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Studies in Gender and Sexuality

ISSN: 1524-0657 (Print) 1940-9206 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hsgs20

Call Me Text, Just Text*

Eleonora Fabião

To cite this article: Eleonora Fabião (2018) Call Me Text, Just Text*, Studies in Gender andSexuality, 19:1, 55-68, DOI: 10.1080/15240657.2018.1421304

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2018.1421304

Published online: 12 Feb 2018.

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Call Me Text, Just Text*Eleonora Fabião, Ph.D.

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

ABSTRACTThis text introduces and discusses the MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT), acollective action conceived by Brazilian performance artist Eleonora Fabiãoand realized November 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Performed by 4,700 bricks, 3books, a group of 7 artists-collaborators, gallery visitors, the cultural center’sstaff, a truck and moving workers, among others, the action started atCentro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Municipal Art Center HélioOiticica, located in downtown Rio) and ended in front of the Casa dasMulheres da Maré (Women’s House at Maré, located in one of the city’smajor conglomerates of slums). During 7 days people, bricks, books, andtruck, among others, moved one another through varied spaces, tangibleand affective matters, and performative dimensions.

Here we are. Finally. After all that happened and continues happening and will continue to happen.All of us, here. The telephone rings, there is always a call, no escape, news about the kid, there isalways a kid, a sun, a cloud, the forest, the road, a corner, the other side, the inside, stairs inside, adoor, bricks, books, and movement. Movement, movement, and movement.

Here we are and, as always, with no adequate pronoun to say the kind of “we” we actually are. A“we” that independent of particular desires and modes of desiring includes “us” all. Not only myselfand you and all others but all. Us all. All there is. We all. Personal pronouns cannot tell. Maybe it isnot a matter of employing pronouns to express the kind of “we” we are endlessly becoming but ofrespectfully acknowledging the fact that our co-materiality is a matter of fact, that our co-existence isthe matter that acts, that our co-constituency is the matter that matters, that difference is what we allhave in common. We, the countable and the uncountable things. The counted and the uncounted.Here we are. Finally. After all that happened and continues happening and will continue to happen.

•

This thing that I want to tell you about came first as an idea. An idea-thing. I (pronouns are drivingme crazy today) had a thought; or rather, I (pronouns are driving me crazy) was thought by an idea,or still, I (pronouns are driving me) was attacked by it. The result was the following performativeprogram:1

CONTACT Eleonora Fabião, Ph.D. ef383@nyu.edu Escola de Comunicação UFRJ – Avenida Pasteur 250, Praia Vermelha,Rio de Janeiro/22290-240/Brasil.

*A version of this essay was published in Spanish at Efímera Revista Vol. 8, Núm. 9 (2017): http://www.efimerarevista.es/efimerarevista/index.php/efimera/article/view/651Elsewhere I wrote on performative programs: “I call this compositional procedure ‘program’ inspired by Gilles Deleuze and FélixGuattari’s use of the word in their famous essay November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? In thattext, the authors suggest that the program is the ‘motor of experimentation’. A program is a motor of experimentation becauseits practice creates body and relations between bodies; it activates affective and poetic circulations that were unthinkable beforethe program’s formulation and realization; it triggers negotiations of belongingness; it de-naturalizes everything that is touchedby it. A program is a motor of psychophysical and political experimentation. Or, to quote a word so dear to Hannah Arendt’spolitical and theoretical project, programs are initiatives. Very objectively, the program is the performance’s enunciation: a set ofpreviously stipulated actions, clearly articulated and conceptually polished, that will be carried out by the performer, by the

© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

STUDIES IN GENDER AND SEXUALITY2018, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 55–68https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2018.1421304

To occupy with 4,700 bricks, 3 books, and 7 people part of the ground floor and surroundings of the CentroMunicipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica, located in downtown Rio de Janeiro)for 7 days in a row. To turn off the electric power in the galleries (no lights, no air conditioning), to open alldoors and windows, and to paint one wall in 100% yellow. From Monday to Sunday, bricks, books, and peoplewill move and be moved. Compositions will be made and unmade, spaces will be formed and unformed. Helpfrom whoever wants to help will be fully accepted. We will construct, keep constructing, keep learning how toconstruct. In the middle of the week a conversation circle will be opened. On the last day the bricks and thebooks will be transported to the Casa das Mulheres da Maré (Women’s House at Maré), a project of the Redesde Desenvolvimento da Maré NGO (Networks of Maré’s Development Non-governamental Organization). Thebricks will become the fourth and last floor of the House, and the books will become part of the library.

This program became an action performed between Monday, October 31, and Sunday, November 6,2016. The action ended with the handling of the books and the stacking of the bricks in front of theWomen’s House. The action’s title, MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT), not only refers to theplace where it mainly took place, the HO Municipal Art Center, but also evokes and honors the artistthat names that place: Hélio Oiticica. The one who once wrote, “The object is the discovery of theworld at every instant. . . . The conceptualization and formulation of the object is nothing more thana bridge for the discovery of the instant, OBJECTact.”2 The one who once said, “To create is not theartist’s task. [The artist’s task] is to change the value of things.”3 Nothing more, nothing less. Thething is to change the thing-value of things. HO, the experimental experimentalist, the worldlyalchemist, was in search of a new objectivity and, consonantly, seeking for new modes of subjectiva-tion and existence. Nothing more, nothing less. This was his thing.

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The Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (CMAHO) is located about 12 kilometers away from theWomen’s House at Complexo daMaré—one of Rio’s largest grouping of shantytowns, with approximately130,000 inhabitants. Located in the so-called Center of the city, the CMAHO occupies a three-story-highneoclassic building originally constructed to house a music conservatory. Considering its inaugurationyear, 1872, it is likely that this edifice was erected with slave labor. Nowadays, it is surrounded by stores ofproducts “made in China,” bookstores of new and used, contemporary art galleries, theaters, bars, parkinglots, churches, brothels, and drug sale points. Located at the corner of Luís de Camões Street (the 16th-century Portuguese poet who wrote, “In great dangers, fear is often greater than danger”) and ImperatrizLeopoldina Street (the Austrian archduchess of the Habsburg House who married to the prince heir of thePortuguese throne, Pedro de Alcântara, and was one of the main articulators of Brazil’s independence in1822), the CMAHO houses exhibitions, workshops, and cultural events. Regrettably, the space is poorlysupported by the current prefecture and survives the deliberated political neglect thanks to the efforts of itsmanagers and collaborators.

Note that all of the aforementioned is not just historical and contextual data to situate the HOMOVEMENT project. The long-gone music conservatory, the slaves’ labor, the Portuguese poet andthe Austrian archduchess; the façade’s stone arches, the gallery’s granite floor, and the sidewalk’sblack and white stones; the experimental vigor and suprasensorial vision of Hélio Oiticica—his work,pallet, words, and politics; the plastic stuff “made in China” and the circulation of necro-values; thecocaine, the crack, and the circulation of narco-values; the pimping and the circulation of porn-values; the calculated political dismantlement and the trivialization of neoliberal atrocities; theproduction and dissemination of many different kinds of art, its trans-valuations and perpetuations,all this, all this and more, much more, are not simply contextual data and historical information.

public, or by both without any previous rehearsal. In other words, the program’s temporality is very different from that of theshow, of the rehearsal, of improvisation, of choreography. . . . It is the program/enunciation that makes possible, orientates, andmoves experimentation. I propose that the more clear and concise the enunciation is, the more fluid the experimentation willbe” (Fabião, 2013).

2Oiticica (1968), pp. 26–27 (this and the following translations are mine).3Oiticica (2009), p. 108.

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They are forces. Very concrete forces that generate a field. A force field formed by human andnonhuman, architectonic and discursive, tangible and intangible, visible and invisible assemblages.The HO MOVEMENT moved in this thick zone: a trans-temporal force field of sociopolitical andhistoric-affective circulations.

•

The first move of the HO MOVEMENT was to acknowledge the CMAHO and its surroundingsnot as a site specific to be occupied but as a highly charged zone of conflictive and mobile forcesto move with. Accordingly, all matters in that space are not inert occupants but active partakersmobilized by the trans-temporal, sociopolitical, and historical-affective currents that crisscrossthe space that they, themselves, constitute in their continuous metamorphosis. Space and matterare radically co-implicated and share a common element: movement; they co-constitute oneanother in their endless “intra-action.” Karen Barad once wrote in an essay beautifully titledWhat Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice, “A radical openness, an infinityof possibilities, is at the core of mattering. . . . Matter is never a settled matter.”4 The radicalopenness of matter (despite its thickness) and the radical thickness of space (despite its open-ness), their endless confusion (and combustion), animate the HO MOVEMENT. AMOVEMENT that, bizarrely, asks itself and asks us what is the matter of space. The telephonerings. The matter of space. What a thing. I feel strange thinking it. Thinking of it. Everythingbecomes strange. Good sign.

•

I (again this pronoun, this inaccuracy, this linguistic claustrophobia) sit on the sidewalk at thecorner of Luís de Camões and Imperatriz Leopoldina streets. I lean my back against the wall ofthe 19th-century building feeling my lungs, air inside, lungs, air outside. Heavy smells,cigarette smoke, barbecue and urine. I look at the stores, at the people; their hands, myhands, hands. On my side, a kid almost bursts out laughing and runs away. I close my eyes

Figure 1. Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (photo from www.panoramio, a photo-sharing community).

4Barad (2012), p. 16.

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and the viscosity of this specific place becomes perceptible. “Space” here is also a matter ofghostly matter. Space as ghostly mass where we, the so-called living beings, move and aremoved. I am reminded of Avery Gordon’s notion of “ghostly matters” (1997): there are pastsocial forces that continue shaping present lives. Here, now. The HO MOVEMENT recognizesand assumes the subtle and the brutal materiality of the phantasmatic. The HO MOVEMENTis an investigation and a confrontation with the materiality of space (be it whatever itmight be).

•

4,700 clay bricks. More than nine tons of material and one fact: the present sociopoliticaldismantlement of Brazil enacted by local, state, and federal governments supposedly represent-ing and defending the rights of the people, with the support of conservative and reactionarygroups. Bricks made of earth, water, air, and fire. Each measuring 20 x 20 x 10 cm and piercedwith 10 holes (there are bricks with 6 or 8 holes but, considering the circumstances, the moreentrances and exits the better). The bricks are very firm and very variable—they vary not onlyfrom one batch to another but also within the same batch. They absorb water tremendously—hands get very dry and it is necessary to drink about three glasses of water every hour and ahalf. They have great adherence, capacity of accommodation, and mechanical resistance—rarely break but shed a good amount of dust. They are excellent thermic mediators—absorbwarmth during the day and release it during the night.

3 books. All copies of Actions—a publication that discusses several works I have performed in thestreets of many cities since 2008. The book is also, in itself, material for new actions (like the bricks).5

As it is printed on its cover,

It is forbidden to sell this book. Actions was made to be given, received, traded, lost, found, purposely lost,donated, lent, passed on. Neither bought nor sold. Even if you find it in a bookstore, you can acquire it at zerocost; just ask the bookseller. I will leave some copies on bus’, subways’, and ferryboats’ seats; on town squaresand churches’ benches; on tables at coffee shops, bars, and nightclubs; on the ground at universities, museums,galleries. I will also leave copies in government offices, banks, supermarkets, gyms, and on car hoods in parkinglots and garages. And, on pieces of colored cloth, they will be left at beaches, waterfalls, and riverbanks. Severalcopies will be sent to Brazilian and international libraries or handed out in specific events. I can affirm that thisbook enjoys movement immensely. The proposal is to continue the performative movement launched on thestreets. What matters is the art of initiative.

Actions has no price and, as such, it does not circulate as a commodity. The book is a gift and,therefore, it is not possible to steal it. It is, by definition, unsalable and unstealable.

Countless questions were also material. After all, performances unfold from questions topose more questions. The confrontation with questions is the work itself. What is important,or what is fundamental to add to our world today? What actions, what images, what sensi-bilities, what relational modes? What experiences do we want to proportionate to ourselvesand to others? To our co-citizens? What acts construct the cities where we want to live? Whatmodes of production (objective and subjective) are adequate to each work? What economies(material and immaterial) do we want to generate from our actions? And when, exactly, toperform? Where? Inside or outside art spaces? How far outside? How deep inside? And towhom? With whom? Which affects will the work be able to circulate and which ones will it becapable of blocking? And always, that disturbingly basic question, that embarrassingly recur-rent one: what do we want performance to be and to move?

5Actions (2015) was co-edited with André Lepecki. Besides my writings and several images, Actions is composed of articles byBarbara Browning, Pablo Assumpção B. Costa, Adrian Heathfield, André Lepecki, Felipe Ribeiro, Tania Rivera and Diana Taylor. Formore information access http://www.eleonorafabiao.com.br/index_en.html

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The collaborators invited to work daily at CMAHO were dance, performance art, video,film, and theater artists. Citizens of Rio de Janeiro, friends, most of them participants ofprevious works: André Telles, Elilson, Felipe Ribeiro, Maria Acselrad, Mariah Valeiras, andViniciús Arneiro (André and Felipe also photographing and filming). We were eager toexperience that performative program, its affects and effects, its tensionings and distensions.We were looking for encounters and exchanges of all kinds. Many other people came either tolook or to put their hands to work—some for a few minutes, others for whole days, and a fewfor almost the entire week. We all had to permanently negotiate and recreate our positions,posture, perspectives, expectations, sensibility, and desires. We were the human matter (be itwhatever it might be) of the HO MOVEMENT.

Bricks, books, questions, people, program, phantasmatics, determination, frictions, negotiations,and our dire Brazilian sociopolitical situation. We were all there; we were many more there. And Ikeep searching for an adequate word to say the kind of “we” we actually were.

•

Each day had a title according to its respective sculptural proposition: 7 days, 7 titles, 7 propositions.However, at the very moment we concluded each proposition, the construction was already a ruinbecause it was built exclusively to be unbuilt. Or still, even during the construction process,transience was already shaping things. Transience was the only stable element.

•

In terms of performance art, to experience is not enough; it is necessary to experience the experience,to experience the doubled experience. And, in the HO MOVEMENT, the motivation was toexperiment the experience of experiencing an experience collectively.

•

Weights, volumes, quantities, and timings were previously and carefully calculated with the helpof an architect, Anna Backheuser. Techniques of stacking and “tying” I learned with anexperienced master builder, Mr. Aurimar Nascimento (“tying” is a technical term; dependingon the way we pile bricks, they “tie” to one another more or less firmly). So, mathematically, weknew that all imagined proposals were constructible. However, we did not know how to do thembecause none of us had ever worked with so many bricks. That is, the doses of knowing and not-knowing were also meticulously calculated. We would have to learn together, to think dialogi-cally, to test ways at every step.

•

The counts were uncountable. How many bricks are needed to cover the ground of the fourgalleries? How many seconds are necessary to move a brick over 5 meters? What is the measureof a neat line composed of all bricks? Using no cement, what could be the maximum high and theminimum wide of a stable column? How many people would be necessary to move all bricks outsidethe building and back again in 8 hours? Where to position a 2 meters high, 10 meters long wall inthat space? No, this is not a good idea. To construct unnecessary walls is to evoke bad ghosts. Nextquestion please.

STUDIES IN GENDER AND SEXUALITY 59

•

There are two other voices resonating here. The HO MOVEMENT was curated by Tania Riveraand Izabela Pucu (then director of the CMAHO). It was born from their invitation to do anindividual exhibition at CMAHO that would be sponsored by it (the center is linked to Rio deJaneiro’s Municipal Secretariat of Culture). Izabela accepted all my proposals—to remove allgalleries’ fake walls, to turn off the electricity, to open windows and doors—without restrictions.Her administration sought precisely to create an art center open not only to the public but alsoopen to the street; a porous institutional space permeable to its surroundings. Once Izabela toldme, while dozens of bricks were flying around us, that that movement was the dream of anydirector-curator. I smiled and reminded her about the difficulties faced by performance artists toexecute their corporeal and long-durational actions in galleries and museums all over the world,about our endless negotiations. She smiled back. Tania encouraged the work to be called HOMOVEMENT instead of HO ACTION. It was after a conversation with her about delirium in abar called Amarelinho (Little Yellow) in Cinelândia (next to the City Council, the MunicipalTheater, and the National Library) that I conceived the size and weight of the MOVEMENT. Taniaonce wrote (2015): “The uncanny is sometimes another name for poetry.” 6

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Another important matter of the HO MOVEMENT was the partnership established with the Redesde Desenvolvimento da Maré NGO (Networks of Maré’s Development Non-governamentalOrganization), a civil association for social development that I have been following for quite sometime. My dialog with Eliana Sousa Silva, Redes’ director, was mediated by Silvia Soter, a dancedramaturg, professor and collaborator in different artistic and pedagogical projects at Maré. FromSilvia I heard that they were constructing the Women’s House and needing material to finish the lastfloor – the floor planed to house psychological and juridical services; and that they would be glad tobecome the receivers of the HO MOVEMENT’s books and bricks. Our performative program, thus,was finalized in front of the Women’s House on Sunday afternoon. At that day, the bricks and the

Figure 2. Day #1: “blanket” (all images by André Telles and Felipe Ribeiro).

6RIVERA, Tania (2015). For an ethics of the strange. In: ACTIONS Eleonora Fabião. eds. E. Fabião and A. Lepecki, Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: Tamanduá Editora, p. 294.

60 E. FABIÃO

books started intra-acting with new partners and trans-temporal, sociopolitical and historic-affectiveforces.

•

Day #1: “blanket”Our goal in the first day was to fully cover with bricks the floor of the four galleries of CMAHO’s

ground floor leaving no spaces. That’s how the number 4,700 was calculated. The blanket would,simultaneously, calm down and activate that ground.

From this day on, the entrance room remained permanently covered with bricks. Thus, in orderto enter the space, visitors would have to walk on bricks (well adjusted but not amalgamated). Sincethe first day, many people asked when the exhibition would be ready for visitation

Figure 3. Entrance: plane and counter-plane; the black circles are a permanent installation of Richard Serra at CMAHO.

Figure 4. Day #2: “climbing plant.”

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Day #2: “climbing plant”The second was the most complex day and this was expected. After all, there are uncountable

ways of piling up bricks vertically against walls. We spent the whole morning wandering in alabyrinth of opinions and tastes (and of interpretations of opinions and tastes). The emancipatoryturn only happened when we all became capable of formulating a common question. This liberatedus from individualisms and allowed the work to speak.

The questions we elaborated were eminently plastic: how do bricks capture, rebound, absorb,radiate light? How do bricks produce and emanate shade? How to change the color of the bricks’holes, make them black or white, according to their position in relation to the walls? Throughout theafternoon we worked collaboratively, considering the proposals of each other and experimentingpossibilities together. I think we managed, not without great effort, to escape the trap of reducingthat force field into a playground; we avoided disfiguring a proposal of collaborative makingtransforming it into a collective exhibition of small individual sculptures. Nothing against individualcreativity—it should be exercised and, if desired, shared. But the HO MOVEMENT was an explicitinvitation for collaboration.

Day #3: “interior of the exterior”It was November 2nd, Day of the Dead. Day for the bricks to go to the street. Day to greet the

great Hélio Oiticica, to celebrate ghostly matter.Day #4: “exterior of the interior”A conversation circle was scheduled for the end of that day. The option, because a circle

was already guaranteed, was to build a series of parallel lines inside and outside the building(lines forming lanes of 69 cm in width, perpendicular to the “tongues” constructed in theprevious day). They were also conceived as benches for us to sit on during the encounter,

Figure 5. Day #3: “interior of the exterior.”

Figure 6. Day #4: “exterior of the interior.”

62 E. FABIÃO

benches that could be moved for better accommodation, leaving traces of a circle in therectilinear space.

Throughout the conversation words were placed with attention and care. A very similar carewe had with the galleries, the CMAHO’s staff, and the bricks. The bricks that would becomepart of the Women’s House, and, for that reason, should be moved with extreme precision toavoid damages. During the conversation we spoke about art and ethics, gratuitousness andintentionality, matter and memory, transience and transitivity; we talked about rites withoutmyths; we spoke of Brazil. We discussed the term “counter-choreography”—an expressionarticulated by Izabela Pucu and Tania Rivera in the curatorial text fixed on the entrancewall of the space:

With bricks and gestures, the HO MOVEMENT will build a changeable landscape. For 7 days, 8 hours a day,Eleonora Fabião, her collaborators and whoever else gets in motion here—you and I—will cross windows anddoors, with their bodies and their eyes, in an exercise of making permeable the frontier between the street andthe institution, between the institution, the artist and the public.

Energy expenditure, bodily experience (including the head) that does not involve “neither profit, nor cure orsalvation,” as the artist would say. Movement towards the other driven by the desire to make collective

Figure 7. Day #5: “disappearance”

Figure 8. Counter-plane—Day #5: “disappearance.”

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thinking, by the attempt of frictioning art and life, thing and poetry (the same that Hélio Oiticica was lookingfor when he affirmed that “the museum is the world, it is everyday experience”).

In the choices that draw the work we feel the artist’s proximity to dance (the compositions andrecompositions of the bricks are counter-choreographies); in the statement and in what the artist calls“program,” in the pragmatic and demystified physical work, her conversation with the North Americanperformance. The space is raw, the windows are open, the natural light and its intensity mark the passageof time throughout the day. There will be no fake walls or backstage where we will move, stop sometimes,talk.In this open space perhaps a movement (political, because moving) will be sketched out among us, and willsuddenly disperse in singular details, in tiny gestures, in bodies different from one another—and, for this veryreason, capable of transforming each other.

Day #5: “disappearance”Our goal was to make the bricks disappear. Or, at least, stay very well hidden. So, when you

entered the space, you could not see them unless you turned around.Given that no tools are mentioned in the program, everything needed over the days was built

with bricks, books, hands, legs, will, dialogue, eye, thought, touch, air, attention, work, work, andwork.

Day #6: “affirmation”

Figure 9. Day #5: “disappearance.”

Figure 10. Day #6: “affirmation.” From the left: Elilson, Eleonora Fabião, Felipe Ribeiro, André Telles, Viniciús Arneiro, MariaAcselrad, and Mariah Valeiras

64 E. FABIÃO

Different from the previous days, we had no drawings or calculations but only the title:“affirmation.” The proposal was to do whatever we agreed was needed after 5 days of HOMOVEMENT. Structurally, I had thought a great deal of how not-knowingness would befundamental at this point of the process, on the eve of the last day. That emptiness, or still,that openness, would be the opportunity for us to dive further in the experience of theexperience, a dimension where the relations among things get weirder, where things confronteach other simultaneously from within and from without somehow abolishing this distinction. Akind of sensibility that, in order to sense better, needs to blur things, needs the blurring ofthings, a distortion that multiplies perspectives. I don’t know. The not-knowingness. And,always, listening to the thing. Loving the strangeness of the thing. The thing so prismatic atthis point. So touched. Very much touched. I cannot tell. I do not know how to say. The thing isthat, by the end of the fifth day, we concluded that we were tired and that the adequatemovement for the next day would be to stop. The bricks were fine where they were. It wouldbe beautiful if we all, all of us, could lean against the wall. The bricks were already leaning, so weshould do the same. Finally. To look and to be looked. To be looked looking. To look beinglooked at. To close the eyes, finally. That’s how we decided to build a brick bench for sevenpeople and sit on it. And, if someone approached us we would ask if she/he/they/it/we (thesepronouns, so disturbing) were interested in listening about what we (so disturbing, thesepronouns) did there during the past 5 days.

Day #7: “transposition”With the collaboration of Mr. Adalberto Rufino, his crew, and his truck, the bricks were

transposed to Maré on the seventh day. Also with the assistance of Luiz Gonzaga dos Santos,employee of the NGO Redes, who accompanied us in the passage and guided the final action:the stacking of the bricks in front of the Women’s House and at the courtyard of a public schoolnearby.

The next step is to propose to the House’s staff to display on one of the walls built with the HObricks photographs of the MOVEMENT and its program. The suggestion is to create a small

Figure 11. Photos taken in front of the Casa das Mulheres before we were warned that local drug dealers prohibited the use ofcameras.

STUDIES IN GENDER AND SEXUALITY 65

exhibition space at the Women’s House, or still, to actualize some virtuals, to materialize memories,to continue moving affects.

•

What moves the HO MOVEMENT?7

This work thinks itself as an energetic system. It asks itself and it asks us, what kinds of energy aretransformed in what other kinds of energy by means of the HO MOVEMENT? What are the dispositifsand techniques applied? What are the alchemic procedures and processes? What is production in thissystem? What is being produced? What is being counter-produced? What values are being generated?Which ones are being trans-valuated? What is the artists’ work? What is plasticity in this case?

Plasticity in its double meaning. Catherine Malabou (2008) points out two etymological senses ofthe word “plasticity”—one, commonly used, of receiving or creating form, and another, symptoma-tically disregarded, of annihilating form:

Plasticity directly contradicts rigidity. . . . According to its etymology—from the Greek plassein, to mold—theword plasticity has two basic senses: it means at once the capacity to receive form (clay is called “plastic,” forexample) and the capacity to give form (as in the plastic arts or in the plastic surgery). . . . But it must beremarked that plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create. We shouldnot forget that plastique, from which we get the words plastiquage and plastiquer, is an explosive substancemade of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent explosions. We thus note that plasticity issituated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects),and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion). The word plasticity thus unfolds itsmeaning between sculptural molding and deflagration, which is to say explosion.8

The HO MOVEMENT is energized by the inseparability of forming and unforming acts. Aparadoxical state of things that is triggered by a MOVEMENT whose definition is a falseproblem—is it a “sculpture” (that does not settle despite its brutal weight), an “installation”(that releases lots of dust and is never quite installed), a “counter-choreography” (of a radicallyaffirmative kind), or simply a “work” (a making, a practice, an urgency)? In the HOMOVEMENT “form” is constantly happening and is a happening: at least 4,710 bits ofshrapnel are in permanent state of aggregation and disaggregation. Perhaps the question inquestion is to continue exploding, as so many have already done, closed understandings of“sculptural form,” “plasticity,” and “visuality.” Action art is not exactly, or not only, art to beseen but the art of activating and making visible the corporeal politicity of things, of us, us all,in permanent entangled states of aggregation and disaggregation.

In the HO MOVEMENT brick moves people which moves brick which moves people whichmoves book which moves brick which moves brick which moves people which moves people whichmoves. There is something of a dance on it. And the space is the one dancing.

The HO MOVEMENT also moves listening to the words of dance theorist André Lepecki (2014)when he argues for, along with Silvia Benso, an “ethics of the thing.” Their ethical project ispredicated in the emancipation of subjects and objects to things—the “becoming-thing” is conceivedas an escape from mercantilization and instrumentalization, as a way of releasing objects fromexisting in a state of constant utilitarianism and subjects from the exhausting exercise of their egosand ego-existences. This decolonizing ethics is understood as an emancipatory movement that canonly succeed if it seeks the liberation of human and nonhuman bodies from their mechanicalexistences in articulated ways, ones through the others. Lepecki says, “To invest in things, not asproxies of the body, nor as signifying or representative elements of a narrative, but as co-partners ina sheer, co-determinant, co-presence—as co-extensive entities in the field of matter—is to activate a

7In the back side of the entrance wall there was a text also titled, “What Moves the HO MOVEMENT?” Written by me as a kind of“artist statement,” the curators suggested it should be displayed. A version of this text, in English and Portuguese, can be foundat http://www.premiopipa.com/pag/artistas/eleonora-fabiao/ (“projects” tab).

8Malabou (2008), pp. 5–6 (author’s emphases).

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fundamental change in the relationship between objects and their aesthetic effects (in dance, theatre,performance art, and installation art). This change is the political activation of the thing so that itmay do what it does best—to dispossess objects and subjects from their traps called apparatus,commodity, person and self.”9

HO MOVEMENT performs openly, collectively, and corporeally a fight in favor of politicalexperimentation and political imagination. It is an explicit dispute for concrete, symbolic, andimaginary spaces in the public arena. It is a meditation on abstractionism and concreteness,materialism and enchantment, absence of cement and presence of mind.

HO MOVEMENT wants all enchantments.Enchantment: the definitive and ultimate material.

•

Epilogue: a dream with matter, the matter of dreams, or a dream I was dreamed by.We were walking along a dirt road—a red-bricked color dirt road. We knew where we were

going and we were resolute, but we did not know where this where was. We continued.Eventually, we arrived at a house—small, white, simple—and understood that it was the where.At the entrance, a woman my age approached, welcomed, and guided me to the backyard. Thetime I was there, she stayed with me but at a distance. I sat on the grass and looked toward theend of the garden. On my left there was a beautiful brick wall—the old white paint fallingapart revealed the color of the bricks mixed with black mosses, green lichens, and ivies;horizontal and vertical, straight and curved, the geometric and the organic mixed, the linesvibrating. I kept gazing at it for a long time, hands touching the ground’s freshness. That onmy left. At the center, right in front of me, there was an arc-shaped gravestone with anepitaph. A gravestone that was a screen and where I read the following sentence (written inEnglish, Times New Roman 12, italics and bold): I am queer, I was always queer, and I willalways be. I was sitting on a dead body. On the chest of a corpse. A body buried a couple offeet below my body. Its presence rising, emanating from the earth. Body earth body. Earth,body, earth, body, air. Stone, earth, flesh, bones, earth, flesh, bones, air, sky. Skin with skinwith skin with skin with sky. Hot. And cold. Time. More time. I stood up. On the right side, awindow, wood-framed. Inside the house, carefully placed, a collection of extremely fragile

Figure 12.

9Lepecki (2014), p. 302.

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porcelain—plates, cups, jars, pitchers, lamps, crystals, fine china, flowered china, translucent,opaline, delicate, delicacy. I looked at the whole and into every detail. The whole in all parts,in all details. Things among things. Things among things among things. We all, different kindsof different things. The woman approached, touched my arm, and guided me to the exit. Shetook me back to the red-bricked colored dirt road for me to go, for me to continue followingthe path. At that moment I understood she was an artist.

When I opened my eyes, sunlight was entering the room. I came back from the dreamknowing what I did not know before about the HO MOVEMENT. I took paper and pencil; saton the bed; and wrote, with no pause, the title of each of the seven movements, the brickformations for each day, and the sequence of movements and formations. The program wasready. Things were things. Things were set for the beginning of the movement in 2 weeks.

Dream’s matter (be it whatever it might be) is fundamental in this practice. Dream’s matter. I feelstrange thinking it. Thinking of it. Everything becomes strange. Good sign.

Notes on contributor

Eleonora Fabião, Ph.D., is a performance artist and theorist. She has been performing in streets, lecturing, conductingworkshops and publishing internationally. Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Theater DirectingUndergraduate Program and Arts of the Scene Graduate Program where she chairs the artistic experimentation wing–, she holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. In 2011 Fabião received the Arts in the Streets’Award from the Brazilian National Foundation of the Arts and in 2014 the Rumos Itaú Cultural Grant that resulted inthe publication of the book Ações/Actions (Tamanduá Arte, 2015). Her performance work has been enacted in severalvenues including, most recently, Things That Must Be Done Series at Performa #15 (New York, 2015), MOVIMENTOHO/HO MOVEMENT at Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 2016), and azul azul azul e azul/blueblue blue and blue at Bispo do Rosário Museum (Rio de Janeiro, 2016). She recently taught as visiting professor ininstitutions and projects such as: MA in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture-Castilla-La Mancha University (2017),Buenos Aires Performance Biennual (2017), La Voz Humana-Havana (2017), Movimiento Sur-Chile (2016),Norwegian Theater Academy (2016), Stockholm University of the Arts (2016), Department of Performance Studies-New York University (2010 to 2015), Museum of Modern Art-New York (2014).

References

Barad, K. (2012). What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. Kassel, Germany: Documenta undMuseum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Fabião, E. (2013). Programa performativo: o corpo-em-experiência [Performative Program: the body-in-experience].ILINX Revista do LUME, 4. Available in Portuguese at http://www.cocen.unicamp.br/revistadigital/index.php/lume/article/view/276

_____& A. Lepecki, eds. (2015). Actions. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Tamanduá Arte, also with a version in Portuguese,Ações. For more information access http://www.eleonorafabiao.com.br/index_en.html

Gordon, Avery F. (1997). Ghostly Matters, Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis and London:University of Minnesota Press.

Lepecki, A. (2014). 9 variations on things and performance. In: Danse: An Anthology, ed. N. Solomon. Dijon, France:Les presses du réel New York series, p. 302.

Malabou, C. (2008). What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York, NY: Fordham University Press.Oiticica, H. (1968). O objeto: Instâncias do problema do objeto [The object: instances of the object’s problem]. In:

Galeria de Arte Moderna #15. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: GAM, pp. 26–27._____ (2009). Experimentar o experimental [To experiment the experimental]. In: Encontros Hélio Oiticica, César

Oiticica Filho, Sergio Cohn and Ingrid Vieira (Eds.). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Beco do Azougue, p. 108.

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