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Natxo Checa is the director of ZDB in Lisbon. He curated João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s recent exhibition, For a Transitory Science of the Indiscernible: Abissology produced by ZDB and on view at the Galeria do Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional from February 8–April 13.
João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Nameless Bone (right: sculpture), Ocular Eclipse (left: film projection), 2007. Abissology Exhibition View. Courtesy of ZDB.João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva are up-and-coming artists whose work focuses mainly on creating fictional models, and inventing works based on literary sources that sustain them. They recently presented their work in a ZDB-produced exhibition in Lisbon, curated by Natxo Checa entitled For a Transitory Science of the Indiscernible: Abissology.
Abissology was created in five different international artist residencies in Angola, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Morocco—all organized by ZDB. Comprised of works created in different media—namely 22 short films; glass, bronze, and bone sculptures; installations; and photography—this exhibition introduces a new fictional model called “Abissology,” or the science that studies the abyss, which is the result of the artistic practice of the artists. This model is reflected in the fiction they create, which is concerned with the literary composition of a specific science of the bodies, designed accordingly to the phenomenological/ontological condition of the visible minimum, what is almost unseen, and what has almost no existence to a beholder.
The term refers to a neologism found in Rene Daumal’s book La Grande Beuverie, a satirical novel with metaphysical contours. The discovery of this literary term in the context of Gusmão and Paiva’s artistic practice is reflected in a new fiction that concerns an experimental procedure that we can also find in the artists’ previous joint project: Magnetic Effluvium. We can approach Abissology as a fictional subject with literary roots as diverse as the materialistic poetry of Alberto Caeiro, the pre-Socratic Atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, the descriptions of isolation inside natural glacier chambers as recounted by Michel Siffre, and even in the philosophical-literary constructions edified by Nietzsche or Gustav Meyrink.
ZDB is an independent, non-profit organization that has made a place for itself as a promoter of a series of different activities that have in common the assertion of emerging and contemporary art. As a creation, production, promotion, and diffusion structure of emerging art, ZDB presents its own projects, and at the same time functions as a privileged space of experimentation, and confrontation of proposals that deal with contemporary aesthetics and technologies.
