| The landscape, a strange foreign landscape, flashes by in both directions as the camera inside the vehicle captures both the windshield and the rear-view mirror. |  |
Michael Asbury
The landscape, a strange foreign landscape, flashes by in both directions as the camera inside the vehicle captures both the windshield and the rear-view mirror. The foreignness of the place is emphasized by the radio, with the DJ continuously speaking in a monotonous tone for us who do not understand the language: no music, just an incomprehensible rant. At first this video seems nothing more than a holiday souvenir, one of those captured by an obsessive holidaymaker who is so intent on capturing all aspects of the experience that in doing so has no time left to experience the place itself without the mediation of a camera. Had this been a private projection, a means of better describing one’s holiday to friends and family, a memory-aid, it might have indeed been described as a souvenir. However, it is on public display, in a gallery, and it is entitled Memory.
Like the double vision of the film itself, with the views of the front and rear of the moving vehicle, Memory thus gains a double meaning of its own. The anonymity of the passengers further suggests that this is not what it first appears to be. It is neither a holiday souvenir nor a self-indulgent artwork that places the ordinariness of the artist’s life on the pedestal of spectacle. Memory, a meditation in the present about the past, exercised in the light of what the future might hold, becomes complicit with the location of the film: Greece. We are speaking therefore of two memories—the personal, holiday snap, and our collective memory of Greece, the cradle of Western civilization. Both these visions of the past are placed in confrontation with what lies ahead. But what the windshield announces, or indeed what the rear-view mirror leaves behind, is certainly not a vision of arcadia but the contemporaneity of the globalized tourist trade. And as the vehicle reaches its destination, slows its pace, and maneuvers into the parking slot, we are finally able to read the banners and flags in the commercial establishments, all of which, without exception are written in English. Perhaps one could speculate that this work is the result of the artist reflecting on the clash of both the collective and the personal memories: a visual essay, as is often the case with Cao Guimarães, on the strangeness encountered within the ordinary, literally a reflection of the past upon the present free from idealism and nostalgia.
Like Memory, the series Campo Cego produced in collaboration with Carolina Cordeiro, presents a similar device that interrupts the view of the landscape. Again, the work involves the act of traveling and the advent of registering, this time through photography, chance encounters that bring distinct realities into a kind of poetic/ludic conflict. The series registers instances in which the artists came across road signage whose information time has obscured, whether through oxidation or, as is more often the case, through the deposit of dust or mud. A struggle is portrayed, where the modern drive, with its self-assertive discourse of progress, is nevertheless burdened, shown its ephemerality and fragility, by the overwhelming power of nature. Yet, if the realities of modernity and nature are played against each other, I think it is safe to say that it is the formal qualities of this juxtaposition that are of interest to the artist.
One such photograph strikes me as particularly telling: it displays the sign, centrally, as a form of escape point. The tarmac road is bordered by a low-level concrete wall, which in the image runs almost vertically until it reaches the sign, or the centre of the photograph. This in turn acts as a dividing line between the tarmac road and a clearing which resembles, in its dimension, a minor dirt track. The road thus finds its mirror image in the dirt track. This play on perspective takes both roads towards the same point, the road sign, actually the non-sign, the territory of confrontation, as its monochrome cover denies any possibility of signaling information. But the road sign, the non-sign, does not only act as the convergence point of these two distinct realities, which could poetically stand in as metaphors for the duality of Brazil itself. Even the clouds seem complicit in this compositional play. The road sign is also placed in relation with the horizon, covering it entirely other than the tips of some trees that just about manage to appear over its top. This produces an interesting trompe-l’oeil. The uniformity of the color of the earth, whether on the roadside, whether on the small concrete bordering wall, whether on the dirt-track is replicated in the dust deposits that obscure the road sign, that transform it into a monochrome field, a painting. Because it is positioned at the very centre, at the escape point of the composition, one has no means of assessing its relative position, it essentially escapes positioning. It could be a small sign placed not so far from the camera as it could be a gigantic sign placed on the verge of the bend in the road. Indeed, if we are to let ourselves be taken away by this ambivalence, it could be a gash in the hillside as much as it could be a painting on the surface of the photograph.
Memory could also be an implicit theme within Cao Guimarães’ Espantalho series of photographs also present in this exhibition. At times grotesque and at times comical, the functionality of the figures portrayed is betrayed by the apparent personality that they possess. Their precariousness is sometimes affirmed by the simplicity of the construction: a few bottles hung from some sticks. The very nature of the scarecrow entails the understanding that these clothes have been discarded, yet they are often so carefully placed that one is reminded of mannequin displays in shop windows.
There is thus an implicit memory held in these images, the memory of the rural workers those who produced them, who, in their seemingly simple agrarian life display such innate creativity, such care, and such sensibility. Their absence is also remembered, indeed embodied, by the scarecrows themselves, who, wearing their clothes become the specters of those who produced them. And if the cleanliness of some of the clothes is demonstrative of their pride, their self-respectfulness, those that are ragged and torn become testimonies of the harshness of their labor.
