Exhibition | QUARTO DE DESPEJO
September 12th to October 10th, 2025
Exhibition view..
SOLO EXHIBITION:
Maria Durão
TEXT:
João Sarmento
A text on the exhibition leaflet only establishes a commitment to those who offer the exhibited objects a perspective that demands a kind of exploratory exploration. Like the attention of an Eskimo to the different shades of white that reveal the state of the snow, we enter this exhibition space as an opportunity for difference, a suspension of judgment, and porosity to what is present.
Erasing can be a way of excavating voids, creating a calligraphic text in the transparency and emptying of words. This is what happens in Maria Durão's papers, manipulated under the strong gestures of cutting, gluing, joining, and tearing, like a tapestry of time, yellowed and fading. By obliterating the printed object, in some way, its objectivity is restored. The dematerialized graphic stain gives way to the support. Text is paper itself, it is not semantics, it is image. Therefore, collage is not a pastiche of other times, of various sources, but rather the need to stitch together the ruins of the world. Of what remains of it. In every piece of trash, in every forgotten thing.
Manuel de Barros invented the verb "to monumentalize" to elevate what is considered waste. He called into the category of monument that which is normally considered insignificant, crawling debris, drawing lessons from the discredited wisdom of what lies on the ground, or from some dumping ground. When something appeared insignificant to him, it was because it needed to be monumentalized.
There are "remains, garbage, and fragments that people leave behind when they abandon their homes. Death forces them to discard everything," Maria told me, who uses waste as the raw material of artistic form and intention. Like finds, treasures of ephemerality that are absorbed – assumed as such – only by those who attune themselves to the sensitivity of what is useless. They are useless objects, just as Manuel de Barros called that garbage that dazzled him. He said that Lacan's maxim that "contemplating remains was proper to poets" was his.
In this work, the remains are not merely objects of contemplation. There is also the interruption of the deterioration of the papers, as a possibility of a profound rescue of the materials. In a state of redemption, the paper re-emerges with the power of living things. Raised from the dust – because even dust pierced by a ray of light, in an abandoned space, is brilliance and an enchanting aura. Therefore, Maria Durão's works, such as a useless poem, whisper in our ear that it is "necessary to thank the dust / the dust that makes the book / illegible like the tiger." (Adília Lopes)
Quarto de Despejo (The Slum Dweller's Room) sends us to a powerful work. A real diary, written in 1955 by Carolina Maria de Jesus, a "favela dweller" from São Paulo. The intensity of the recitation assumes a hypnotic chronology. It does not allow us to abandon the repetitive plot of the daily life of the woman who collects cardboard to feed her children.
A reader of garbage, whose office is a bed full of fleas. "January 1st, 1960 I got up at 5 o'clock and went to fetch water." The diary ends. The favela is the city's dumping ground, and the time and action of the story are years in a Sisyphean cycle – as revolting as all systemic poverty.
Maria Durão leads us to relearn how to read from a destroyed book. To gaze upon fragmentation as the grammar of memory, as a rehabilitated nostalgia, ignited in the warm silence of the paper. A new textuality where a kind of narratology of collage takes place. It is drawn with what remains of the invisibility of discard, where meaning is suspended as indeterminacy, wandering, obsolete. Thus, if in the beginning was the Word, here the principle is the averbal chaos, accumulated and formless. Composition precedes the verb, therefore, the words disintegrate. What remains is almost nothing that demands total attention.
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