Texts

by Diógenes Moura

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What should you do with time when it is not responsible for another time, the one that for a city and its characters makes disappear the monuments that tell them their own story? So, time is lost, one inside the other, and all that science of an archaeology is, or would be, disappears as if it had not passed, much less future. Therefore, cities and their citizens come to be seen as things: one thing, another thing, nothing more. Secret Soul. A series of photographs by Ana Lucia Mariz, it brings to our eyes precisely an inverse position to these processes of lost times. What she sees is what should be imprinted on the canons of another universal memory, which time itself builds and wears out, but the world cannot lose.

 

The series covers ruins and demolitions in São Paulo – the capital and the towns of Santos, Sorocaba and Rio Claro – and in Bahia – Salvador, Praia do Forte, Cachoeira and Ilha de Itaparica -, where holding a flashlight in her hands the photographer printed the presence of present days, in the night syrup, using the light-painting technique to indicate, with each scene, a pictorial sensation, something that makes The Secret Soul approach, from some signs, the Jungian statement that translates these clippings to a longer time "than the eye can meet". The project began in 2002, from demolitions found in São Paulo and soon after, when the inhabitants of Carandiru – their screams, their stories, their messages on the walls, their saints, their pains – left that stigma of cruelty, one by the other (the inside, the outside), and the building was deactivated. Only memories were left, branded by certain fates: in the images made from the rubble, each character that lived there is built again, in an even more provocative way, in a plan expressed through images that are born from the void. It is this absence of the human figure that causes The Secret Soul to establish a repertoire that is very particular, sensorial, floating between time and space, mapping ahead what is not inscribed.

 

The series showing the uninhabited Carandiru functions as a "scream still in the air". But it is not a social photograph, thought to move us by showing the place where the suffering of those who are not on this side where we are (and where will they be now?), cannot be erased: it is precisely by showing a certain folly between silence and absence that the simplicity of each image reaches a state of mind that is lacerating, beautiful, and hollow at the same time.  Let's see: the floor of a corridor exposed and cut by the light beam of the flashlight rebuilds the psychological faith that goes beyond the barrier of the bars, should this be possible in real life. In the picture, it is. In another one, the open door of the cell is able to suggest a scene that even hurts, "an empty bag inside the soul", as Augusto dos Anjos wrote at that transparent time lived at the Engenho Pau d'Arco, in Paraíba. All images made by Ana Lucia Mariz in Carandiru show us a process of approximation, of lucidity, of life and death: dishes and cutlery forgotten through the rubble; stairs, also abandoned, that keep asking, "how far will we be able to escape?"

 

Freed in photography to be part of a real and worn-out-by-time document, the images make us sometimes think of the prisons created by the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), who recorded the "traces of the ancient glory of Rome". Here, the traces photographed by Ana Lucia Mariz possess the same affective voice, where the web creates the soul and everything deepens in levels never interrupted. For instance, it is like this in the images taken in the manor that used to belong to the family of Santos Dumont: one of them is enough, where a caryatid suggests a dive into that past, leaving the curtain of time ajar in the face of the days lived during the architectural project by Ramos de Azevedo, when the city and its inhabitants first lived their days of glory. Days that appear in the images from the beginning of the last century. Then, the same city and its same inhabitants saw the "palace" be abandoned, trespassed by the institutionalized national poverty; its story betrayed behind its back (as in Caligula’s Halicon drama); drugs coming in and out of their once sophisticated rooms, because each one of those invading individuals needed a home and some kind of substance to imagine they were still alive.

 

Now restored, the building houses the São Paulo Energy Museum. Its yellow walls are clean, still safe from the graffiti that San Paulo is so used to see printed on its historical monuments, on landmarks of its past, where, confronted by such manifestation, it is often said that such graffiti is the art of the "voiceless". When we see the image of that caryatid almost offering a smile, eyes wide open, neither tragic nor romantic, this story is inscribed in just one photograph. A photograph that comforts and threatens at the same time.

 

This same cry silences in the images made in Salvador, more precisely one of them: the Fort of Santo Antonio, separating two slopes beyond the first Cathedral, destroyed in 1933, when its carved stone walls went down the mountain. Seen from a sentry- box, the harbor pier lights signal the idea of a city in motion, sung and spoken as a land of happiness, seen on television on Carnival days, when individuals – usually coming from the Southeastern part of the country, and who are gladly called VIPs – smile a lot in disposable boxes, without having the slightest idea that around them hundreds of buildings, both houses and historical monuments, fall into the geometry of the city. Then they go away, the verdaccio face dripping into chunks of oblivion. Ruins remain ruins. So, what Brazil watches on television is the failure of its memory. No one cares about themselves. That's not what Ana Lucia Mariz's photograph means. The image of the Fort of Santo Antonio speaks to us so symbolically of this stigma, it is so imbued with a petrified silence, that unlike the images of the Champs-Élysées manor, it does not point to any feeling of comfort: it scratches on the skin of the eye the eagerness and melancholy with which the estate of the country looks itself in the mirror. Perhaps it is due to this silence, this eagerness and this melancholy that the streets of the Historic Downtown have become a square of violence, body and soul. It is at this moment that the photograph jumps into the musculature of the real world and gains both the movement and that sense, looking through the crack of the sentry-box and illuminated by the lights of the harbor pier. And the city falls asleep.

 

Secret Soul makes use of colors in some images made in barren plots, a time when what existed there belongs neither to the city nor its inhabitants. And, also, at the moment when the doubt about what will be erected there touches the seven senses of the Urbis itself. These are the photographs by Ana Lucia Mariz: clippings coming from the timeline, from the nights of time, from the days in common, from a moment of intimacy between herself and what the eyes of others will be able to retain (and not just look at) so that we do not definitely lose the notion of where we came from and what we are, let alone lose the voice of our memory, so much at risk in the skin of the interrupted eye; neither bread nor water or milk dripping through the streets and slums on the same carved stone floor.

 

Diógenes Moura,

Curator of photography, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.