Texts

Barren Herbarium

act of revealing insurgent images

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From the latency of buried times and histories buried under the earthy ocher that emulates the soil of the city, emerge specters of natural life demanding, as an image, the perenniality that the invention of photography dared to propose to the surprise of beings conscious of their transitoriness.

This Herbário Baldio [Barren Herbarium] lies between the desire for eternity and the awareness of the transitory, as a new poetic research by visual artist Ana Lucia Mariz. Recurring to the beginnings of the invention of photography, Mariz is inspired by the photogenic drawings of pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and by the experiments with cyanotype by botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799–1871), to bring to light, without the use of a photographic camera, a history of minute details and resistances – arising from the accelerated and disordered process of changes in São Paulo or, as geographer Milton Santos would say, the accumulation of unequal times that permeates the space of the city.

An artist with a keen and uneasy gaze, Mariz creates this poetic herbarium of great pictorial charm like someone who asks us: – how does a city move? How is nature converted into geography, weaving roots of concrete, setting itself up and overlaying itself to the viscera of the untamable and sacred nature?

A city, after all, results in the sum of layers, channels, landscapes, mindsets, passions and pains. Geographies and grimaces that mirror the desires and pulsations that wander through it. Spurred by the sensitive life of the city, Mariz follows the advice given by Marco Polo to the powerful Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities by Ítalo Calvino: “You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

By collecting leaves, seeds, flowers and stems of plants remaining from land lots undergoing demolition in São Paulo, the artist operates a sort of discourse of survival regarding the marginalized and hidden elements of the history of the city’s transformation. The aim is revealed as an archaeological and botanical experiment in the chaos of São Paulo. The artist seeks to draw another sensitive and inexhaustible geography for the small living things that survive in the roughness of the times. Small branches and structures of a faraway origin of botanical species, buried under cement and iron, gain a new cycle of life when they are materialized in the form of an image-aura. The vulnerable bodies of these vegetal species sprout from the earth, now changed into paper, at the decisive instant at which the artist presses them against the surface and, with a piece of sandpaper, carefully copies them. The barren bodies are transmuted into images-auras. Inverting the photographic process, in which traditionally the light is added to transform the photosensitive surface, Mariz gives birth to a process of the surface’s subtraction, like someone excavating what was on the threshold of disappearance.

Through this poetic-political process, the artist interposes a critical gaze to the rationality of capital and the processes of industrialization to demarcate, in the barrenness of the geography, the intercrossing of many existences: an art of paradoxical uprisings that generate insurgent images – these volatile bodies that nevertheless yearn to be the perennial body of a photograph.

Eder Chiodetto and Fabiana Bruno