How do we inscribe thoughts that do not yet have the structure to be communicated through a rational exercise, such as writing? We can substitute writing with any other type of exercise in communicating ideas, and in all these possible questions lies latent the same starting point: how to materialize desire?

This exhibition is part of an ongoing curatorial research project that began in 2019 entitled La historia de las montañas (The history of the mountains). The two research axes are structured around the process of emancipation and the creation of  imaginations. I understand the latter as structures of symbolic and material order that allow the organization and management of the life of living beings. In the last year, the research has focused in depth on the perceptual system of the human species and ways in which it could be expanded through aesthetic thinking. It considers under the premise that, if we continue to perceive the planet in the same way, the imaginations stirred will end up being very similar to the structures that we have created so far.

Although we tacitly recognize that the imagination in which we live is exhausted and that, from different coordinates, the human species is pushing to concretize other ways of existing, this is not enough; desire needs to be touched–the vital force. As Suely Rolnik points out: “we will have to look for ways to access the power of creation in ourselves: the birth of the drive movement that mobilizes actions of desire in its different destinies”. By touching desire, which in this project is assumed as a reconciliation with movement, we achieve the interception between emancipation and the creation of imaginations. This being the case, how can we bring our bodies closer to operating through constant movement, to create imaginations different from the current ones? 

de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas (from underwater mountains fire makes islands) brings together different forms of aesthetic knowledge from around the world that are linked to strategies created by human beings to reconcile with the constant movement, as aesthetic tools that allow us to access our vital force. Thinking and desiring freedom beyond imaginations based on the principles of the stable and of the binary have been a common denominator in various human communities. I refer to the materialization of these reflections as  “aesthetic tools”; these are works of art of a different nature with the power to touch desire. The intention with this project is to trace the presence of these strategies and tools in contemporary art practices and by putting them in relation, asks: how do these works affect our bodies and the ideas of the possible?

The project functions as a refuge space, as Marilia Loureiro states in her essay Captura e fuga: notas para imaginar espaços-refúgio: “a refuge space on the other hand, functions somehow from opacity, to preserve and care for the practices that take place there, practices that do not necessarily become public events, but that exist as art (…) the refuge space seeks people who not only come to observe and contemplate, but who can effectively use, compose and participate in its space-time”. Drawing from this idea of the refuge space, de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas is organized as three mountain ranges. The first contains two islands: this exhibition in São Paulo and a video screening in Santo Domingo. The second  is a single island: a publication that compiles, shares and translates reflections by linguists, curators and writers who have been key in the research.The third and last is an underwater mountain-island: a public programming of conversations focusing on  the creation of imaginations in the human species.

Together, the artworks, texts and conversations conjure a fire. A fire so intense and visceral,  it causes enough movement inside the planet to break through the crust of the underwater mountains. After  long, constant movement with water, the fire modifies the structure of these mountains by accruing more and more materials, until the mountains begin to appear on the surface of the water. Those living beings that can only see the surface of the water assume that this is something unrelated to all other geographic masses. The islands–as human species calls the visible part of the underwater mountains–are the spaces of endemism and diversity par excellence; they contain different worlds within the same planet. Interestingly, the creation of so much diversity is that the islands create the conditions for living beings from other latitudes to coexist and, at the same time, for their own beings to coexist outside of them. That is why it is so important for creating imaginations different from the world in which we live; their existence and the life of their living beings, do not rule out the existence of other islands and other living beings. There are very large islands such as Brazil, islands that move all the time like Japan, islands that grow and shrink and, in that dance, they serve as a link for the fire to continue on its way. A path of slow rhythms, like the one narrated by Félix Servio Ducoudray on the formation of Cabritos Island, “is the result of a long, patient and very slow task, the kind that sometimes seems useless because they are impossible but at the end of the struggle proved to be effective”.

How do we inscribe thoughts that do not yet have the structure to be communicated through a rational exercise, such as writing? We can substitute writing with any other type of exercise in communicating ideas, and in these possible questions lies latent the same starting point: how to materialize desire?

The works in the exhibition at Pivô explore the link and the potential between contemporary aesthetic thought and the generation of increasingly opaque subjectivities. The exhibition is physically organized as many nucleuses, where through each reflections and artists from different coordinates of the planet converge. Through these investigations, they incite the suspension of our bodies, just like when you jump into the ocean and your body, looking for air, pushes itself onto the surface. It is, perhaps at that moment, when we begin with short and unforeseen movements to approach the possibility, that our bodies also seek the water, inhabit it. Then as we submerge, little by little, this movement that suddenly appears and disappears allows us to sway and begin a relationship with the constant movement of the ocean.