Close your eyes and imagine, she said. The answer quickly came to her mind: eggs, sperm, cell divisions. “Then do it!” – the instruction she heard was accepted almost like a spell. She bought plasticine and made a set of three pieces. With her hands, she created egg and sperm, forming cells. The story of this encounter between Nazareth Pacheco and Louise Bourgeois and its many peaks reverberates in the artist’s work to this day.

Living and creating – perhaps we can consider Nazareth Pacheco’s work through these two gestures. At the core of her poetics, we find synonyms: experiencing and sharing what has been lived; feeling in her own skin and overflowing into art; being seized by events and re-materializing them; listening to the everyday and working with raw materials. All these verbs are conjugated as translations by Nazareth Pacheco, who breaks down the dichotomies between what we consider as life and as art, or, between living and creating. These spheres have their contours and boundaries but are gestures intimately connected by the artist. Different, yet happening together. Over the years, Nazareth has reshaped her experiences, constructed narratives of the body, and experimented with processes of embodying and transferring what she has lived into her work. From this, she has invited us to delve into the complex webs of craft and ways of engaging with materials. Autofiction? Perhaps something more than that. For she is not only interested in a reference to what deeply moves her or an organization of facts. Nazareth urges us to perceive events sensitively and to construct multiple narratives: those that bodies tell, that bodies counterpose when they dare to align them. The stories are not the same, just as the bodies are not either.

The title of this exhibition recalls one of her encounters with Louise Bourgeois – a fundamental reference and an artist with whom Nazareth has woven visual and conceptual links in her work, in many instances, such as relationships with materials, constructive processes, engagement with biographical themes, and ways of sharing them through language. Returning to this phrase, more than 25 years later, shows how Nazareth sees herself following a path in which “making art” is an inspiring motivation, a kind of response to what presents itself as life and demonstrates an effective reflection on the body, the presence of the body, and the traces it leaves in daily life. Perhaps in another quote from Louise Bourgeois – “My world of sculpture and my social world are one and the same” – we also find another point of reference in terms of the inseparability between art and life, which is important to Nazareth.

Thus, this “do it,” which may sound commanding or instructive, actually emerged in Nazareth’s life as an invitation to gesture, to move in response to a poetic need when action itself, with the material, becomes a mobilizing force for what truly matters in making art. This verbal prompt directed at Nazareth also echoes in this latest series of works. Everyday objects are reproduced in unconventional materials, while their uses are also reconfigured beyond the prescribed and existing norms. The artist, in this network of constructions and renegotiations with the everyday, adds performative and unexpected actions to the objects. She flips them, makes them dance, moves them, while choreographing on her body the textures, shapes, and histories of these objects. Thus, she endows the objects with certain questions: What is the body in the face of something? How does the body act in a non-standardized territory? What happens between the body and objects when the body’s actions might aim to transform both objects and itself? When faced with another material, one considered unconventional, how does the body reconfigure its actions with a given object?

Faced with these questions, without answers or with endless possibilities to explore this intense terrain, where ableism insists on establishing its ambiance, Nazareth invites us to enter the mysteries of so-called “simple” or “standard” forms so present in everyday life, which have been and continue to be produced according to the rhythms of serialized productions, intended for standardized uses and with manuals that aim to fit a “common human being.” Common, according to whom or what? Standards that serve whom and cater to which bodies?

If we stop to think, there is a whole effort for these objects to enter production lines and fit a body whose dimensions are also thought of as a model human – artificial, produced, idealized. Parameters, averages, and percentiles are guidelines that subtly infiltrate daily life and provide us with a manual of gestures that guide their uses. More than that: they tell us a lot about how the body should react so that the entire system – from production, consumption, and use – functions smoothly. It doesn’t take much expertise in anatomy or architecture to notice that Le Corbusier’s “modulor,” for example, is still considered an important parameter for projects today, alluding to a tall, Caucasian man – a body that represents very little of the world’s population yet continues to guide the arrangement of spaces and the design of objects.

Changing the weight and material and rethinking how objects exist in space and are made available to bodies, for instance, are procedures that reveal different facets of the objects themselves and those who engage with them. This is Nazareth’s “do it” in these works. A heavy bench. A staff and a pair of golden bachi. A taiko drum made of brass, corian, and crystal. A tennis racket with a crystal net and a hole in the middle. A basketball hoop far from the court. A set of dodecahedron-shaped balls and bowling pins. A pair of X-shaped spoons holding two eggs. A copper and crystal hula hoop. These objects are repositioned in space and were selected by the artist because their shapes induce very directed, specific uses, enforcing a kind of well-parametered manual with questionable consensus and demanding a precise use exercise. This series of works also includes a Dennis Brown orthosis, another appropriated object that is part of Nazareth’s story. The artist recreated the orthosis, commonly used to aid in correcting congenital foot deformities and alignment. Made in bronze, the sculpture is accompanied by a pair of red shoes. Common to all these, it is worth highlighting, is that the singular, prescribed uses of each object are not erased but re-signified. The artist recreated each object, and in each construction process proposes a deviation, an aesthetic space for us to reconsider them, presenting us with a critical perception of attempts to erase the plurality of bodies.

Moreover, there are photographic records of actions that accompany the works. Nazareth performs and documents actions that do not appear in manuals, nor are they common when considering the ergonomics of objects in their ordinary uses. Again, we might ask: which bodies does ergonomics serve? Continuing: even in art, in pedagogical and experimental environments, or those that do not aim to be specialized, poetic processes are directed at which bodies? And what do they demand from bodies? Talent, mastery, dexterity, perfection? Each body, with its history. Each body brings a unique technique, a unique way of making the world. “Each knows the pain and the joy of being what they are” (Dom de Iludir, by Caetano Veloso, released in 1976).

In these sequences of photographic records, the artist’s body is an agent of transformation. She enters the scene, recognizes, and challenges the original function of the object. She cloaks the object with a layer that has no name, cannot be learned, and is impossible to definitively name, as it desires to be in a constant state: happening whenever someone dares to be present, whenever someone dances the unpredictable, whenever movement takes over the body.

Then, we can consider: in every practice, there is a process of knowledge and experimentation concerning what the body does. And in her artistic practices, knowing that the body reacts in the most varied ways, at every moment, with every desire, with every memory that crosses it, rather than acting in exception, Nazareth proposes coexistences between the norm and possibilities. She thus constructs a layer of antagonisms and oppositions that do not reconcile in her works. Nazareth confronts barriers with possibilities. She proposes a contortion of perspectives to overcome the implicit ableism in standardized measurements. For what interests her is what the body does, instead of what the body should do.

Galciani Neves

 

1.Excerpt from an interview given by Louise Bourgeois, transcribed in Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father. São Paulo, 2000, p. 96.
2.Ableism is any form of discrimination against a person based on disability, which can be defined as: any form of distinction, restriction, or exclusion, by action or omission, that aims to or results in hindering, preventing, or nullifying the recognition or exercise of the rights and fundamental freedoms of people with disabilities, including the refusal of reasonable accommodations and provision of assistive technologies (Law 13146, 2015, art 4§1).
3.Field of science that investigates how things should be adapted to the human body to enhance the productivity and efficiency of object use.