0220

In the Last of the Soviets, journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievitch remarks that history is usually told under the abrasive light of day, therefore subtracting nightlife accounts from any official¹ narrative. She is mostly referring to the often dismissed —no matter how relevant— so many conversations that were held over dinner, during small gatherings at the tiny kitchens of former USSR’ housing projects. If not actual subversive plotting cells, those were spaces where friends could withdraw from the public eyes and ears in comfort, muffling their voices with the sound of music, or by surreptitiously playing the local news radio station. An expedient of communication that enabled the soviets to freely speak about the unspeakable, or the forbidden, without being heard —a domestic device for “encrypting” language, so to speak.

Whilst 0220 —an exhibition of Pablo Accinelli and Karlos Gil— primarily alludes to veiled and muffled nocturnal contexts, it also further explores tacit communication among artworks in a gallery space during dayshift —or even, perhaps, after night falls. If cryptic conversation was a strategy of survival in the USSR, here it stands for a desire to investigate the material culture informing our relentlessly convoluted times, where nothing really stands for what it appears to be. Hence, the present show at The Goma Gallery at once evokes such hermetic atmosphere and the dazed ambiance of an empty bar, nuanced by puzzling, scattered objects whose functions are no longer clear. As in a typically drunk conversation, when words are mumbled and meaning slips through the mind, here we are faced with a trail of misleading clues left behind so as to challenge one’s perception of reality: a neon sign fails to communicate a name, or a brand; metal trays stoically await for drinks to be served; a set of playing cards hide their suits and defy intelligence by depicting monkeys in the guise of humans in rather a sarcastic post-apocalyptic scenario; and so forth. Under the sign of a rather intriguing trickster’s plot, the public is invited to break down a chain of padlocks safeguarding some secret narrative that resists it’s unravelling.

Exhibitions are coded enactments, insofar as they demand from the public to interpret its lexicon in order to extract sense from objects and actions which take place in an architecture otherwise deprived of meaning —that is, generally, the white cube— a space only invested with due agency once inhabited by art. The artistic apparatus staged in a gallery operates as a semantic board, a discursive platform where a diversity of elements, material and immaterial, convey a feeling of uncertainty, instilling interrogation: Are those artworks merely revealing their formal nature or, perhaps, and furthermost, masking their souls and obscure purposes? Are they reproducing language or engendering their own?

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How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings”, that is, greater than the sum of their parts?
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 

In 0220, Accinelli and Gil reassign meaning to objects belonging to an economy of domestic or public use by sequestering them into the realm of artistic language, therefore subverting their original purpose in order to establish a new semantic intercourse. What is at play in this exhibition is an attempt to disrupt a system of objects and its coded nature by shuffling their primary roles. While promoting such ontological rupture, the very idea of meaning is put at stake, and henceforth a reconfiguration of the symbolic world acquires shape, thus enticing a myriad of lateral narratives. 0220 stands for an alter/duplicate reality, a parallel dimension where objects do not obey to a logic a priori established on the grounds of functionality, or of a brazen capitalist equation.

The artworks in this show could well be seen as the leftovers of our time —or perhaps as the sphinxes of a symbolic & material culture— as if the world had come to an end and whatever lasted was just a reminder of our species’ former solitude in the whole of the universe: the mundane signs of human history; lonely entities entertaining the idea of communication. To put it another way, these odd samples of human design displayed in the gallery would be nothing but traces of an existence as dependent on form as on function, if it weren’t for the use of artistic language as a mediator between the tangible and the intangible world.  

Like intruders entering an abandoned venue, the public is compelled to explore ordinary remnants of our civilization, or elements that once conjured up some quotient of meaning derived from human ingenuity and its cultural constructs. For that matter, technology produced by humanity is not just the result of material needs and projections, but also the very element to reshape its own behavior and imagination. As Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley state, “the redesigned world redesigns the designing animal”^2. 

On a rather different note, this collection of artworks could be reminiscent of some sort of pagan ritual, inasmuch as it reveres the entities of day-to-day existence. Conversely, it may well be understood as a set of artifacts revealing the material world besides silent immanence. Be that as it may, here they are, displayed in a gallery, oracles quietly provoking interrogations about what could be lying underneath their bodies, pervading their souls —if they have one, to begin with. Accinelli and Gil’s pieces result more from a culture of appropriation and resignification than from a sense of pure abstract autonomy; they function as triggers to one’s capacity to fathom human’s devious purposes amidst a solid western material culture —one blatantly based on the exchange of ideas for money, money for goods, and faced with scarcity throughout history. Ultimately, what we see in this exhibition is an ensemble of artworks disguised as ordinary objects, interacting with one another, and with the human to a larger extent; a syntactic exercise which brings the symbolic world to a paroxysm, and to an eventual collapse of meaning.

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On the brink of a 3rd World War, of a potential nuclear cataclysm and the consequent pulverization of life on Earth —as António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said this week, “The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”³— 0220 reminds us of humankind’s pursuit for material wealth and grandiloquent achievements vis-à-vis the precarious grounds where ordinary life is subsumed to the chores of daily routine and hedonistic strategies of survival. Afterall, humans are players at odds with the material world, pawns on a checkboard as politically charged as pervaded by sheer, all-so-necessary metaphysical queries; and as such, they carry on playing, seeking for the “who of things”⁴ infused in the design of their own manufactured universe. As formulated by Colomina and Wigley, “What is human in the end is neither the designer nor the artifacts but their interdependency. It is precisely the fully organic condition of technological life, the fact that it is alive, that raises the urgent questions about design. In particular, it raises the question of how, where, and when invention itself was invented. How did that impulse to do things differently arise?”⁵

As for the title of the show, 0220, it could read as an anagram, the gateway for navigating history over the years and centuries behind and ahead us. A time-capsule of sorts, encoding diverse cultural scopes and momentous historical facts, 0220 might just as well work as an index (see appendix) of all-so-many grand or prosaic events that have either forged humankind or taken shape as a result of its contingent relations to technology, and the perishable, unstable nature of both cultural and material resources. 

March 20, 2022
Bernardo José de Souza

[1]ALEXIEVITCH, Svetlana. O Fim do Homem Soviético. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2013.
[2]COLOMINA, Beatriz & WIGLEY, Mark. are we human? notes on an archaeology of design. Zurich, Lars Muller Publishers, 2021.
[3]Consulted on New York Times online publication on the 24nd of March 2022: How will the Ukraine war end?, by Spencer
Bokat-Lindell.
[4]ROSA, João Guimarães. Ficção Completa. Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguilar, 1994, vol I.
[5]COLOMINA, Beatriz & WIGLEY, Mark. are we human? notes on an archaeology of design. Zurich, Lars Muller Publishers, 2021.