Fragment I: PORTICO WIND, by Clarissa Diniz

This is not just another factory, nor is it strictly an exhibition. The first of the fragments conceived by Iah Bahia, Loren Minzú, and Siwaju in the old facilities of the lingerie brand Marilan in Penha, PORTICO WIND gives shape to the space-time transition of what was once a clothing factory and now regains its inventive vocation by experimenting with new functions and uses.

If we name this moment Project Factory today, it is because in this industrial plant, with its machinery and raw materials, the artists have been sharing their creative processes since March 2023. They contribute to the history of the place and elaborate, from their practices and bodies, other intentionalities and meanings for the social and cultural inscription of this factory in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro.

Deactivated in 2015, it is in the fertile presence of Iah, Siwaju, and Loren that the former Marilan becomes an accomplice in the ongoing revival. It transforms its old dining rooms into studios; its fabrics, metal shelves, and other technologies into gifts for artistic ingenuity; its traces and subjects into interlocutors; its environments into exhibition and experimentation spaces; its territory and neighborhood into new horizons of belonging and political responsibility.

In dialogue with the memories of Marilan and with Absolon Matos, Diego Araújo, José Laurindo, William Porto, Wagner Freitas, and William Reis – employees who continue to work in the Factory today – the artists update and strengthen the creative vocation of the hundreds of people (especially women) who, over approximately 50 years, manufactured panties, bras, or swimsuits in a continuous experimentation of designs, cuts, molds, stitches, colors, fabrics. In doing so, they approach a history of work marked by gender, class, and racial relations, imagining and practicing reparative and redistributive practices of knowledge and values that take creation as their guiding thread.

Thus, Siwaju, Loren, and Iah establish Fragment I: PORTICO WIND – in current partnership with NONADA Galeria – from within, as well as from the Factory, its environments, riches, conflicts, and stories. Following the coexistence and learning of this space-time of invention, criticism, and collective dialogue, in what seems like an exhibition but is, in truth, an expanded studio, the artists present sculptures, installations, interventions, engravings, videos, and objects that witness both the singularities and convergences of their works.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, their research provides an intriguing view of the recent production of Brazilian art that is interested in establishing a symmetrical (perhaps reciprocal) relationship with materialities that, like paper, iron, wood, or ceramics, have been called upon for creative processes from the subjectivity of their physicalities, that is, as alterities.

We are not facing extractivist aesthetic projects in which materials are instrumentalized as resources to be appropriated – when not expropriated – by authoritarian hands and gestures. On the contrary, objects, substances, and other elements are not seen as de-subjectivized things but as existences.

A term dear to Loren Minzú, existences refer to the ontic dimension of the presences that integrate their works, such as clay or branches that agree to be touched by the artist, establishing with him a field of relationships that find, in the form of works of art, one of the many conjunctions that are not only possible but fundamentally desirable. It is from this interest in living materialities that Iah Bahia and Siwaju are dedicated to fabrics or metals inscribed with the silent memories of their own existences, such as rust, dirt, or wear. Instead of buying new materials for their sculptures, arrangements, or installations, they have ethically and politically committed themselves to act with what already exists, even in states of invisibility, silencing, destruction, or disposal among old irons and trash bins.

In this way, their works become territories for aesthetic insurgencies contrary to the economy of obsolescence. Politically, their gestures do not adhere to the hygienist fantasy of a creation ex nihilo (arising “from nothing”). On the contrary, ethically, they are committed to continuing to transform what has never ceased to be open and in a plural process of recreation: an ethical-aesthetic perspective now experienced in the Project Factory. It is from the core of these ontological as well as social concepts that, in this Fragment I: PORTICO WIND, we challenge the public to expand the usual technical-formal approaches to the works of Bahia, Minzú, and Siwaju to experience them not from their striking materialities but primarily from their negatives, reverses, fluctuations, hollows, gaps.

By doing so, we realize that not only are their corporealities imbued with agency, but also their emptiness. Radiating in their own emptiness, such fullness of agency approaches a central concept of Lygia Clark’s work and some constructive traditions of Brazilian art: the “full-empty,” which “contains all potentialities,” being “the act that gives it meaning.” However, as revealed in Body and Secret Scenes II and III (Loren Minzú), the series A<->F (Siwaju), or 1#experiência-breu (Iah Bahia), these voids are not passive vacuums waiting for significant acts that would fill them or attribute ontological meanings to them. They are, on the contrary, existences in themselves. They are “full of air,” as Gilberto Gil deciphers in Empty Glass (1974), a song then recorded by Chico Buarque: “It’s always good to remember / That an empty glass / Is full of air.” Therefore, engraving, sculpting, folding, modeling, or inhabiting emptiness is to make wind, move the mass of air that, visualized in the oxidation that delicately embraces Siwaju’s sculptures, fills and welcomes everything.

Identifying with Gil’s dense emptiness, the artists reveal how criminal the presumption of desertification that underlay the colonial endeavor was (and still is), arguing that the territories presumed to be “authorized” to occupy were uninhabited and emptied. A rhetoric of invasion canonized in the lyrics that Vinícius de Moraes composed for Brasília, Symphony of Dawn.