Is it possible to express the heart of a place not so far away?
Like Francis Ponge, I too, for a long time, asked myself the hardest questions, and now I apply myself to the simplest things. In the middle of his poem Introduction to the Object-Oriented Party, Ponge says the following: “They will not know me / they will have no idea of me except through my shell / through my dwelling / through my collections / or rather / since they are weapons / through my panoplies. / Through the accent of my representation of the world.”
This is the connection I draw between the verses of Ponge’s poem and the cosmopoetics constructed by Erick Peres in End of the City. When we pay attention to the artist’s panoplies, we can capture a bit of the atmosphere of the small set of images he has tracked down. Old passport-size portraits that time has not consumed, an official map of the city of Porto Alegre, a few almost illegible notes, aerial photographs that tell us the beginning of the city’s end, a poem written by his mother on a yellowed piece of paper, a [intentionally torn?] photo of a happy couple from some past summer, or a pack of cigarettes from a brand that is no longer in production, etc. These cumulative effects of personal and collective experiences transform into a strange topography populated by ghostly traces, shadows, and other precious signs. It seems to me that, in this work, the hegemonic ideal of clarity is not a goal to be achieved.
Perhaps this is the wave: to play with blurring, practicing a kind of skewed phenomenology of the blur of that which, in a natural way—or not—refuses to play the game of clarity for clarity’s sake. However, the pregnance of these fleeting images, which drag their viewers into a forest of signs, like in an endless guerrilla between appearance/disappearance, fragmentation, evanescence, and other mysteries, gains more density from the technical procedures carried out. Instead of clearing, in the broadest sense of the term, Erick blurs even more, tears, erases, sticks, and unsticks, questioning the meanings of clarity. Like the philosopher Serge Margel, he also performs his archeology of the ghost, relating photography, ethnography, counter-cartography, archive, and artisanal work done with wood. As if it were necessary to give more body to the ghosts of the image, the artist, haunted by his fugitive memory, decides to cut small pieces of wood, engraving onto these cuts the specters that haunt him.
In his desire to re-signify invisible memories, broken narratives, and erased subjectivities, undoubtedly, this type of extreme mental game undertaken by the artist sometimes recalls the dynamics of minkisi statuettes from Bakongo culture. “They are points that mediate protective grace between the living and the dead”—as Robert Farris Thompson, author of Flash of the Spirit, would say. It’s no coincidence, a flash of confluence or coincidence, that Erick Peres used pinus, wood of high quality, resistance, and durability, in the construction of his pieces. Another element of reflection is that this wood refers to a local expression, a characteristic mark of all the unknown neighborhoods and villages at the end of a particular city: Porto Alegre. In fact, in Ipê, Cefer, or Bom Jesus, and throughout the eastern zone, where houses built with this material still abound.
As I got to know Erick Peres, I began to notice how he relates in a very intimate way to the memories of the city, always starting from his own navel in the world, his own end of the city, through somber and muted images. The presence of absence in his work is also a constant haunting. Just like the question of the evanescence of bodies at the city’s end. Consequently, those friends of his, who died for nothing, or almost nothing, may reappear here, making their presence known on the surface of the pinus wood, in the trace of the unreadable, and in the estrangement of things that do not let themselves be seen so easily.