Fragment II: Reversible Wraps, or Beyond What the Horizon Circles

Climbing to the highest point of the old Marilan factory, the roof of its central building, serves not only for a scenic outlook. Even though from there Rio de Janeiro reveals itself in an unusual horizontality compared to the city’s classic panoramas so often identified with the peaks of its mountains, the small space of that rooftop can be more a point of presence than a point of view.

Thus, when Loren Minzú climbs onto that roof in the Penha neighborhood in scenes of body and secret IV, it is not to reveal a view of the city but to produce a space-time that, once occupied, makes the body, the metropolis, and the cosmos experience themselves in other regimes of relation. Positioned at the angle of the factory with the world’s horizon, beyond being its observer, the artist positions himself as a kind of instrument of communication and contact between its planes and forces. To do so, as in the other works of the trilogy, he calls upon a tentacle-like branch to expand the tactile field between what is skin and what is air, catalyzing their transits and dialogues.

However, in this, which has become the fourth gesture of the set of movements he has been developing since 2020, for a brief second, Minzú also dispenses with that vegetal device and, using his arms and hands in a mudra position, makes his own body the continuity between sky and earth, a connecting gesture that finds a counterpart in the bamboo installation substance-mirage in its triangulation between wall and floor. The fleeting dimension of that scene, an apparition amid the most intense minutes of the video, ends up transforming the figure of his mudra body into a kind of vision, an image whose spectral nature captures us, entwining us in its mysteries.

The scene refers to a vertebral interest in Minzú’s work—the abyss—a space-time of voracity that also captivates the works of Iah Bahia and Siwaju, in which folds, curves, and holes perform abyssal spatialities that do not offer horizons that can serve as lines of stability or fixity. Instead, they throw us into movements of mystery and fear, fascination and disquiet.

This abyssal fervor is not limited to topological investigations but also occurs in color, texture, and light. Thus, if Siwaju’s work has been marked by a craftsmanship of oxidation that bathes his sculptures in a unique color-time, in Fragment II, we can see opacity taking center stage in Loren Minzú’s research as a way to bring sculpture and image, physicality, and vision closer together. Or witness how Iah Bahia’s recent sculptures continue the exercises of cutting and folding present in the frequencies, her paper works, but now combining them with the colors of the fabrics found by the artist at Marilan and the blurring of cement in its unique light-absorbing capacity.

In the wake of PORTICO WIND, conceived as a listening field magnetized by works whose voids dialogue with the whispers and utterances of the winds, in this Fragment II: Reversible Wraps, or Beyond What the Horizon Circles, we propose to investigate the more militant dimensions of the forms that have characterized the works of Minzú, Bahia, and Siwaju.

By occupying four environments of the factory, the works touch the air that surrounds them with a material and formal repertoire that combines tips, weights, edges, splinters, arrows, blades. They explore corners, ceilings, and tears in walls and floors as places for proposing abysses that reverse enchantments and back again. In doing so, Fragment II emphasizes that not everything that surrounds is an embrace.

In the video Cold Weapon, Iah Bahia holds an ice cube. In the uncomfortable heat transfer between her hands and the solid-state water, she shapes an almost pistol that dissolves into drops while numbing the grip performed by the artist. The work insists precisely on this vortex of bodies, spaces, and times in which we witness the transformation of existences. If, on one hand, Iah’s gesture shapes the weapon, it is also the one that dissolves it while undergoing the anesthesia of the ice.

With Bahia, we learn that touching can be violating. Not surprisingly, in Fragment II, the artist brings together works that surround and protect the body and its many parts, alluding to armors, cocoons, shields, and other wraps that become heavy, impregnated with oil, or covered with textures uncomfortable to presence and touch, such as concrete in its roughness.

However, as in the installations and sculptures of Siwaju and Loren, Iah’s works do not launch an attack, do not invade the space of otherness. Like capoeira, they defend themselves by returning the force of the other’s investment against themselves, taking advantage of refractory materials, resistant to invasive, unauthorized touches. Thus, the ethical-aesthetic project that has interested the artist in her preference for dealing with pre-existing materials—often in a state of abandonment among old irons or trash bins—demonstrates another of her political strengths.

Bahia shows that much of the confrontations and struggles take place outside the zones of conflict, far from the spectacularization of violence or the cinematic dimension of war. In her work, adding to the aesthetic force of what already exists is also to occupy and strengthen the trenches and escapes that are already in place and that, as she outlines in Escape Routes, have been ancestrally conceived in the discretion of routines, in the secrecy of daily repeated routes, among those who camouflage themselves in the socially imposed anonymity, in the incendiary silence of what is considered unproductive, old, disposable.

On the other hand, Siwaju’s increasingly complex practice of collecting non-functional metals to build her work finds, in the friction with the idea of a trap, an intense voltage. While it is undeniable that her metallic tips and splinters could lead our gaze to presume that they are sculptural weapons, paying attention to the installation forms of the pieces reveals that the artist is little enthused by the understanding that her works are armaments. On the contrary, her constructions tend to sabotage the premises of warlike ergonomics: Siwaju does not make prostheses for the body, does not create devices to be supported by hands or shoulders.

Her works are things—body-machines—in themselves. Betraying the programmed obsolescence of capitalism, they escaped the industrial production lines of life and, with escape, gained the right to exist by balancing and asserting themselves despite the use (or lack of use) assigned to them. They are dystopian machines whose functionality affects other agencies.

Thus, emancipating themselves ontologically, formally, and politically from the fate of being both waste and objects, her sculptures are eminently affiliated with the concerns of installations, reversing the intentions of weapons into traps by tensioning space and magnetizing it with a kind of readiness for confrontation—whether offensive, defensive, or strategically waiting—that does not require human manipulation to be activated. As the name given to Siwaju’s recent body of work suggests, they are Satellites: they are happening even when nothing seems to be happening.

In this direction are the black holes installed on the floor and wall of the Marilan warehouse in this Fragment II, works that act in, with, and as space. Dug into architectural surfaces, they contribute to the machinic imagery of their poetics with their antennas and metal structures. But, especially, they reinforce the presence of the vortex idea in their work, where circles and other spiral movements warn us of their formal and ontological proximity to whirlpools, mouths, and other concavities capable of devouring or expelling existences and temporalities.

In coexistence with the Antidotes and Armour – Iah Bahia’s sculpture-armors – and with Velocity/Telluric Force, an installation by Loren Minzú that gathers and hoists factory stakes transformed into arrows aimed at the earth, Experiment-Black Hole #1, #2, and #3 form, in the Marilan warehouse, a field of forces that accommodates tensions and fears. There’s a tense breath in the air; we feel time lurking around us; things and bodies are on the verge of moving and perhaps reversing their positions of defense, attack, or strategic waiting.

Reversible wraps, or beyond what the horizon circles, deepen PORTICO WIND, arousing other perspectives on the works of Siwaju, Loren Minzú, and Iah Bahia. Now enjoying a broader coexistence among themselves and with the spaces, memories, and subjects of the Factory Project, the artists build alliances that do not exhaust themselves in this battlefield and its horizons.

If there are those who affirm that the greatest wars are precisely those that occur on the plane of the invisible, we cannot lose sight of the suspicion that the tactics to remain alive in the face of it will similarly not allow themselves to be displayed.