Monumento ao Horizonte

by Julia Lima, 2016

Public artwork
Caminho Niemeyer – Niterói

Human nature is paradoxical: we are beings with both nomadic and sedentary impulses. In the beginning, man was always in motion: moving, not staying in one fixed place, was essential to evolution. Agriculture, however, allowed communities to settle in certain places, cultivating the land and putting down roots. Despite the immobile stability of these communities, there remained an exploratory drive, realized, for example, in seafaring voyages. They wanted to go farther, ever farther. They traveled to discover new territories, dominate other peoples, expand empires, eager to find other horizons.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Maurice of Nassau brought the Dutch artists Albert Eckhout and Frans Post to Brazil, who, with a naturalist’s eye, recorded landscapes, flora, fauna, and human types. In 1816, Jean-Baptiste Debret, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, and eighteen other artists of the most varied specialties disembarked in Rio de Janeiro to record its natural beauty and social types, and also to revolutionize the teaching of the arts in the country. Debret wrote about his arrival in Brazil:

‘All of us animated by the same zeal, and with the enthusiasm of learned travelers who no longer fear, in our day, facing the hazards of a long and often still dangerous voyage, we left France, our common homeland, to go study an unprecedented nature.’ (free translation)

It is known that the arrival of the French Mission had more effects than those romantically desired by Taunay – the French artists came not only as instruments of record and documentation, but also to establish a new academic teaching of the arts in Brazil, and to spread the Neoclassical style at the expense of the already well-developed Baroque. The Mission, or invasion, was not content merely to visit a new world, but sought, in some way, to imprint deep marks of the French presence upon the country: a cultural colonization through public policies of art education and a professionalizing system never before seen, responsible even for the training of national icon-artists such as Pedro Américo and Almeida Júnior.

However, with the modernization and industrialization of the world, it became increasingly easy to travel to and get to know other places – whether through the advent of new means of transportation or the invention of photography. In the twentieth century, the traveling artist was no longer required to record and document unknown sites: the photographer came to occupy that position. Thus, with contemporary art, the exclusively colonizing gaze is no longer indispensable to the development of an aesthetic view of a place; we ourselves set out to navigate, invade, and re-signify the overseas, decolonizing ourselves and appropriating our own navigating impulse.

This interest that permeates, in one way or another, the production of some contemporary artists is not limited to inhabiting the practices of real, physical displacement. “Monumento ao Horizonte,” by Felippe Moraes, is an unfolding of a work Moraes created in 2010, titled “A Distância do Horizonte,” which consists of a mathematical formula developed by the artist to calculate the distance between the observer’s eye and their horizon. The method is entirely singular: it is the height of the eyes that determines how far our gaze can reach.

The “Monumento” is a public sculpture created to permanently occupy the pier of Caminho Niemeyer, in Niterói. If, in that earlier research, the measurement varied according to each person using the formula, in this project it is the object itself that establishes the elevation of vision and designates the exact measure of sight: from the small horizontal slit that opens in the structure nearly 4 meters above the ground, it is possible to see more than 7 km ahead.

The piece brutally disrupts the pier’s space of contemplation – weighing more than a ton, it is made of Corten steel, a material that evokes the hulls of ships and modern vessels which, with sea spray, oxidize and take on an ochre hue. Its already scratched and marked finish denotes the action of a time that has not yet passed, suggesting its existence in the world long before its installation. This proto-lookout faces west, as if it were the needle of a setting compass, and nothing could be more poetic than building an apparatus that defies chronological time by always pointing toward dusk (after all, it was in Rio that the applause for the sunset was invented).

Elongated in form, when seen from the front its appearance oscillates between totem and monolith: it can be seen as an object whose presence is ancestral, or as a natural element; something built by an ancient civilization or organic matter sprouting from the earth itself, erupting from the ground. On the other hand, it also seems to rise as an artificial place created outside our time, as if brought into the past-present to summon what is to come and make us face the future – in each distinct sphere of apprehending the work, we activate different ways of being, existing, and perceiving ourselves in the world.

Climbing the steps that lead to the monument’s viewing slit, we encounter another dimension – the sounds of the body’s presence echo and amplify within the steel walls, while outside noise is silenced, muffled. This silence is complicit with the contemplative impulse aroused by the encounter with the landscape of Guanabara Bay, seen from inside the structure, framed by the metal window. The positioning of the slit produces a sensation of floating and dispersal, showing us the horizon but not the ground, as if we were in the conning tower of a partially submerged submarine.

This almost nautical constitution seems ready to sail, yet remains still. As a public artwork, it has no function or practical use, serves no one and nothing. Synchronically, it takes shape as an architecture of waiting – the pier where it stands never received vessels. From here, now, depart the voyages of the public’s gaze that activates the work, and the monument can be a shelter for those who arrive and, above all, a kind of port for those who wish to depart.

Julia Lima
2016