SPINNING AROUND ONESELF

Duo The works of Gleb Amankulov and Andreia Santana come together in this space and time given to us. My main interest is that both carry a series of artistic, social, and political inputs attached to sculpture practice. Selecting a precise series of works by Andreia and juxtaposing them with a series of sculptures by Gleb that partially share the same materials helps to cloud (to trigger psychologically the desire to bring together) two distinctive approaches. Andreia‘s sculptures replicate, by hand, industrial objects. Her handwork and poetic flux contradict the nature of the „depicted object,“ which is reduced in size to a domestic relation with our bodies. Underlining the quality of industrial versus handcraft, the scaffolding interior spaces are covered with glass that receives handwritten and hand-drawn graffiti or wall marks in one hand and nestles speculative creatures on the other. Gleb‘s work is made with industrial materials and objects bought in second-hand shops, markets, and online platforms. These objects are disassembled and reassembled as provisory sculptures. Without cutting, perforating, gluing, or using nails or screws, these sculptures come together with Andreia‘s works. In the same way, a poetic gesture transforms the industrial into an object that is a receptacle of emotions and, or stimulations. The Invisible(s) A good deal of the stimulations and emotions mentioned above are invisible. They may have triggered the artists‘ decisions, and they can affect us without stating what is moving or disturbing in them, like a brushstroke on a canvas. In Gleb‘s work, one can imagine a series of narratives imprinted in these objects before being acquired by the artist. One can add particular aesthetics that belong to previous households or offices, acknowledging their past lives. These objects were discarded because of the loss of their utilitarian quality, or merely by aesthetic choice, by someone who wants to move towards a new self, as if these apparently empty objects could provide a promised upgrade in their mood or social condition. Andreia‘s scaffoldings unfold narratives observed by the usage of these structures by New York City‘s inhabitants. This „second skin“ of the city‘s architecture, consummate within the passage from temporary to permanent, carries stories from protecting passers-by from the construction work in the buildings and those searching for shelter underneath. In a dichotomic way, they also relate to remnants left by those who can afford to leave in those apartments, even if temporarily. The glass panels carry scribbles, messages of love and hate, and animals that were visible or invisible until now - some new inhabitants or invisible inhabitants in our world, opening up the possibilities of life and interrelationships on our planet. The social and political The remake of industrial objects enlaces with another series of past works by Andreia: metal sculptures that made the gesture of pause or silence made by orchestra conductors visible. These suspensions of time and production were rehearsed and built in the contest of a factory during an artistic residency. A prominent critique of labor and the oppressive, coercive aspects of life keeps hovering around these objects arriving at the present. Other works from the past, echoed in this Roof of Mouth series, are the Soul Houses, which give space for the invisible forms of life within objects in blown glass sculptures, and Skin Echoes, an installation alluding to feminism and its potential for transformation and empowerment. The current sculptures on view are what these previous works and the artist‘s future work will allow them to be. Their social and political layers of understanding are tangible and possible to address, transforming our perception of these objects. Gleb‘s activity as an artist reminds me of Agnes Varda‘s documentary The Gleaners and I from 2001. He‘s a gleaner of cultural sorts, rescuing discarded materials to do his work. But this seems short for the open wound these objects carry. This wound is a social gap when oscillating between a certain beauty, or the access to a creative act within these objects, and their provenance, social and economic conditions often obliterated by artists. Class issues have been pushed aside to a secondary problem in cultural production in general. In Sartre‘s critique of true intellectuals presented on Between Existentialism and Marxism, the author states that the intellectual (when coming from lower social and economic conditions), invited to the bourgeoisie is meant to forget their locus, their experience, which could derive towards new narratives and work nomenclatures. This idea serves as an image to think of both works that deal with class issues by offering a step in both sides of the world where they participate. Choreographies Both artistic practices imply precise choreographies in space. Andreia‘s work provides structure to space by presenting sculptures in the four cardinal points of the gallery (entrance, last wall, and side walls). With a tilt to the side of these cardinal points, the three scaffolding works are below the canonized height, something that implies our body bends when looking at them and further bends (thus becoming aware of our body as part of the receptor of the work) to see its details. Given this framework, one continues with Gleb‘s experience of similarity and difference in gestures or possible choreographies implied in his works. Leaning towards the floor and raising our heads up are companion gestures to the snake-like movement in space. These movements produce an experience different from those provided by images scrolling through the axis screen-eye-brain. Space All artworks carry a high degree of transparency. Glassworks operate as filters, adjourning other forms of visibility to the space. This is considering absolute veracity in language or clarity as something less possible to grasp than narrative and fiction. The metal frames perform an editing movement in the walls of the exhibition space, switching between the visual realm in Andreia‘s work and the physical realm in Gleb‘s sculptures. Simultaneously, space hosts the work and becomes an extension of it by bearing embedded sculptures. This gives the sense of movement or a certain history of materiality, as Karen Barad professes in Posthumanist Performativity, by borrowing the memory of these sculptures from the wall towards an imprint onto the glass. A similar form of space assimilation - as a workspace - is found when a fish glue binding coat is applied to one of the exhibition space windows. Glebs‘ relation between architecture and space appears as reverberations, positioning these sculptures and their forthcoming relations as an ongoing rehearsal. This idea grants a dreamy vision of his practice as performance. Title The title refers to the motion of a screw. „Parafuso“ - the Portuguese word for screw, refers to the movement in which the „passista“ (solo samba dancer) spins their body so fast, launching it into the air, that is barely able to apprehend any image around due to rapid confusion of the senses. According to Paola Berenstein Jacques in “A estética da Ginga” (The swing aesthetics), this results in the experience of the favelas (or slums, umbrella name for working-class neighborhoods in Brazil) for its non-inhabitants. This book starts from a transcendental gesture - Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica‘s climbing up the „morro“ (hill) that became his locus and place of speech, shifting from the bourgeois Brazilian modernism milieu to the popular aesthetics that carry new artistic, architectural, and by extension, socio-cultural aspects. Spinning around oneself renders a slow movement that aims to open up readings between the canonized and commoditized readings of sculpture towards a transversal position where the artistic has a mimetic relation with social and political ethics.