Flavia Regaldo
Publication produced in 2023 at Oficina do Cego, in Lisbon. It brings together images taken in 2022 during incursions to Mount Etna, in Sicily, within the framework of the In Situ art residency. The text, by Gui Vernize, was developed in the same year during a writing exercise proposed by the artist at the Movimento residency, on Terceira Island (Azores), exploring myths of origin and themes such as creation, love, and death through volcanic elements.
Printed and produced entirely by hand using screen printing and letterpress.
Publication 2023
dimensions: 23x32cm
print run: 60 copies
text: Guilherme Vernize
hand-printed using screen printing and letterpress at Oficina do Cego / Lisbon
After Departure
After Departure is a work that delves into the mineral matter and its human-cosmic dimensions. A work about time, mountains, and affections. A journey guided by printmaking and nourished by photography, video, sound, and text.
I come from Minas Gerais, in Brazil, a state where the disappearance of mountains due to extractivism is a historical constant. The project After Departure originates from previous works related to mountains, stones and the colonial ground. The works explore ways of symbolising contrasts between dimensions and erasures. Between natural time and human time, between construction and disposal. Here, magnitudes oppose and merge. Human time joins cosmic time through the extent of its mythology, tales and wonderings. The counting of geological time accelerates with the collapses of the Anthropocene. In several of my works, this dual perspective is central to understanding historical relationships and the constitution of collective memories and fictions.
The journey of After Departure begins with my personal narrative, marked by the sensitive collapse of a long-standing love and artistic partnership, coinciding with the landslide of a large stone in the house shared with my partner in the mountains of Minas Gerais, our common research space. The fall was consolidated by the political collapse of my country that same year, the mark of yet another erosion. Fleeing through other mountain ranges, the paths open up to explore new fictions of body-geology.
Hole: in Minas Gerais, the stones are devoured. Blood-red ore is extracted, travelling along new routes, distinct from those once traversed by gold.
The Tapir Head was an Ox: in my new home, the rocks mimic the movement of the sea.
Eruption, About Affections, Roar and Breakers: forever, volcanoes explode, destroy and fertilise the earth. A perpetual cycle of non-linear history.
Vertigo and Lapse: the melting of glaciers, the fear of the end manifests itself as social vertigo.
A project that seeks to capture the movement of the mountains.
In both lands, new perspectives on love. Reconstruction can only be mediated by affection.
About Affections
24 pages and 1 poster
23x32cm
60 copies
Manual binding cover with dry letterpress
Inner pages hand-printed using screen printing and letterpress
text_ Guilherme Vernize
video
About Affections
Guilherme Vernize
About Affections
Guilherme Vernize
A text produced through unconscious writing, based on an exercise proposed by the artist during the ‘Movimento’ artist-in-residence programme, held on Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal.
To create is to explode and spread. The consequence is something new, which occupies the space of what was already there. Eruptions have always been part of the whole and volcanoes, spokesmen for the mountains, spit the heat of the earth into the sky. The lava melts, dries and turns into stones and walls for the inhabitants here. We create because we were once created, and we erupt when the magma no longer fits inside the mountain.
Before the first morning the power of creation was locked under the ground. What good is magic, when it is trapped under the hard shell of the earth? But then, when the fireballs came down from the sky - spat out by something foreign - the holes were made. 3 balls formed 3 holes in 3 mountains and the island's blood poured out, moistened the dry soil and the first tree sprouted, the first river flowed and the first cloud rose into the sky. In the veins of every inhabitant lives the lava that explodes out of volcanoes and mouths.
The earth trembles and announces an end, mountains pour their hot blood and in return want the blood that is ours. We bleed and mourn, the end of what once was. Life and death are the bed and the surface of the river, and so are lava and stones. We mourn, but never complain, for we know that the spilled blood only overflows because it exists. Without water there is no island, without lava there is no ground.
We die because we live, we explode because we live in peace. We cry because we smile and we never, ever question the capacity of the end, to create beginnings and open holes in the ground, like the 3 fireballs that fell from the sky to grant us access to the magic of the earth. Sorrow is only the reminder that we have something good, which is why when volcanoes erupt we applaud and cry, of sadness as well as happiness.