that can lead us to healing. The sea the artist creates invites us to dive into a poetics that contemplates the mystery of things – plants, mountains, the earth – and dodges the vicious anthropocentrism that undermines nature’s otherness. Other times and processes house leaves, ore, clay, rocks, paper, wood, gold, and formal elements that, combined, hold ambivalences and enigmas.
Laura Belém’s return marks a kind of “Praise of Hands,” like the title of the book by Henri Focillon in which he describes the hand as “a curved surface traced with veins and arteries, and rounded at the edges, [that] links the wrist with the fingers, masking their hidden structure.” The French art historian sees creation in the hand’s active life, as “it can stretch and stiffen. Quite as easily it can shape itself around an object.” And it is the artist herself here who reveals the magnitude of the gesture, the central presence of the hands: “The work became less about designing a project and more hands-on and experimental, yet not less installation- and space-driven. The engagement with the landscape, nature, and matter has also become more apparent.”
Her work encompasses languages including installation and sculpture, moving across audio recordings, photography, and drawing. The exhibition “I Create the Sea” features many new pieces and is outlined as an investigation in the fields of sculpture and expanded drawing, also incorporating visual poetry and sound art. It is truly a crossing that invites us too to create a pier, another body, another ethos to lay new foundations for the relationship with nature, the world, and species. It is no coincidence that her “creation” calls another biome beyond the mountains of Minas Gerais: the sea, pure otherness. And this is what it is about: a relationship with otherness that places us not only somewhere that is familiar, but also strange.
An installation-like dimension pervades the poetics of the exhibition, forged from a new spatial and bodily relationship that creates displacements as it somewhat disrupts the architecture. This personal – and collective – metamorphosis that her pieces evoke makes us imagine a politics that can resist the system of exploitation of bodies, nature, and the imaginary. By occupying a place on the borders, the exhibition requires an exercise of presence that allows the abilities of imagination to exercise freely, like in the piece “Flight, Escape Route” (“Voo, rota de fuga”), in which a blend of materials – blanket, fern, iron ore, copper wire – creates tensions between the forms and presence of these elements, with outlets including signs that warn about the dangers of dams and those spelled out by birds, uncovering some utopia.
The presence of birds is also evoked in the nest that keeps the exact message that resembles a colonial monocrop which, in turn, exterminates diversity and makes landscapes homogeneous. The exhibition can also be understood as a procession – also the name of a piece (“Cortejo”) – that captures the dimension, as sacred as it is profane, of what is presented in the scene. One cannot help but think about “Totem-object,” “Totem-plant,” and “Totem-bird,” typographic drawings that create a synthesis of sacredness, now condensed in the relationship with nature. “Amor de índio,” a song by Beto Guedes, is echoed here – “everything that moves is sacred” –, evoking the irregular topography of Minas Gerais, with high and low surfaces that quite dramatically set the course toward the unknown.
A choreography spans the entire exhibition. In the installation “Whitewater” (“Correnteza”), which uses the language of ceramics, the dimension of a gesture, and the inescapable presence of the hands, there is a contrast of colors in tubular pieces made with black ceramics and a carpet of white clay powder. The tactile aspect of it, with its power to leave trails and traces, supports writing and movement, body and sign. In “World Map” (“Mapa Mundi”), the artist stamps something of her body onto the landscape of the paper – her fingerprint with black gouache – mixing a more personal aspect with the map of the world, drawing a particular memory along with the possible collective memory.
Laura Belém dives into the sea she creates for herself and invites us to dive into the otherness of plants, animals, and minerals. With her hands, she calls us to also see with our fingers this tactile matter that has diluted into oureveryday lives mediated by a succession of empty digital images. It is a similar exercise to that proposed by Emanuele Coccia, who reveals, in the beautiful essay “The Life of Plants,” a way of understanding the world: through plants, with their surfaces of sensations and leaves, through flowers as cosmic forces, and through the earth, through the roots. A way of writing and a state of presence and temporality, as what is outlined in “Dew” (“Orvalho”) and its glass gemstones hanging from wooden boards. Something ethereal and a matter that endures in weight and history, like reclaimed wood, is the presence at play pervading the exhibition: dew turns into tears that create a bridge between the visible and the invisible. The familiar and the unknown in the silent presence of things.
By conducting her meticulous formal research, the artist chooses poetic and musical aspects as key elements in this conversation, observed in the photograph “Crossing” (“Travessia”), in which, reminding us of our humanity, a palm tree bark – a body-landscape, a body-plant – resembling a boat floats on the water. As a body-mineral, this feeling is pulsating in Milton Nascimento’s song: “I let my voice out on the road, I don’t want to stop. My path is made of stone, how am I supposed to dream?”
A dream made of breeze, a mineral dream, a dream made of stone, leaf, water, tree, clay. A dream that faces the nudity of the world and its horrors: mining, predatory agribusiness, the climate collapse, the degradation of the bonds of life and nature. A dream that faces the stumble on the rock. One cannot help but remember the disappearance of Pico do Cauê, a mountain range that could be seen from the balcony of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s home when he was a child, and mentioned in the poem “The Pulverized Mountain.” Where there used to be a mountain now there is a crater. In “Mirrored Mountain” (“Montanha Espelhada”), a piece by Laura Belém and Daniel Antônio, the neon lights play with inversion, the abyss, and the bottom of things. In “Pit” (“Poço”), this mixture of a certain industrial presence appears in the neon rim surrounded by iron ore rocks.
In “Exchange Currency” (“Moeda de troca”), in turn, leaves of a Cerrado tree are painted gold, carrying the marks of mining operations that shine bright and, also, destroy. There is criticism in Belém’s gesture of painting the leaves gold, as there was in Cildo Meireles’s 1987 installation “Mission/Missions – How to Build Cathedrals,” a piece made of bones, sacramental bread, and coins, with Baroque theatricality and brightness that created the atmosphere of a sacred place, depicting the Jesuit missions in which religious conversion was the violent work of exterminating Indigenous peoples and their culture. Laura Belém promotes discursive turns, playing with ambiguity-filled forms and presences: gold that shines, fruit from the exploitative wound of mining, and points to some beauty that can still be created from the ruins.
Ambiguity and ethereal elements are also present in “Mantle” (“Manto”), an installation with Japanese rice paper that seems to float and make everything feel suspended – like the small churches through the clouds of Guignard – and, pierced by snake plants, reveals unfathomable mysteries and reminds us of a certain silence evoked by the poet Adriana Versiani dos Anjos, who murmurs in “Lament” (“Lamento”): “the tears happened to become crystal / as they touched the ground.”
The ground is the soil of utopias, as the nature Laura Belém summons here is not only the prehistory of culture from time immemorial, but also the future that has yet to happen. Laura makes us walk on this ground, through the ecosystems of conviviality, and to think about other cosmologies and cosmogonies. And she does so through a sound piece or the endless dance of “Ballerina” (“Bailarina”), made of a tree trunk surrounded by Jacaranda seeds in the mythological space recreated by a different time, accurately described by Ailton Krenak: the future is ancestral. Art reminds us that we must be up to par to what happens to us.
Bianca Coutinho Dias
The artist thanks: Marcelo Figueiredo, Flávio Vignoli, Adriana Versiani dos Anjos, Benedikt Wiertz, Fernando Polleti, Silvia Gomes, Juliana Alvarenga. The pieces in the series “Totem” (“Totem”) and “Frag(la)ment” (“Frag(la)mento”) were printed at Tipografia do Zé, in Belo Horizonte.
Translation: Aline Scátola
