poetics of silence in the works of rachel rosalen
Cruelty is one form of organized violence. It is not necessarily erotic, but may flow into other forms of violence that transgression organizes. Like cruelty, eroticism is deliberate. Cruelty and eroticism are organized in the spirit of the determination to go beyond the limits of interdiction.This determination is not general, but can always shift from one field for other: it is a matter of neighboring fields cast one over another on the euphoria of escaping from the power of interdiction” (Bataille)Crude is derived from the Latin crudo, meaning not cooked but incipient, and designates charred but bloody meat; the latter stripped of its ordinary ornaments or accompaniments such as skin, and reduced to something bloody and indigestible. Documenta’s question “what is bare life?” surely relates to the theme of cruelty, this execrable, indigestible and banal part of real life. Bataille, after Nietzche, says that the real measure of Man is seen in the cruelest of actions.
The precariousness of the human condition, the execrable part, consists precisely of a tragic subjectivation seen in the cruelty of rituals and their boundless gestures of destruction.Cultural production relating to these remembrances often takes on a melancholic configuration, indicating that losses have yet to be coped with. It is often within this aesthetics of trauma, in dialogue with Bataille, that we can situate the work of the Brazilian artist Rachel Rosalen. Her works circulate in his vacuum, in this space that dialogues with death and the fragmentation of the rounded human being.Her production seems to pose allegorical signs in Benjamin’s sense: telling the story of man lost, decapitated, lost in the barbarism of the capitalist world, lost in avarice for power, breaking the most profound ties of love and sociability. Although the theme of cruelty is more in evidence in her recent works such as ESSAY ON CRUELTY OR MR. FATZER MEETS THE QUEEN OF SPADES (live with music by Wilson Sukorski and Paula Pretta), #07 ESSAYS ON CRUELTY (installation, as yet not shown in Brazil but scheduled for Paço das Artes in 2008) and BLACK RAIN # anti-war project (interactive videoinstallation shown at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2005) that depict the horror and tragedy of war, crude or bare life contaminates her other works: they speak of the dissolution of constituted shapes, the eroticized body, the determination to exceed limits.
Bodies in transitIn the beginning of time, according to a Greek myth, the human species was created by three gods: a male, a female and an androgynous one: the latter a perfect being that shared the characteristics of the former two. Endowed with terrible force and strength as a whole and in part, with twofold limbs and organs, these beings began to conspire against the gods. The solution found by Zeus was to split them in half, taking away their former shape, so that each half was missing its lost totality, no longer aspiring to be a single being. As in Plato’s Banquet, this seems to be the mythical origin of Eros: this incessant quest associated with nostalgia for lost continuity; pure desire for something that is missing and escapes it. “This being, like any other desiring being, desires that which is not to hand, that which it does not have, that which is not its own and is lacking in it,” says Socrates in The Banquet.From within this perspective, it is this incessant quest - associated with nostalgia for the lost totality of the Other that escapes it - that designates the narrative poetics in Rosalen’s works. Her works in the form of videos, videoinstallations and other creative processes seek to explore the theme of the body through the resources of language provided by mediatic devices. Since her first works in the early 2000s to her most recent developed during her stay in Japan, such as Japanese Diaries, Tokyo In, Otaku or Red Dreams, her art career has been marked by the poetics of the body eroticized in its utmost totality. Through images, undulating and flowing forms, superimpositions, quick and blunt sections combined with acoustic and textual resources, she assembles a hybrid language that brings the theme of the body into play: the body of lack, the body that seeks this lost yearning, the impulsive body overflowing with desire, that breathes and aspires near the limit of madness, passion and excess, this Other that escapes it.This is the body referred to in Fluorescências, or no_places or (IM)MORTALITÁ. These subversive and disturbing works pose metropolitan aesthetics dematerializing urban territory in post-modern ruins. There is the city, marked by its huge high buildings and architectural monuments as receptacle for the eroticized body. There is the contemporary city presented as fluid and mutant territory giving life to an unstable geography showing imagistic bodies copulating on billboards.This eroticized body is also in Roses, Tokyo In, Matsu, Raasar, Otaku and Japanese Diaries. But here the body of the artist or woman-artist is on stage too. Sometimes dressed in red fabric, but often without any clothing, her body is staged in its own nakedness. Exiled from the world and itself, this body “in a state of siege”, this foreign body, is shown in these works in its most intimate essence leading us to an exotic adventure combining oriental and western culture. Between the sword of mortuary sacrifice and the spoon perforated in the middle, which metaphorizes that which escapes us, we are asked to plunge into courses that often show moments of a profound silence; the moment of erotic plenitude, death, joy and renewal.Rachel Rosalen’s videos provide a chance to experience issues related to the most intimate conditions of the subject in contemporaneity. She has created poetic strategies that often abandon narrative linearity to offer multiple and fragmentary spaces. As a kind of methodological resource, Rosalen often has a different context revisit the same image to stage her creative path. On this basis she postulates a relationship of continuity of thought between her different works, or rather the idea of time as repetition. This is how we find the image of the spoon perforated in the middle, which returns in Red Dreams, Tokyo In and Otaku; this is how we find images of bodies copulating in Fluorescências and (IM)MORTALITÀ. Rosalen’s creative poetics is assembled in a way that is often aggressive and disturbing, accompanied by the frenzied and mad rhythm of the contemporary world, or at times by a stunning softness evoking profound silence.Anti - war essaysMore recently this profound silence is seen as a kind of ’stifled scream’ in her anti-war essays. In Urban Bodies, BLACK RAIN and # 07 essays on cruelty, Rosalen aks us to immerse ourselves in works of history as trauma - after Márcio Seligmann-Silva’s concept.In BLACK RAIN # an anti-war Project there is an opportunity to experience issues relating to war atrocities. Between the melted body and the city on fire, between the silence and red actors’ kimonos, between wrecked bodies and children’s panic-stricken eyes, we are asked to contemplate the concepts of humanity that are still left to us .Rosalen’s # 07 essays also speak to us of this cruelty. Combining studio scenes with scenes from everyday life, she shows us an Alice gone mad, an Alice bereft of sense or logic, victim and accomplice at the same time, tormented in scenarios of human barbarism.
Priscila Arantes researches language of contemporary art and holds a doctorate in Communication and Semiotics from PUC/SP. She wrote Arte e Mídia: perspectivas da estética digital (Fapesp/Ed. SENAC); she was nominated for the 48th Jabuti award, and has written numerous articles for books published in Brazil and internationally. She coordinates the postgraduate course in Interactive Media at SENAC-SP, is professor and council member for the master’s in Design course at the same institution, supervisor of the Art and Technology qualification for the Technology and Digital Media course at PUC-SP, and a CAPES referee in the field of the arts.Arantes leads the Cnpq research group on Aesthetics, Design and Communication, and coordinates the SENAC-SP project on Technological Aesthetics. She has been active in local and international conferences such as INTERCOM, ANPAP and P&D, and has lectured on contemporary art, aesthetics and new media. In 2003, she was on the jury for the International Electronic Languages Festival (FILE) and in 2005 on the organizing commission for the event Padrões aos Pedaços at Paço das Artes. In 2006 she developed the curatorial design for Circuitos Pararelos: retrospectiva Fred Forest for Paço das Artes, chaired the 1st International Congress on Technological Aesthetics at PUC/SP and together with Sergio Motta Cultural Award and Canal Contemporâneo planned and held the Conexões Tecnológicas event.