A Realidade Morde a Própria Cauda Lucia Prancha

20/06/2013 - 20/07/2013

I have never been there. Everything happened at that moment, when my laptop’s work environment became a Screen Saver. In a kind of curtain that divided two spaces, and up to a moment allowed me to see what was in the other side or at the back, now turned my computer darker and darker.

Moving to the other side I noticed that snakes were coming down from the ceiling, with red back and white bellies, from the scrap at the dunes. Their strait tails clung a fulcrum of perpendicular mirrors that reflected in space what it was around. As my Mac’s screen had folded 45o and in its reflection I could see the XYZ Cartesian coordinates, vertically multiplied. As if there were two worlds, the one up and the one down. But the chances of this being true or real got virtualized really fast.

In this afflux of happenings I saw someone collecting risk cards. A young guy, really tall and thin, controlled the ‘card chain’, this series of narrow cards, perforated and attached by a thread, which seemed to follow a continuous sequence. I remember that while he organized the cards he was saying: “The paper has been perforated to create a pattern from a mathematic proportion 1+1=3 that represented numbers with different values, with different realities… Just not those that we usually know.” I had seen some cards like this in the Covilhã in one of those factories that closed right after April 25th…Now they are museums and universities… In one of this worsted mill museums, a museologist called Helena told me: “This pieces of paper has been invented by a French, Joseph Marie Jacquard, to his jenny, in 1801. With this cards the threads in the loom came in and out through the holes, as if it was a computer program. This simplified a lot the process of textile manufacturing with complex patterns.”

Still at it, one could hear two albino children playing with different kinds of dice at the back. In shapes as a cube, a tetrahedron, an octahedron, a dodecahedron, an icosahedron… In the front they said the little ones were born at the Lençóis Maranhenses Islands… They were part of that people, defamed by certain historical peculiarities. In one side, the aphrodisiac nature with lagoons, beaches and dunes that covered the territory, seafood abundance all year round, but also the place of an elusive, embittered people, condemned to albinism and to the belief in a gone king…

I never saw them. I only heard them. In this zigzag of voices and testimonies it was known that the creatures father collected ox’s tails. He wouldn’t kill them; he’d only take their tails and keep them preciously with the expectation of one day finding that bull with the supposed star on the forehead. About the mother of these children, also an albino, it was known she hanged clothes in white iron structures spiked into one of the 90.000 dunes of the Lençóis Maranhenses. I eventually found out that those white structures, almost invisible in the landscape, had been there since the children were born. Each metal structure had the width of three books, by three Portuguese authors. More precisely, the proportion of the numbers of pages of The Lusiads (1572) by Luiz de Camões, History of The Future (1718) by Preast António Viera and Message (1934) by Fernando Pessoa.

The only thing I remember is that this day I was wearing a t-shirt with a photograph of Rui Reininho from the GNR singing Portugal na CEE, in a concert in the 80’s in Lisbon.

About the artist:
Lúcia Prancha (Coruche, 1985). Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Graduated in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Portugal (2009) and the University of São Paulo, Brazil (2012). Her first solo show “O sol que emite uma luz negra” was shown at Red Bull House of Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2012). Amongst her recent group shows stand out: “Say what you have to say, put it on the table and walk away… and see what it does”, Baginski Galeria / Projectos, Lisboa, Portugal (2012); “Princípios Flexor”, Galeria Gramatura, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); “TEXT´o-&-figura”, curated by Rolando Castellon, Museo Nacional de Costa Rica (Museo de los Niños), San José, Costa Rica (2010). Her residencies include: Residências ZDB, Zé dos Bois, Lison, Portugal (2013 and 2009); Red Bull House of Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2012); FAAP, Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil (2010).