Texts

by Agnaldo Farias

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Uninhabited, deprived from their original purposes, abandoned to the natural time so that they rot after years of gentle submission to the time of men, the ruins occupy cities in direct proportion in which these are built. They are like dense and tangible failures, spoils of buildings that once offered comfort and functionality, but today head toward death. And perhaps due to that, because they are nothing more than spoils, the photographs by Ana Lucia Mariz show a particular interest in them. Her photographs, like every photograph based on the deep tradition within what may be called the kidnapping of the now, suffer from a similar ailment. Because most of the photographic tradition fed on the chimeric desire of not bending to the destruction of things, tried to retain them in the present time, tried to eternalize them in what would be the moment of their splendor.  A dream sewed in the perfect quad of a photo paper. A vision cultivated as a chemical plant that hibernates inside a glass bell.

 

Seen from this angle, the photograph becomes an adequate instrument for the manufacture of monsters, something which is nothing new. After all, what was Dorian Gray, the famous character by Oscar Wilde, paralyzing in beauty as his portrait aged with the rhythm of his villainies, but a monster?

 

In contemplating these images by Ana Lucia Mariz, all of them about corroded things, heaps of matters and spaces that today coexist with darkness, silence and the memory of what they were, it is necessary to keep in mind that photography, as conceived and practiced by the artist, joins precisely this orientation that aims to stop the spur of time, intends to be situated above it , like a piece of present time that, such as an island, departs from the flow of things, fixing itself as eternity.

 

A state of suspension, it should be remembered, which will only be shaken when it too, the photograph, either on paper or negative, begins to be attacked by time. If nothing escapes from this relentless goodbye, what about the so fragile paper and negative? And even the digital file, whose shrewd immateriality leads to the creation of so cunning viruses?

 

Ruins and the present time are the common denominators of these images by Ana Lucia Mariz. A curious binomial, giving that the present corresponds to the future of things in them, when they are already reaching their end. Armed with her camera and lights, Ana Lucia Mariz visits century-old ruins made of stones and thick adobe bricks; abandoned manors, some of them partially destroyed; the grim and vacant space of the former prison of Carandiru; and barren plots, these clearings that are suddenly opened among houses and buildings of large cities. The images of old ruins, churches, and other monumental buildings, occupied by recently executed scaffolding and footbridges, lead us to wonder how our today’s photographs will be seen in the future. In fact, if the idea of this forcibly brief text is to focus on the images of the future of things, the photographs of these preserved ruins lead us, on the other hand, to think about the presence of the past, in the care required for the preservation of a time that has passed, an effort to postpone death, a feeling proper to those who, like us, can make contact with this dimension of life.

 

Defying this trend, the artist visits these ruins pointing out the scale of the buildings, their grandeur often accentuated by the fact that some of them have the sky as cover. The thickness of the exposed walls, boasting the materiality of their stones and clay, the crumbling steps, the grass-covered floor, the windows with their hatches torn off framing nearby trees, they all seem to throw the buildings into an even more distant past, as if their fate were the same as the indistinction between them and nature.

 

The same is not true of the interiors of the manors, closer to our experiences, to the point that in them we can still visualize the lives that until recently they sheltered. The facades precariously resist, intensified by effort, despite the decaying of the rest of the building. Rooms once intended to shelter people, source of protection and coziness, are now occupied by rubble; rooms whose doors and walls lie disrupted, foreshadowing a greater violence whose ornamental linings only increase. But there's the fireplace, the kitchen tilting window positioned next to the hood, other life figures unfolded in a typical domestic setting that is now dismantled forever.

 

The artist does not visit these environments with detachment. She is interested in highlighting her own presence, something she does with the technique – weren’t she a photographer - of a light beam through which she performs drawings, highlights objects, stresses situations, a fast interval in which she leaves the camera on the tripod, with the diaphragm open. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a body or shadows of people. But they're ghosts from now. Manifestations consistent with the impact of a space that alludes to the ephemerality of all that is. The images extracted from Carandiru have another specificity. It is useless not to admit that the awareness of what this is about does not impact our perception. It couldn't be any different. On the other hand, even if you don't know it, it will be possible to deduce from this dark atmosphere – such as the one in which a succession of ajar doors are unveiled along an overwhelmingly low ceiling corridor, equally oppressive iron doors, and with the same rectangular opening at eye height – that this is a penitentiary, this sad image of the city, where this long corridor – narrow and claustrophobic – can be the street , each cell equivalent to one house. The doors are covered with signs and rusty points. It is impossible to tell one thing from another, although one is able to understand the reasons that led them to support expressions that, unable to be satisfactorily expressed, have been thrown everywhere, hiding their marks. Again, in addition to the fragments of dialogues with the sacred and hope, the abandoned objects that are still waiting, as if the inhabitants were about to return, resuming their sleepless lives.

 

Finally, the barren plots, the clearings obtained at the expense of recent demolitions, which is noticed through the pile of construction rubble, of pronounced prints of tires of trucks and handlers, the old floor now converted into shards and earth, of a few walls, partially destroyed, but still bearing the grimy remains of the white tiles that once covered them.

 

All these images give off silence and loneliness. Desolate and exhausted, these constructions, all of them presented in recent records, babble, within the fuss of the present, their tangible and unsettling presence.

 

Agnaldo Farias,

Professor, FAU-USP.