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.