In the kingdom of the landless

Pedro Pousada

 

In capturing the apparent, the photographic act stands face to face with the poetic act. They are concurrent, but not necessarily equal. Making the bell of reality ring in one’s imagination and making the dissonant rhythms of imagination reverberate in reality is not the same thing, but they can become one and the same circumstance. The corollary of “knowing how to do” fabricates the aesthetics of the act, but it does not enjoy all of the resources: the aesthetic energy of that which is named, that which is pointed at, that which is “targeted” — that child, that woman, that elderly person, that dog — is yet another force at play. What remains of the object-subject in photography are in fact many things: its spectral, unfinished side, dissolved in the fluidity of the days; what remains is the opaque silence of that which cannot be represented. Because in every representation there is this loss; there is an awareness that the lived world possesses regions in which the image is just the confession of an incompleteness.

The subjectivities of the referents are cinematic, unstable, undefined, and constructed. The other side, which will become an image, is still alive, it is still warmth, presence, voice, gesture, disposition, will, culture. It is still difficult to clot the phenomenon, to close within a single photographic entity the succession of states that define or indetermine it.

It is the short-circuit between the thinking gaze and the gaze which decides to photograph which triggers the transaction between humans – and their spatial practices, their material culture: their objects, their instruments, and their uselessnesses – and unlimited reality, not always legible, not always accessible, not always speaking of photography.

The documental-poetic realism, the plein-air of the photographic series Faro-Oeste [Far(o)-West] (2021) by the artist Pauliana Pimentel is an example of this. Capturing something is not just the result of a specialized intuition and the mechanics of the device, but it is rather the space allowed for the “conspiracy” of the pondered, contemplative gaze, which still manages to be reflexive and, therefore, proceeds, in cold and hot blood, to hierarchize, exclude, segregate, accentuate, choose. And, thus, placing a recognizable and dissonant world within the reach of a multitudinous and indeterminate spectator — after a rigorous and private selection of what will be enlarged and what will remain unknown in the negatives and contact sheets —, and doing so, how-ever, devoid of a single hint of essentialism and without being able to overcome the distance and opacity that make the photographer and the spectator forever strangers to this world.

The automation of the technique — the direct experience, the framing, the exposure time, the contrasts, the harshness and thickness of the light-shadow, the soft or rough color, the depth of field, the photographer’s very own body swaying on the edge of the decision-photographic action before the bodies and materiality of others — seems to organize itself so that, at the instant of the “click”, the sensory materiality builds up to the point of becoming a violent mismatch between artifice and authenticity, between the beautiful image and the good image¹.

The photographic invasion bears a revealing character. We feel different, sometimes unrecognizable, when we see ourselves as images. We are surprised (or disappointed, and very much now so incessantly with the drive for selfies) because we see our body, and — residually — our mind there, outside of us, forever detached from what we know of ourselves when we look at ourselves free of images or reflections.

I imagine that these people who are not so much used to being images — but very used to being undesirable — might have had curious reactions to the results of Pauliana’s almost analytical, almost intuitive, but decidedly sweet poetics.

In these photos, we sense that — at once — peering and discreet empathy that we can trace back to Un enterrement à Ornans (1849-1850), by Gustave Courbet, and which reveals to us how survival is beautiful and difficult and how those within it struggle on a daily basis to make their lives less frightening, less grotesque and absurd. A struggle in which “I exist, I am, I want to be” takes place in the midst of the barbarity of programmed disarray, the disarray of “a man is a wolf to another man”, a disarray that wishes to consume us all, to the point of absolute irrelevance. They fight and lose, or they fight and win for another day.

That’s what we see here, in the melancholic undramatic chromatism of Pauliana’s photographs, free from moral judgment. Photography (and its world) transforming the everyday banality of a gypsy community into a contradictory biopolitical testimony.

I could resort to the usual categorizing clichés and say “here lies, in its end-of-day fullness, bohemian nomadism living on a razor’s edge! They are free, but forever trapped by insecurity and the cold”; I could compare that flying horse to Icarus, who will forever lose, who will crash, happy and miserable; I could say that the horse and its riders are akin to a child that laughs and cries (one of those) when their brother or sister pulls their hair (the Sun pulled Icarus’s hair); I could say that the child running in the plastic petticoat is a princess, forgotten in the forest, but that in truth was forgotten by civilization and it is in the forest that she finds her shelter; I could say that those female bodies want something they’ll never tell us. I could, but everything would remain the same, in a spaceless silence.

The inescapable and foundational contradiction in this testimony, in Pauliana’s testimony, is that it questions the meaning of the exception (where does it fit, where does it survive in this standardized and normative world?). It questions it in the valley of tears and smiles of one of the most liminal and polarized externalities of modern life: a gypsy community lost around the edges of touristy Algarve, caught between rural dismay and the paroxysm of urbanization without urbanity. A community which watches — without participating in it — a world that is about to end.

This is a portion of modern life which, through signs, symbols, relaxed presences, heterarchical creativity, tells us that it wants to leave the world that oppresses it, that excludes it, but still does not know how, and maybe it will never know. Yes, it wants to leave this world, a world relentless in shrinking us to atomized, isolated, harmless producer-consumers.

But how can a poor, vulnerable, powerless, and depoliticized Roma community aspire to leave the world that has rejected them?

Where, in that ecosystem of scarcity, in those gazes and bodies overflowing with delicateness and uncertainty, is the proof of that will that is, in itself, a political power?

In that precariousness we find no traces of defeatism or passivity; we find several signs of weariness and, yes, of anguish and uncertainty as well. Like the Palestinians everlastingly in their refugee camps, these human beings, these rejected Portuguese, build their aesthetic sovereignty, they “work”, with very little, “on themselves”.

                 There is a text by Brazilian philosopher Katia Muricy — “O heroísmo do presente”

[The heroism of the present] (1995), where the Baudelaire of modern life, the Walter

Benjamin of Paris, the capital of the Second Empire, the Kant of revolutionary violence, and the Foucault of Heterotopias intersect — that resurfaced in me when I added

Homeliness, practiced space, a sense of belonging, when I added the frugal philosophy of the furniture, the interior spaces with their tables, chairs and sofas, with their curtains and reproductions of genre paintings — two Andalusian scenes hang on those precarious walls — when I added that philosophy to the bodies lying in their voiceless solitude.

We look at those temporary rooms in improvised huts with plastics, cladding, various types of wood, that affection and aesthetic care for the few things that one owns, and we realize that everything there is heroic because it is surviving, because, there, having an object, a blanket or a chair and putting it away, carrying it and taking it back out of suitcases, bags, wagons, setting up the house or cleaning it is already a political act before being a cultural act. It is a political act to hold a broom in a place where the elements are harshest and entropy happens far too quickly. And, suddenly, those subjectivities are no longer just referents of a fragile way of living, but of the will, the free will that survives in a gesture of domestic utility and that fights against reification, against the dirtiness of a dark horizonless world; which fights with clothes laid out in the sun or neat and folded, with pots that are washed, sanded and hung on precarious noggings, with a sundry of chairs and benches and sofas from different sources gathered in a circle, next to the fire, bringing people together in speech, bringing together

— like us, woven into a rope — the different subjectivities in agreement and discord.

They don’t know it yet — the young man leaning against the wreckage of a car, the other playing around on top of a chest freezer, the elderly man stretched out on a bed and waiting to fall asleep for the day’s minutes, the young mothers waiting to repeat ancestral anguish —, but their images already know that this world which never welcomed them is not necessary and is not enough, and is lagging far behind. The dream of a house, of a place separate from the heavens and earth, the dream of studying, of employment with rights, the dream of eternal warmth and rooting can be built free from that bourgeois order that has always expelled them from the borough, that always prevented them from breathing the free air of the cities. The images know why there are, among us who consume and admire them, those who see in them traces of a lost world.

If this world we are in seems to be getting closer and closer to an end and, at the same time, it seems endless, maybe these lives can teach us the balancing act of existing in a freer, more untroubled way (or is it all an illusion? A fantasy in my head? Is fear of the future hiding behind those eyes?). Yes, they can teach us, but chances are we won’t learn because a world with nothing is scary and uncomfortable and aggressive. This too is the contradiction: there lies the humanity that is not allowed to be free because the city gates are closed and, on this side, where we are at, here lies the humanity that cannot be free because the city gates are always open, but with a mortgage and bad credit. Between these two there will be no reconciliation because one wants to stop being the exception and the other wants to stop being the norm.

One day, those who are governed, administered, objectified, evaluated, mortgaged, indebted, normalized, generalized, forgotten, and archived will lie down dreaming in a field overflowing with vanishing points. And they are going to go on strike on this society where history has abandoned them. But, until that day arrives, let us look at some of the unfortunate and chronic strikers of this society. The weak, the different, the difficult, and the forgotten also want to exist beyond survival.

This is what the self-taught painter and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys did when he transformed his project for a gypsy camp in Alba, Italy, into the starting point for his urban utopia: New Babylon (1956-1974), the cornerstone of the unitary urbanism of the Situationists and a non-stop happening of a new way of living.

Pauliana’s photographs also tell us that the world is too dangerous, too permeable to intolerance and prejudice for us to allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring otherness.

 

 

1. 1. For the more informed reader it may seem redundant to feature this excursion through the “philology” of the photographic act. Benjamin, Arnheim, Bazin, Barthes, Kracauer, Sontag, Berger, and Krauss have spoken plenty about the habits, effects, and historical consequences of the photographic device, they have defined the metaphotographic a priori of interpretation and interpellation, of the description and encoding of photographic images. But personal insights on author work cannot be ex nihilo, the emanations of nothing are merely nothing. It is necessary to realize that, in order to get out of this vicious cycle of systemic poverty, the crisis of the crisis of the crisis, of existing solely to work, we can also take in these forms of existence as ways to rebuild the collective singularity beyond and without the mediocrity of our condition of being merchandise. The photography of the “common experience”, of the experience of being human, but also of being creatures of a culture and a social class, can become, as a result of its semantic self-indulgence, a surrender to the functionalization of subjectivities, an anodyne duplication of reality, without mystery, without infinity. It can become an aesthetic of possible life. The testimonial and poetic method of Pauliana’s work escapes this surrender, escapes all and any naturalism, keeping intact in the visual field the incongruity of existing, of that existing; and keeping us on the threshold, but still in disparity, of a true living that bears less and less of a resemblance with our life. She writes with light and a photochemical broth on apparent matter, a new externality that returns to the poor nomadism of these gypsies the unreality and intimacy that the bourgeois order confiscates from them every day, and it is in this in-between space that we realize what we cannot be.