Divino Maravilhoso

by Julia Lima, 2019

Solfejo – Solo Exhibition
Centro Cultural FIESP

[Lyric excerpt — “Divino Maravilhoso,” Caetano Veloso/Gilberto Gil, 1968; omitted here for copyright reasons.]

Sound is an element that connects us to transcendence, to memories, to places, to people. Music is a manifestation present in every culture: it is the art of the muses, the manipulation of vibration, the passage of time; it is language, it is abstraction, it is material and absolutely ethereal. Images are constructions of light and shadow, contour and matter. They illustrate ideas, unleash fantasies, give form to emotions, fix history in place.

The myth of Echo and Narcissus is an allegory for this not always immediate relationship between image and sound — foundational both for psychoanalysis and for art. Narcissus was a beautiful young man born under an oracle’s premonitory warning that he must never see himself, his own reflection, on pain of death. Echo, in turn, was a nymph who had a body but no voice, cursed — for talking too much — to only repeat the last words she heard. Therein lies the tragedy of the obsession with (self-)image and with the repetition of sounds: the sight of oneself, which may be another; and the voice of another, which comes back as one’s own.

Every time we experience art, we may find the possibility of symbolically reliving the myth — we search the works for something of ourselves; we reach the imaginaries that correspond to the representation of the “I,” as much as of the “other,” and we hear our own words echo back. These latencies that art stirs up carry a profoundly transformative power (so long as we do not become intoxicated by our own reflection) — Narcissus saw himself in the water’s mirror and, enchanted by his double, drowned in his own image; where he died, they found not his body, but a flower. Echo, hopelessly in love with Narcissus, could never communicate her feelings; frightening the beautiful young man with her echoes, she lived hidden in a cave until she became nothing but voice and bones — she turned to stone.

Entering the exhibition, visitors are struck by the unexpected, potent consonance between visuality and music that shapes these works by Felippe Moraes. Despite Solfejo‘s playful approach, the works on view can and should be experienced by people of all ages. Moreover, the moment of organizing a solo exhibition is a rare chance to investigate a body of work and an artist’s ongoing research from new perspectives that take into account the institution’s different audiences, without, however, resorting to childish devices or to obtuse, superficial formats — giving things diverse meanings through proximity, opposition, conjunction, or estrangement. Curating an exhibition, as much as the public’s experience of it, is an act of appropriation, a taking hold of something of another in order to transform the experience into one’s own, or even ours — and some call that poetry.

[Lyric excerpt omitted for copyright reasons.]

Solfejo welcomes the public this way, like the first note of an increasingly complex melody composed by Moraes, who — though not a musician, mathematician, or astrophysicist — draws on all of these fields in works that are as poetic as they are scientific; as rational as they are affective; as dissonant as they are unisonous. There is a clear musical rationality in the sensory experiences triggered by the works, even as the playful nature of interaction and cooperation transports us to more surreal and unconscious states.

We rise and fall, like notes on a staff, to probe the listening of Tubos Sonoros (2014), which evoke the seashells held to one’s ear at the beach. We sway in the hammocks of Composição Aleatória (2019), creating spontaneous melodies. Impossible to repeat, the music generated is unique to the moment and to the people present — who are there not to follow scores or notations, harmonies or rhythms, but to become as much authors as the artist himself. To create is also to set free, and the making of a work is also an achievement of humanity. It is a whole in which the unity is at once greater and lesser than the sum of its parts.

In other works, we settle into being an audience, as if at the edge of the stage of Harmonices Mundi (2017). The video, made during a residency in Iran, takes as its starting point the concept of the “Music of the Spheres.” The work is based on Johannes Kepler’s 1619 formulation, which posited the existence of a cosmic harmony — the possibility that patterns might govern every element of the universe. Drawing on the analysis of the orbits of the six planets known in the seventeenth century — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury — the German physicist established a musical correlation between the speed of the celestial bodies’ trajectories and their proximity to the Sun: the closer they were, the higher-pitched the tones; the faster they moved, the more accelerated the rhythms. Moraes took these principles as his own and carried them out with a band: each member represents a planet and, as in an orchestral crescendo, the video culminates with the whole group playing simultaneously in cacophony.

[Lyric excerpt omitted for copyright reasons.]

The body, in turn, is essentially implicated in nearly all of the works. This is an exhibition that should, ideally, be experienced in community. The singular introspection usually reserved for the contemplation of works fixed on a wall gives way to shared experiences. Regardless of our wishes, we find ourselves caught up in uncontrollable noises, entangled in sudden scents, and invited to draw closer to one another. The collectivity essential to the works can be democratically liberating, and together our bodies feed their potencies, inform other histories, vibrate possible futures, creating moments that will not be repeated, but that will be lived again and again and again.

The uncertain times we live in have forced our bodies to become subjugated automatons, to fit into patterns that determine human gestures not through free, fluid choreographies but through rigid machinations. We have grown accustomed to being, all at once, ploughs, mills, conveyor belts, keyboards; our functioning is increasingly suited to mechanization and technology; we are fully adapted to external devices, conditioned by the market and by capitalism, subject to labor and to the artificial time of work. Today there are attempts to govern our bodies through consumption, through leisure (or the lack of it), and through imposed expectations of self-image and presence — which leads us to eternal dissatisfaction and, at the same time, to an obsession with the physical, with performance, with the control of our own physiologies.

Sometimes we forget that we carry our body with us, a body that every day does everything the same, and, as in Construção, that we are subjected to the nauseating rhythm of repetition. We come to resemble machines and put our bodies to the test, unlearning our most primordial functions and taming our own nature. And yet it is urgent to think about the different possibilities for understanding and using the body — one’s own and that of others — especially in times of unification and hardening of discourses of surveillance, chastity, and repression, at the expense of freedom, autonomy, pleasure, and the expansion of potencies. It is also necessary to summon the atavistic memories of our bones and our flesh, to remember that we always have been, and still are, capable of creating, alone and together. Finally, it is essential that we establish listening — that we learn to hear ourselves and others: it is by listening and imitating, like Echo, that we learn to speak. Whoever is truly capable of listening can become the bearer of the voice, of the exercise of creation.

This exhibition opens gaps in the statutes that regulate the state of bodies. In how we relate to the objects on view, there is no need for literalness or rigor; no fit or solitude is required. Here, there is only affect and the warmth of skin in contact with the hardness of bone, giving rise to the innumerable possibilities the body has of being much more than mere organic matter or biological mechanism. The bodily imminence that the works in Solfejo allow to emerge stands in absolute contrast to the industrial materiality of the exhibition devices, establishing dialectical relations between harmonizations and conflicts arising from the encounter of bodies — at times harmonic, at times dissonant.

[Lyric excerpt omitted for copyright reasons.]

Julia Lima
2019