WHERE WE DO NOT THINK

WHERE WE DO NOT THINK

BsAs (2011) 100cm x 91cm, fotografia digital

Sem título (2012)140cm x 70cm, aço e vidro

Spontaneously, photography permeates my research about the world. When I started looking where my images involvement came from I found that, since childhood, I’ve been interested in the landscapes, geometric shapes, expressions and the human being. I remember my interest in an old camera. At 9 years old I got a Polaroid that witnessed, mainly, a few moments of my daily life. With analog cameras I began to take pictures of trips that I used to make with the school, a concert of folkloric music, padel travel championships and trips abroad.

As I grew up, I became interested in the fragment of the world we live in and that, in an editing way, we elect to be captured by the camera. I was moved by the will to build a memory; an imagistic archive with the supposed claim that these pictures would help me evoke new memories to be revisited. Special situations that could fall into oblivion. Friends, people, objects, places, weather, time: all that captivated the conduct of carrying a compact digital or analog, and later, a professional camera. I found out, later on, that this choice, this fragment-clipping of the world, is not haphazard. I photograph what urges me in the world and which concerns to an important experience, a happening.

Freud, in his paper “The Ego and the Id” - 1923 – points out that the thinking in images is found closer to the unconscious processes and is older, ontogenetic and phylogenetically, than the thinking in words. To some extent, the act of looking is anticipated to the understanding of the word in the development of the human being; and the emotional experience of the individual has been with us since our birth. We elect one of the parts to which direct our attention in everyday life. We are instructed to that.

The display “Where we do not think” presents an installation of glass and steel and 13 images where I emphasize this radical condensation of scenes. In the photographic recording, these two condensed moments comprise, then, a single one. Thus, it breaks up the objectivity matter of photography in recording only what lies in front of the viewer. This photographic series shows what is ahead of the photographer and also what is placed diagonally to him. The photograph goes in crisis. The spectator comes across, realizes and, as an abyss between image and word, builds his own meaning. The meaning for oneself.

Why photographing?

Hence my interest in working on these photographs: not regarding the content or the representability of the elements that compose them. It has to do with the fresh way the photographic recording creates in this new image.

They are photographic instants. A common experience for us all. These are not two different images that are, electronically or by double exposure, superimposed. These are instants. The photographs capture is through drift. An inserted process in the multiple places in the city. The installation aims to bring the condensation experience into the exhibition space.

The structure, made of three glasses with equal dimensions, is positioned in parallel and allows the viewer to see his diffuse image, condensed into new images of himself. These are images that I find peculiar, which we don’t commonly select by being immersed in the everyday rationality. The psychism acquires a limitation when we consider the rational perception. We are, primarily, beings of desires, driven by processes that are beyond rational thinking. We are individuals of processes from “where we do not think”.

Kitchen (2011) 100cm x 71cm, fotografia digital

Sem título (2012)100cm x 67cm, fotografia digital

Bustop (2011)100cm x 73cm, fotografia digital

Tania Rivera*

Image laid over image. In Marcelo Leães’ photography, urban everyday life images duplicate themselves; opening sudden windows upon themselves that transform and refer to something else that is not there (would it be the unconscious? The real?).

The photography discloses, then, its truth: it is not a mere projection of reality on a two dimensional plane. First, it defoliates the real and shows its astonishing plurality. The reality might consist of a complex assembly of infinite facets – which, for most of them, we blind ourselves, in the demand for unifying the world. Suddenly, Leães condensations open our eyes to the presentation of a brief moment in this beautiful and complex superposition game, in this written furniture palimpsest.

As Walter Benjamin said, the picture implies an “optical unconscious”. Over there “where no one thinks,” we shall look at.

If the image is reflected, it is according to, as shown in etymology of reflection, something that repeatedly bends on it. There is no direct passage between the world and image, but a particular inflection, a breach capable of unfolding reality itself (like a glass). In the surprising space in which this bend builds inside itself, in this transparent interval, I am, for a moment, invited to lodge between images. “I think where I am not; therefore I am where I do not think,” said Lacan, reshaping Descartes. Or better: I look at where there is thought; therefore I happen there, would say Leães’ images.

The Place of Transparency

The condensation is the most important mechanism of unconscious labor, along with displacement, which absorbs much less attention of Freud. It consists of overlapping or joining different thoughts in one dream element, forming points where its plot becomes more dense and appears impossible to interpret. It is precisely these opaque areas that lead Freud to speak of “dream’s navel”, a point where he plunges into obscurity and convenes the body and the connection to the other (the navel metaphor is loquacious) to materialize into image. Condensation may be a strange moment of meeting yourself, in the images of the world. According to André Breton, we can say that these photographs remind us that “nothing around us is object, everything is subject to us”.

*Tania Rivera is psychoanalyst, essayist and professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF).

Sem título (2011) 100cm x 66cm, fotografia digital

Sem título (2012)100cm x 67cm, fotografia digital

Crossing II (2012)100cm x 74cm, fotografia digital

Crossing (2012)100cm x 72cm, fotografia digital

Bloco mágico (2011)100cm x 66cm, fotografia digital

Esguio (2012)100cm x 87cm, fotografia digital

Sunsets (2012)100cm x 66cm, fotografia digital

Bloco mágico II100cm x 66cm, fotografia digital

Crossing III (2012)100cm x 67cm, fotografia digital

Nascido em Porto Alegre/RS (1981), o artista vive e trabalha em Porto Alegre, onde desenvolve seu trabalho de fotógrafo e psicanalista. Formou-se em Psicologia pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) e realiza formação em Psicanálise no Centro de Estudos Psicanalíticos de Porto Alegre (CEPdePA).

Exposição individual: “Onde Não Pensamos” (Galeria dos Arcos da Usina do Gasômetro, Prefeitura Municipal de Porto Alegre, Porto Alegre/RS, 2012).

Exposição coletiva: “Bienal B” com o projeto A Fotografia em uma pesquisa-intervenção com o coletivo de jovens da Vila Bom Jesus de Porto Alegre. (Casa do Budha Khe Rhi, Porto Alegre/RS, 2008).

Paulo Ernesto Leães, Maria da Graça Lubisco Leães, Luciano Lubisco Leães, Nathalia García, Gerson Marques, Leo Felipe, Guilherme Dable, Paula Ramos, Lurdes Krás, Marcus Mello, Bernardo Jose de Souza, Juliana Costa, Fábio Cabral, Cristiano Soares, Luiz Antonio Camargo, Beto Santos, Julio Cesar Conte, Sueli Santos, Danilo Christidis, Anderson Astor, Marcos Sari, Bel Cestari, Frederico Vittola, Marcel Dallagnol, Gabriel Pereyron, Prefeitura Municipal de Porto Alegre e Guarda Municipal.

Apoio: Realização:

Marcelo Lubisco Leães

Agradecimentos

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