Ventário
Anna Costa e Silva

 

Who has never wished to escape the confines of their own life?
A singular existence will always be a kind of prison,
a mutilation of the other possible realities of the other individuals we could have been. Who has never wished to be someone else?

– Rosa Montero (The Danger of Being Lucid)

 

The sound of bureaucracy expands in the space. A mechanical noise orchestrated by ringing phones, papers passing through fingers to be stapled, certified, and registered in the urgency of the present time. The white and sterile light that fills most public institutions across Brazil homogenizes actions and standardizes the lives of those who inhabit these offices. It robotizes the human exercise. However, it cannot sterilize thought. Thought remains free, being what it wishes, dreamed, imagined… or better: ventário – something from the realm of things that blow (like the wind). From the daydreams that occur in daily life and involve more than one person. The word is part of a small invented dictionary, a co-creation between public employees of the Rio de Janeiro Department of Culture and the multidisciplinary artist Anna Costa e Silva.

Ventário gives the name to this exhibition, but it is also the title of a dreamlike film and an installation that synthesize the 12-month process Costa e Silva experienced during the Setor Público Artist Residency [RASP], which involves the immersion of artists in Brazilian public institutions to build processes and/or objects in collaboration with the employees of these institutions. In this process, the artist opened a powerful listening channel for the employees to share their stories, thoughts, pains, and dreams – many dreams. Together, they developed a unique repertoire of real and invented colors, textures, images, and words, allowing each participant to experience, in their own skin, an intriguing game of self-fiction. In this way, the creation of fantastical characters began, materializing these desires and their respective solitudes – the sensation of one’s own freedom, something completely individual and inaccessible to others. But here, in this room (and because they allow us), we can feel and recognize it.

The project synthesizes one of Costa e Silva’s most interesting skills: the art of reshaping social and emotional fabrics, with encounters as the primary material. She works immersed in an art-life process, in continuous chains of listening and transfiguring words and images. A natural observer, she translates the environment around her with generosity and precision, using a wide range of artistic genres and techniques to better materialize different forms of human existence, delicately handling the essential fragilities of life. Her projects exist in some unnamed space, at the intersections of visual and performing arts, cinema, and relational practices – and Ventário is a splendid example of this.

From these narratives, and in an attempt to sustain the enchantments that bloomed, Costa e Silva invited stylist José Camarano to create costumes in collaboration with the participants. Thus, the described images took on forms, cuts, weights, and movements. The public employees could then sit at their desks, wearing a story, a desire; they received makeup based on their words or objects that contrasted with the formal daily environment. In this way, they had a new experience with their bodies in that well-known workspace, now novel in this new version of themselves, in that other being that inhabits us and that we occasionally manage to set free. Each participant also developed a series of gestures that play with the choreographies performed in their daily work, introducing surrealistic elements into the scenes.

This experience unfolds into captured phrases transformed into signage, in an audiovisual piece and several photographs, which are accompanied by testimonies – a kind of free poetry that turns into text, composing the dreamlike atmosphere and sleepiness – a storm-volcano, of the order of very intense things, combining love, pain, and fear. In this way, Costa e Silva recreates worlds and enables us to be others, to be many, even within ourselves. As was said to her during the many listening sessions of this process, “It is important not to forget who we are (and can be!) beyond just performing functions. We think, we feel.”

Ana Carolina Ralston
Curator