Curatorial text, by Marta Mestre

 

 

Only those who work in inevitably absolute solitude are capable of populating it, not with dreams, fantasies or projects, but with encounters. “You find people (sometimes you don’t know them, or have never even seen them before), but also movements, ideas, events, entities,” writes Deleuze.

 

Anton Steenbock (1984) e Gabriela Gusmão (1973) had had many of these kinds of solitary encounters with movements, ideas, events, and entities over the last few years, and more frequently over the last few months.

 

Artists from different generations and followers of different trajectories, educated in “antipodean” geographical realities, they now share a tiny 30 square meters in a workshop in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.

 

What unites them are not common ideas, nor the themes or research lines to which they have dedicate themselves. This provides us with the opportunity to speak about something that exists between the two of them, that runs in parallel to them, like a zig-zag, a serpentine line, moving back and forth between them.

 

For our encounter, Gabriela brought two enigmas for us to decipher, from a story by Jorge Luis Borges: “zurriburi” and “drifters.” We translated these expressions freely, trying to cultivate a soil with neither roots nor sediments (the music, free of its aerial vines, entering Gabriela’s artisan press), relying only on the minimum sustenance necessary to orient the action (the invisible maestro who conducts the atonal score of Anton Steenbrock).

 

“Zurriburi” is almost a linguistic noise, a loud sound – zurrriburiiiii – and it also refers to a “despicable” or “insignificant” person, making it a good subject for a translation exercise between a Brazilian who lives with the world, and a German who found himself here, and a Portuguese in flux. What follows is an extract from our exchanges and the crossing of our paths/purposes:

 

Anton: hello my dears, I’ve worked up this concept, I will try to to write it out tonight and sent it by email…. it’s turning out well! - I’ve also managed to fix the windshield motor (it was a mission!!!) and on Monday I’m going to test it out. I had another look to better understand the word “drifter”, I think I understand it now…might it not mean, in other words, someone who is“there by chance”?!?!

 

 

Gabriela: To me, it is someone who is open to unexpected situations, who has submitted to the reveries and the possibilities of extraordinary discoveries (…). He is ready to live synchronous or “chance” experiences. The meaning that you’ve discovered is totally well-founded. I also recognise the idea of someone who walks without a fixed destination, rambling, and in that way starts to daydream. A drifter is not necessarily a person who is idle, but a person who lives life in an idle fashion. A Zurriburi strolls around as if in a daydream throug h a crowd, or in an idyllic landscape, and might knock up againts a good idea or a melody. I knocked up against one such idea myself, the notion of the “silence of the drifter”. Does this message help explain things, or does it confuse things further?

 

 

Marta: Hello Gabi and Anton. While Gabi’s title is very suggestive, you need a lot of mental gymnastics and rhetoric to relate Zurriburi to the Dovstoyevskian “idiot” and the “drifter”. Even so, I can see in this fallow land the potential for constructing meanings, even if only provisional ones. There is an element of going back and learning how to speak, and I still think art, and artists, give form to something indeterminate. Like the idiots, the “fools” or even the Christian hermits who removed themselves to live another kind of experience in the world, artists too have their own singularity, which is fragile and provisional. I also see our attempts to “construct” something that is so provisional in nature (starting with language itself), as being a very Brazilian cultural mark. In this sense it is also a very Portuguese one, which begins with the formation of Brazil and leads to our contemporary ignorance about each other.

 

 

We did not reach many conclusions, and followed starting points without seeing where they would lead us. Until the exhibit was assembled the work continued, moving in unpredictable directions, giving it its unpredictable relevance. This is how it usually works.

 

Nevertheless, throughout our encounter, I kept trying to make sense of something that the artists themselves had brought as a link. Without ever having said anything to each other, they both deal with seagulls in their work. In Gabriela Gusmão’s work, they appear as large metal sheets on the external wall of the Gentil Carioca gallery (2012), and in Anton’s work they appear in “Gaivotas”, a book of anonymous graffiti markets from the streets of Rio de Janeiro (2010).

 

There was now a kind of communicant between them, no longer the silence of the encounter. Through the seagull, the focus of a common interest, the artists found in each other a unique series of transformations that they do not share, but that affects them both and brings them together.

 

I ended up thinking that it made sense that what brings them together are birds. They are also “drifters” in the freedom of the skies, breaking rules, capable ot covering long distances on a solitary trajectory, like people, like artists.

 

Marta Mestre, Rio de Janeiro, November 2013