Bodies touching bodies — Cristina Ramos, 2022
 
 


 If one lies down on one’s side, then one’s head ends up a few centimetres above the surface one is laying on, a distance equal to the breadth of one’s shoulder. We usually use a pillow to bridge this gap, but the ancient Egyptians used a headrest. An object consisted of a semicircular upper section placed under the skull, just above the ear, and one or more columns raising the upper part to the right height. Its use not only ensured a relatively comfortable position while sleeping, but also enabled air to circulate around the head, an added advantage in a warm climate like that of Egypt, as well as protecting the head from insects that could potentially damage this precious body part. I was not surprised when Vera Mota mentioned the trigger provoked by a headrest in the studio of Minimalist artist Donald Judd in Manhattan. The observation of this object made her reconsider where to place the head, and how its symbolicprivilege is challenged in its dis/re/placement, wether it’s being lifted or brought down to the feet, as she suggested in previous works.


 An echo of a headrest is encountered in Mota’s exhibition made in green marble and placed on top of a brass sheet, which has been carved with a shape that reminds of an animal’s skeleton, and which it is actually the shape of a pair of eyebrows used for training in the cosmetic industry. The body is a continuous reference in her exhibition: a performative body in which the thing that matters is precisely matter. Her artistic language challenges the idea of it as passive and immutable, at the same time than expands the notion of the human body by representing parts such as nails, alongside prosthetic elements that serve the purpose of holding it. Offering an account of the materialization of all bodies – human and nonhuman – establishes a situation where agency is granted to our fleshy beings as much as to the matter around us, which holds a vibrant vitality, defined as “Thing-Power” by Jane Bennett. Drawing and movement are intimately linked to the gesture that creates the works, the body’s expression and the graphic tracing is almost present in every piece of the exhibition where correlation and repetition create a flow joining them.
 
 


 “From within the midst of things has the scratched surface of the canvas, irregular as a result of gestures by one given body and time; it has a marble pointing sculpture that resembles a nail; it has scratches again on the brass this time as a result of a mechanic process repeated rigorously, while the curves and colour of the headrest send us back to the waves and folds in the painting where the fragile curving lines take us to the rigid and still bouncing blades of iron from the sculpture Stance.”


 The works propagate shapes and directions in space summoning forms that upend perception and stimulate a kind of imagination where representation is disturbed while we are being moved by matter. Lines dominate the work, notably through the force and importance of horizontality and verticality. As some action is permanently crystallized through the materiality of the works, it seems natural to bring in Tim Ingold’s
 
 Lines: A Brief History
 
 (2007), a book which begins with this question, “What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another.”
 
 


 Mota’s way of seeing form drags us to the realm of things, the contained pure, the ground of undifferentiated elements suggesting a lack of hierarchy between the material and that which it represents. Her practice reminds us that artworks are not autonomous entities that exist in themselves or whose content is containable. On the contrary, in their exhibition ecosystem they generate a series of conceptual and spatial relationships between themselves and the person who relates to them. Art objects are not as static as they appear to be, nor is the viewer the sole possessor of agency in this relationship.

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From within the midst of things, 2022

Pé-Sombra — Mariana Pestana, 2022.


 Vera Mota’s work uses performance as a means of production and staging. There is an operative body, evident in the form and structure of the pieces, which inscribes concrete processes of materiality and construction. And there is an acting body, whose agitations and transit are registered in the sculptures and drawings. This dual body interacts with materials whose properties - weight, rigidity, colour, malleability and chemical composition – are decisive in defining the expression that the objects take up. In this sense, Vera Mota’s work puts forward a sculptural animism shared between agent bodies.


 In previous work, Vera Mota displaces the primordial element of the head, perhaps remembering that the mind is decentred, bodily, physiological. She sometimes suggests that knowledge, much like feeling, is a physiological interaction between different parts of a body. To transfer a function such as thinking or feeling –
 
 
 from head to hands, from head to toes – is, thus, to recognize the science of the body’s axial interdependence. To put the hands on the head. To put the feet in the mouth. To have guts. To bend over backwards.
 
 
 The exhibits
 
 Mergulho
 
 (2015),
 
 levar a cabeça aos pés
 
 (2018) and
 
 Ventriloquismo
 
 (2021) invoke processes of inversion or transference, which the artist gives continuity to in this exhibition.
 
 


 
 Pé-Sombra
 
 makes a direct reference to the mythological figure of a skiapod (ciápode in Portuguese, from the Greek σκιαποδες, skiapodes, “
 
 pé de sombra
 
 ” – shadow foot). Represented in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography in the fifteenth century, the skiapod is portrayed as a part of an arrangement of “monstruous” creatures in a bizarre or freak context, accompanied by a cyclops, Siamese twins, a cynocephalus and a blemmyae (body with a head on its torso, between its shoulders). The skiapod first appears in the 4th century BC. in a text published by Ctesias of Knidos, court physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon of Persia. In this older narrative, the skiapods would be a people who had only one very wide foot allowing them to move quickly and protect themselves from the sun. There, the skiapod is defined by the absolute inversion of the body in relation to space and the cosmos. The surface of the palm of the foot rotates 180°, bringing it into contact either with the darkness of the earth or with the light of the sun. The foot becomes a means of adaptation of the body, allowing it to simultaneously move and serve itself – inverted – to protect the body from the atmospheric elements, interrupting the light that blinds the eyes. It is from this possibility of inversion or reconfiguration of the body that the artist invites us to see this exhibition.
 
 


 The image of the body that reconfigures itself in relation with space and time, that reinvents itself in accordance with its performative functions, is presented in this exhibition in two sculptures. The body, although always absent or removed from the scene, is invoked by the suggestion of movements, performances, use and function. The artist presents an iron sculpture that refers to a pair of giant foot prostheses, these prostheses recall the quasi-cyborg technology of the Cheetah Xtend carbon prostheses, used by top competition athletes. These faster, more durable, more capable than human legs are shown alongside a white, shapeless silicone rubber membrane, that is suspended. The body is fathomed, through the spectator’s attempt of recognition and identification with something familiar. However, the shape and scale of the pieces make it difficult to fit them into a recognizable body or function. We are invited to question dominant conceptions of normativity, capacity and monstrosity. What bodies serve these pieces? What functions do they have?


 You are not asked to believe, or to guess a body that is known to you. The figuration presented in these sculptures is meant to be maladjusted. Without the pretention to match any truth, these pieces serve rather as an imaginary. Just like the skiapod.

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Pé-sombra, 2022

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Stance, 2022

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 DISEMBODIED — Filipa Loureiro, 2022
 
 
 
 
 Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) has pursued a unique and reflective career, in which she had explored the politics of the body, promoting and considering the body’s participation as a generative methodology and an axis for conceptual formulations. Her artistic practice involves a strong material component. Primarily working in the fields of sculpture, drawing and performance,
 
 
 she takes advantage of the breadth and permeability offered by these disciplines.
 
 
 
 
 Her use of performance becomes a vital means of production, composition or even staging – in a process in which the body asserts itself as an agent that is almost always indispensable – imprinting its gestures and transits upon itself. Placing special attention on the economy of presence, effort and action, Vera Mota proposes successive exercises to reposition the body within her work, sometimes subjecting it to processes of almost complete erosion of its characteristics, in which she foregoes its material evidence, but nonetheless implicates it. Assuming sculptural animism and claiming other perspectives of the body and materiality, Vera Mota re-evaluates different modes of representation, proposing strategies and procedures for disqualification, the transfer or transfiguration of forms, status or functions, between bodies, or their constituent parts.
 
 
 
 
 Over recent years, her strategies of scrutiny and politicisation of the body have undergone a gradual transformation within her artistic practice. The body has progressively assumed different roles and reconfigured itself. It has evolved from the
 
 
 participating, working body, invested in the programmed actions of her performances, to the dismemberment and synthesis
 
 
 of its constituent parts. The body now appears as something that is crystallised
 
 
 in anthropomorphic, mineralised and metallized representations, in sculptures that foster exchanges between biological and geological, organic and inorganic bodies. The exhibitions
 
 
 Levar a cabeça aos pés
 
 
 (2018) and
 
 
 Ventriloquism
 
 
 (2021) invoke these processes of inversion or transference, which the artist continues herein.
 
 
 </div>
 <div class="column">
 
 
 DISEMBODIED
 
 
 – the artist’s first exhibition in a museum context – proposes a permanent and tense dialogue between drawing and sculpture,
 
 
 in which she presents a set of new works conceived specifically to this moment. In this context, drawing is an indication of a clear and restrained exercise of the body. The same gesture is repeated at regular intervals with an assumed cadence and rhythm,
 
 
 in an almost ritual or choreographic rehearsal that we can foresee, and from which organic, almost corporeal configurations are born, that expand to the entire surface of the page, from front to back. Various organisms and unstable forms are revealed, reminiscent of the spine or throat, as beings in permanent mutation. These large-scale drawings appear as musical scores that record a specific interval in time and the physical participation of a now absent body. The drawings reveal the artist’s sequence
 
 
 of gestures on the sheet of paper. Each drawing is a recurrence of the previous drawing and enunciates a transgressive similarity with the other drawings, transporting us to what Deleuze describes as a repetition of difference:
 
 
 “To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something
 
 
 unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent."¹
 
 
 
 
 These works by Vera Mota often place
 
 
 the spectator in a position similar to that which she herself occupies when she
 
 
 is composing her works – a position of confrontation and resistance of the body in relation to materials, and their scale and weight. This is a position of simultaneous proximity and remoteness, which enables the spectator to rigorously edit that which he or she observes. Following a movement from hands to the head, the exhibition continues from the drawing to another medium, the sculpture.
 
 
 
 
 The head is the “organ of exchanges”, to cite Deleuze. It is the receptacle of the brain and an area that houses most of the sense organs, the place where everything we do is transferred, thereby registering and articulating an endless tension between various signals and answers.
 
 
 The head has occupied a privileged place in the hierarchies of the body since the dawn of time. It appears in a wide array of different representations, from the symbolic to
 
 
 the scientific, from
 
 
 ex-voto
 
 
 offerings, to portraits, or anatomical studies. It appears in reproductions of pagan traditions and also in Christian ideas, whether in biblical passages — the head of the giant Goliath or the head of St. John the Baptist — or
 
 
 in mythological references — the head of Medusa. From modernism to the present day, various artists have challenged the traditional limits of representation of the head, transgressing formal conventions, inventing faces that have yet to be seen. From Brancusi to Camile Henrot, from Gerhard Richter to Cindy Sherman, we witness different processes of erasure
 
 
 and disfiguration. We observe a similar operation when we observe the sculpture that Vera Mota presents to us. The opposition between the head and the feet, between the head and the hands, is a recurring theme throughout the artist work, fostering an inversion of their positions, corrupting their qualities, or functions, deforming and decomposing them, in an exercise that is close to the
 
 
 informe
 
 
 (formless) described by Bataille²
 
 
 
 . In the place of  the big toe ("Le
 
 gros
 
 
 orteil",
 
 Documents nº 6,
 
 November, 1929)
 
 there's a big head, elevated high but crushed by its weight against the ground.
 
 
 
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 This disembodied head, like a monolith that depersonifies the figure, with erased features, is a head that has become an entire body. Cast in bronze and with dimensions that distance it from a familiar scale, this almost monumental object, dispenses the need for a plinth and is presented on the floor. Vera Mota remarks: “to say that it has no body is more than a literal description of what this object is, it is precisely to deny part of what qualifies it as a head.” This sculpture simultaneously conveys a sensation of familiarity and strangeness. We can recognise the head, even though we know that it is incomplete. Made of bronze, its weight is as important as its shape.
 
 
 
 
 While Vera Mota was making this sculpture, the enigmatic
 
 
 Moai
 
 
 monolithic human figures on Easter Island, Chile, built in around 1300, suffered a devastating fire. The news of this event immediately transported us – in time and space – to these prominent heads, with their solemn faces. Given that many researchers consider that the Moai are religious vessels, that store
 
 
 the spirits of the ancient leaders of the Rapa Nui civilisation, what can this head of Vera Mota reveal to us? Could it also become a receptacle? What is the status attributed by the artist to the figure when it constantly oscillates between new protocols and meanings, fostering its emptying, with each reproduction?
 
 
 
 
 DISEMBODIED
 
 
 suggests the confrontation between a body that is no longer there, and whose wandering is engraved in the impressions that impregnate the fragility of the paper, and the solid form of a head without a body. Both now confront the body of the spectator, who is invited to be part of this place of transience between different materialities and permanences.
 
 
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 ¹ Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.
 
 
 
 
 ² Georges Bataille, "Informe”, in Documents, no. 7, December 1929.
 
 
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DISEMBODIED, 2022

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Ventriloquism, Mariana Pestana, January 2021


 The work of Vera Mota uses performance as a medium  of production and staging. There is an operative body, evident in the shape and structure of the pieces, which inscribes concrete processes of materiality and construction. There is an active body, whose agitations and transits are registered in the scultpures, drawings or photographs. This dual body interacts with materials whose properties – weight, rigidity, colour, malleability, chemical composition - are determinant to define the expression that the objects take up. In this sense, there is Vera Mota’s work a sculptural animism shared between the agent bodies. The politics of the body, a constant theme in the artist’s work, is inscribed here one more time, but extending more consciously, from a post-human perspective to
 
 other
 
 bodies,
 
 other
 
 materialities.


 In previous works, Vera Mota displaces the primordial element of the head, perhaps remembering that the mind is de-centered, bodily, physiological.
 
 Ventriloquism
 
 continues this exploration. In
 
 HEAD HAND
 
 , the head appears inscribed in the hand, with black ink. Knowledge, just like feeling, is a physiological interaction between different parts of a body. To transfer a function – to think or to feel – from head to to hands, from head to toes – is, thus, to recognize the science of interdependence’s axes. To put the hands on the head. To put the feet in the mouth. To have guts. To bend over backwards. In works such as
 
 Fold IV
 
 , the artist presents objects reminiscent of inter-corporalities. An expression or movement originating in a biological body is transferred onto another, inanimate and geologic. However, in the gesture of displacement, subjectivities change. Heart of stone, or iron courage. The reality loses its precise outline. In
 
 Real feel
 
 , the intertwining of the marble fingers is presented on a colossal scale. The pink colour of the blood which can be seen through the skin, is frozen by the marble’s material, fixated on the stiffness of the stone, and dehumanized.
 
 Hold
 
 are two metal legs that fluctuate in space, in a gravitational displacement. They are optimized legs, invoking a superhuman performance. Together, the pieces make up a performative circuit, simultaneously classic and cyborg.


 The binary that distinguishes organic from inorganic matter makes a subjective distinction between biological and geological bodies. There are language codes inherent to this distinction, which atribute possession, property and value qualities to the matter, and therefore render it inert, detached from social and ecological relations, without agency¹. Even though the material is molded according to the idealized form, the shape itselfis determined by the intrinsic qualities of the matter, which is let to speak by itself on purpose by the artist. Therefore, one can say that the previous order is reversed because when the matter forms an image of a biological body, it mineralizes it, by imposing mineral qualities of it. The pieces metallize legs, petrify fingers, and thus transform the body in this formalization². The conscious acknowledgment and the deference with which mineral properties are imposed, suggest a revision of the extractivist and antropocentric models which divide the world in binaries, things with life and without life.


 In
 
 Ventriloquism
 
 , the pieces speak of intra and inter-bodily transactions, of transmissions and displacements of parts in the same body or between bodies that interact with each other. What is lost, gained or transformed in the movement of transference? When the ventriloquist transfers a human attribute (voice) to an inanimate object (puppet) (s)he brings that object to life. There is an uncanny quality to the act of ventriloquism, because the biological (human) body is robbed of a particular function – the voice - which is taken by the mechanical body. And in the movement of transference, the function is altered performs in ways that it didn’t in its original body – it’s as if the voice had a life of its own that behaves differently across bodies. The image of the surprised ventriloquist, clinging to his throat because (s)he has lost the function of speech, is familiar. The ventriloquist who looks with astonishment at the puppet which, by stealing the voice, comes to life. However, there is in this process another detail that contributes to the uncanny of the scene. In the transference movement, the vocal function changes and behaves in an autonomous way. It undergoes a mutation – timbre, when it crosses from one body to the other. As if the voice has a life of its own.


 More than hundred years ago, Violet Paget wrote about empathy as the lending of one’s life to a
 
 thing
 
 . Empathy, originally translated from the German
 
 Einfühlung
 
 (“feeling into”), was for Paget the process through which feelings transferred between one
 
 thing
 
 and a body³. By using the male pseudonym Vernon Le, Page wrote down the sensations that determined things provoked in her body and that of her partner, the artist Anstruther-Thompson. The sensations were, for exemple, the tightening of the throat, breathing and heartbeat rhythm variations.
 
 Things
 
 worth feeling were a painting, a sculpture, a mountain, or even a chair. All observations required deep attunement: to the moment, to the place, to the body. Nowadays, empathy is broadly understood as the ability to capture, understand or simulate the feelings of other person. But, in its origin, empathy was understood as a relational practice between people and objects or “natural” landscapes. Now, in a time when we broadly recognise the agency and the rights of more-than-human entities - be them plants, animals, microbes, fungi, minerals or bodies of water – practicing empathy may well be a means to think of how feelings navigate out of our own, and into other bodies.  Vera Mota’s work expresses such an invitation, in recording the transference of impulses, expressions and potentially feelings, across biological bodies and otherwise.


 In a conversation about this exhibition, the artist has shown me images of an oroboro – a snake that swallows its own tail, forming a circle. It symbolizes the cicle of life, the creation force, the simultaneous destruction and renewal of a body.




 ¹ Katrhyn Yussoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. P. 4-9.


 ² For an expansion of this idea, see the interview to Timoth Morton by Mariana Pestana and Pedro Gadanho in Eco-Visionaries: Conversations a planet in a state of emergency. Londres: RA Publications, 2019.


 ³ Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.

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Sensations, 2021

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Fold IV, 2021

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Ventriloquism, 2021

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Hold, 2021

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HEAD HAND, 2021

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Column, 2021

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Einfühlung, 2021

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Sem Título, 2020

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Ensaio. Pausa, repete, 2020

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Aimlessly adapting, 2020

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Hand Studies, 2020

Floating Bones, Miguel Mesquita, October 2020


 
 “A body is not defined by the form that determines it, neither as a determined substance or subject, nor by the organs it has or the functions it performs. In the consistency plan, a body is only defined by a longitude and a latitude; that is, the set of material elements that belong to it under such relationships of movement and rest, of speed and slowness (longitude); the set of intensive affections that it is capable under power or degree of power (latitude). Nothing but affections and local movements, differential speeds”.
 


 The human body has always been the object of representation or inspiration in artistic expressions. However, the body as described by Deleuze and Guattari, a body as an action, has only integrated the artistic vocabulary from the avant-garde of the 20
 
 
 th
 
 
 century, reaching artistic autonomy from the 1970s with the recognition of performance. This body – the one that is static due to action and not representation – has been a key element in Vera Mota’s reasoning. Wandering between drawing, sculpture, painting and performance, the practice of Vera Mota, which result is rooted in a tenuous coexistence between order (or the intentional) and unpredictability (or the accidental), trusts the body as the executing agent of a method that promotes the development of this unpredictability.


 By promoting the participation of the body as an artistic creation methodology, Vera Mota discusses the relationship between action and event, systematized by Donald Davidson in “Essays on Actions and Events” (1980), since the actions she performs are not intended to build a final image, but rather the creation of conditions so that the events generated by her action can produce that result.


 Floating Bones, the exhibition presented here, may inadvertently recover an anatomical language, but it does suggest the presence of the body, which is translated into the image and also the process. The works that make up the exhibition – two untitled drawings and an installation with the same title as the exhibition – are images that by suggesting bone structures suspended in a liquid or even an aura, consist of an entanglement, more or less untouchable, of records that materialize pendular oscillations of the hand which has shredded these lines. However, the created images are the result of the gesture of placing a thread with oil and an uncontrollable and unpredictable process of absorption and the chemical processes that lead to its transformation from translucent to a cloudy yellow. Thus, the “skeleton” in the drawing is the trace that the thread prints, and its musculature is the stain that slowly grows and expands from the ribbing, as described by Vera Mota:


 
 The drawings that constitute the installation “Floating Bones” present in its undulating composition translucent bone structures, which sometimes flow or ascend, mirroring trembling or intermittent nerves. Within the limits of the sheet, the thread spreads, running through the paper. The time of these drawings does not crystalize in what we can observe now, continuing to leave its print in a slow process of oxidation, and the already yellow transparency of these stains will become more cloudy, darkening against the surrounding white.
 
 The line leading to the stains fulfills a function that is both supporting and controlling. Although unstable, discontinuous, diluted, the lines articulate the stains that impregnate the paper and swallow its opacity. The spots are not loose, they allow themselves to be anchored by the lines as if they amplify the humming of their curves, imitating their undulation.
 
 


 
 Inserted in the exhibition cycle O Desenho como Pensamento (The Drawing as Thought), the works presented in the exhibition question Drawing as an autonomous discipline of artistic expression. If, from a procedural point of view, the works refer to the drawing methodology, both by the linear character of the gesture and by the print made through the pressure of the material, from a formal point of view, there are sculptural characteristics in the set of drawings that compose the Floating Bones installation. Although one can strictly classify the elements that compose the installation as drawings on self-supportive concave surfaces, by highlighting the translucency of the paper as a fundamental factor of the composition, we privilege the work as an object in which the drawing is complementary. These images can be seen not only in its two-dimensionality, but also in the relationship system established between matters and materials, which add thickness to the image and flows from the light emanated from the interior of those structures. These vertical elements thus claim a wandering observation that requires the confrontation of scale with the observer through the movement in the space around these elements, and the habituation of the eyes to the luminosity variations, which allow to reveal the different intensities of the materials’ reaction.

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Floating bones, 2020

From within the midst of things, 2022

Pé-sombra, 2022

Stance, 2022

DISEMBODIED, 2022

From within the midst of things, 2022

Pé-sombra, 2022

Stance, 2022

DISEMBODIED, 2022

Sensations, 2021

Fold IV, 2021

Ventriloquism, 2021

Hold, 2021

HEAD HAND, 2021

Column, 2021

Einfühlung, 2021

Sensations, 2021

Fold IV, 2021

Ventriloquism, 2021

Hold, 2021

HEAD HAND, 2021

Column, 2021

Einfühlung, 2021

Sem Título, 2020

Ensaio. Pausa, repete, 2020

Aimlessly adapting, 2020

Hand Studies, 2020

Floating bones, 2020

Sem Título, 2020

Ensaio. Pausa, repete, 2020

Aimlessly adapting, 2020

Hand Studies, 2020

Floating bones, 2020

SOLID EMOTIONS, 2019

The worry trap (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Untitled (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Multiple heads (SOLID EMOTIONS). 2019

Accept, adapt. (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Rhythm, 2019

SOLID EMOTIONS, 2019

The worry trap (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Untitled (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Multiple heads (SOLID EMOTIONS). 2019

Accept, adapt. (SOLID EMOTIONS), 2019

Rhythm, 2019

Heads, 2018

Anticipation, 2018

Face, 2018

Container, 2018

Apparatus, 2018

Atletas, 2018

Composition, 2018

Real Feel, 2018

Curva Contínua, 2018

Ramp, 2018

Continuous construction, 2018

Affectionate encounter, 2018

Sensation, 2018

Heads, 2018

Anticipation, 2018

Face, 2018

Container, 2018

Apparatus, 2018

Atletas, 2018

Composition, 2018

Real Feel, 2018

Curva Contínua, 2018

Ramp, 2018

Continuous construction, 2018

Affectionate encounter, 2018

Sensation, 2018

A certain failure, 2017

Untitled, 2017

Levar a cabeça aos pés, 2017

Non-figurative situation — The economy of the presence, 2017

A certain failure, 2017

Untitled, 2017

Levar a cabeça aos pés, 2017

Non-figurative situation — The economy of the presence, 2017

Untitled (a certeza de que há sempre acontecer), 2016

Músculo, 2016