Emissão

"As of late, my work has focused on a tripod: the body, politics and nature. In Emissão, my reading and the actress Renata Sorrah’s voiceover of the Black River Manifesto, written by the French critic Pierre Restany, somehow summarize this tripod. The manifesto extols the flamboyance of the Amazon and the importance of having contemporary art converse with nature, even if only in a subjective way. When I read the manifesto and realized that its symbolical contents coincided with my own inquiries, that was the starting point for this piece. 

Here, the other, a foreigner, voices questions that are ours. To me, inviting an actress like Renata Sorrah to dub my reading, filming it and naming it Emissão means building an artwork with interlocking pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle that gradually gets put together without revealing the final image. In a piece like this, language is as conceptive as what is not visible yet. Other pieces resolve with a drawing, a performance or a video. Only the process can determine this.

Aesthetically speaking, the fact that Emissão materializes as a video puts it on a plateau of image and sound, and this activates other aspects, such as the poetics of an 'incarnated', possessed body, a 'trans' body. The viewer participates in the signing of the manifesto, subjectifying it, taking possession of something that represents us, which is the communion of man and nature. And art is an interlocutor in this encounter. 

I have been inviting actors and using texts by other people in my work for some time now. Word and image have always been recurrent platforms of mine, and creating a work of art involves a set of factors: practice, subject matter, medium, and time. This video represents a moment of great clarity and maturity in my career, which has been going on for fifteen years now. Coming into one’s own poetics takes time. And being sensitive to it is dear, in every sense of the word. I believe in building, and I think every artwork is a poem in progress.

We live in a time when politics, geopolitics and engaged art have surrendered to the urgency in dealing with a few questions. In contemporary art, perhaps, there is this idea of tapping into topics connected with philosophy, science and communication, which are de facto drivers of political actions while not being necessarily pamphleteering. For me, making videos and performances has proven the most effective way of addressing issues that interest me, that occur to me, or that I feel I have mastered.

The title of this video is Emissão, so maybe emitting, spreading, diffusing, suggesting, informing is what this piece is 'all about'. I use a text/manifesto written in the 70s that still echoes as an awakening of awareness to issues as close and latent as nature, and its importance to the building of subjectivity. All of this reminded me of my grandmother, who used to say: 'my nature is not doing so well today,' referring to something internal, sensitive, intuitive. I guess this was my understanding of what Pierre Restany calls 'subjective nature'."

Carlos Melo in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)