Crowns

Essay for the exhibition Coroas, Museu de Arte da Bahia, 2022.

When talking about photography, Uiler Costa-Santos also talks about dwelling—climbing to the tops of buildings to capture his first images, wandering from one place to another, recreating his family through the people who cross his path, rediscovering the air that filters through the cracks of everyday objects, recreating the magic of familiar places in movement. The danger of movement within movement, as Fred Moten reminds us, is the awareness that we are affected, that we are affectable. There is also danger in the very act of this reminder, even if it is just a glimpse of what we have not seen. “The only way we can traverse this culture in the service of destruction and reconstruction, this contract, this contact, this refusal to surrender, is for us to reach back into the pre-autobiographical modalities of our own history. Our constant escapes, even from time, and our consent to being inseparable, demand that we live in danger.”
From this perspective, the extravagant, abstract, formal, and textual depths of the images on display here also present a challenge. There is a flaw in our proprioception, that is, in the body’s ability to gauge its own position in order to maintain its balance, whether at rest or whether at work. In turn, this dual articulation of images demands that we acknowledge two things: 1) that the artistic process responds to the inhabiting of an experience connected to the multiple times in which it occurs, and thus, that its aesthetic expression potentiates the (re/de)composition of what transpires from that meeting; 2) that the body is the receptacle in which this process unfolds. In this sense, perceiving and listening to the body is about giving shape to its (re/de)composition in the world.
The use of abstraction as both a political and compositional tool for the images also aspires to the construction of an alternate hereafter. It not only enables a situated discussion of the structural stories through which life unfolds, but also allows us to understand our own participation in them, as we seek to reclaim the debate over the composition of the world in an ongoing commitment to space and matter. In this context, when critically positioned against conventional landscapes, abstraction kindles the potentiality of our lives (both individual and collective) that long to (re)inscribe, here and now, the strengths and forms of freedom within this experience of the world.
The ongoing project Coroas, which began in 2017, revisits Uiler’s encounters with the moments of freedom that were manifested during the Syzygies—periods of alignment between celestial bodies. At these moments, the sea, the land, and the rivers construct new reliefs and sensitive geographies from an ecology of seemingly familiar knowledge. In Uiler’s words, “these moments are also a meeting. The time-space where various forms of non-human life respond to the synchronous movement of the cosmos and produce their own fluctuations, destinies, reliefs, and maps.” Therefore, it is within the Syzygies that the landscape transmutes, allowing us to perceive the everyday in its constant capacity for creation.
Through an action that involves both observation and listening, the images in this exhibition represent some of these visual enigmas that Costa-Santos experiences in Baía de Todos-os-Santos. By revisiting the critical and fictional potential of the images, this play of abstraction through the landscape reveals the synchronous presence of a sophisticated fishing technology that is used by traditional groups of sea-workers in the region. Known as pesqueiros, the engineering of these spaces is realised through full-body contact. The wooden circles structured in dialogue with the ebbs and flows of the sea-tides offer the opportunity to understand fishing not as a means of exploitation and extraction, but as a form of communication, contact, and relationship between humans and non-humans. At its most radical, the pesqueiros reimagine other solutions to the dilemmas posed by the present when we touch upon the forms (both ancestral and contemporary) of knowing, dwelling, and existing.
TARCÍSIO ALMEIDA