insconsciente

Mecanismos
Centro Cultural Maria Antônia
Sound Installation
2010

The exhibition space resembles that of an empty and abandoned albeit fully functioning laboratory. The works are mechanisms; at first sight, they are utterly anachronistic. The scene possesses a dreamlike quality. But what type of experiment is there in unceasing execution if the mechanisms appear to have taken on a crazed, disordered life of their own as redress for their utilitarian obsolescence, disobliged from their corresponding function the irrational revenge of the machines? How could we have kept up our relationships to these strange things for so long? This thing that, up until a while ago, had been a telephone what is it now? A curious object, possibly, but no more. In Chaplin's Modern Times, man struggled with enormous mechanical machines. Nowadays he does not even do that. The thing that threatened Charlie has hidden itself. It has vanished from sight to become possibly even more threatening. So this exhibition suggests the drawing of a parabola: the sonorous evocation of mechanical life through contemporary technology. The digital signs, the synthesized voices and the electronic noises that ring incessantly and madly mimic the paraphernalia of sound that surrounds us, like a continuous, insistent and fruitless prayer to the mechanical unconscious. The litany of sounds would awaken those mechanisms, bring them back from their sleep, restore them to existence and remind us of alienation, yet these noises also happen to be the infernal din of that which we call progress, which gives life while simultaneously annihilating it.

Paulo Venancio Filho

Telegraph machines, telephone, wooden tables, sculpture, software, sound
Installation / Variable dimensions
Photos: Gabi Carrera