Diaspora
Josué Mattos
Dispersion is the movement that defines Diaspora. It is made of resistant matter, divided and interconnected between female and animal strength. It does not hide looted identities, being understood like the object of construction of a time saturated with "nows"¹, which defines the set of works of Márcia Porto, maintained since the end of 1990. The Ginaiques, wandering women, simultaneously self-referential and foreign, move freely in search of the forgotten origin, living with ideas created about themselves by those who eventually transformed them into threats to the homogeneous. All because they left without looking back. Vaguely aware of a certain discomfort in the air, one of them heads the movement that destabilizes homogenizing processes. Intruders, they witness the stupidity of voices that welcome the foreigner, causing him to be fit to the particularities of the place where they pass. However, as the Diaspora has no fixed identity and carries its lacunar origin, filled with particularities found in each new place, when they traveling through labyrinthine alleys, these women live with questions that echo everywhere, such as that tearful hymn that Caetano sang: "we exist: to which is it destinated?” The responses renew the urgency of the movement.
Consisting of shredded memories, Diaspora is generated by the insatiable hunger of the place of the other. It is the result of a process of colonization of seeing, thinking and tread. "The gluttony of the ground will eat my eye," Manoel de Barros once said. The Diaspora, which the artist builds on this temporary architecture, takes place after the loss of the ground and the resulting experience of instability that generates contact with the unpredictable. The Ginaiques walk in the wake of what Lovecraft means by strange suspension, to the extent that they participate in an invariable migratory process, trodden indefinitely and that affects all who live. Restores the right to eternal return, evoking the presence of the animal as one capable of gathering in one body instinct, love and savagery.
Sucked by holes above their heads, Diaspora women recognize the singular experience and engagement with the decoding of abstractions of the path to be trodden – with their simultaneous riches and wonders – as the main factors responsible for fermenting ecstasy or anguish. "Sometimes I go through defoliations", replies Manoel de Barros in relation to the subject crossed by moments of recovery of himself.
The feeling of perpetuity that animates the fragile body favors the construction of the idea according to which each stage won always makes the clarity of not knowing greater. That is why intuition, ancestral devotion, and heterogeneous savagery contradict barbarism and shape acts, words, things and subjectivations, in order to meticulously measure what to carry between one place and another. Hence, we witness the particular way that the Ginaiques appear as carriers of weights that do not compromise the come and go. The artist introduces these women as follows: "Many generations ago the Ginaiques have forgotten their origin and, freed from the order of time, evoke: When did we leave the door open?"
Attached to the body itself, the weights thrown forward facilitate displacement. They are braids connected to sheep, but they can also be viscera or an umbilical cord that attach them to the ground. Telluric figures, feel the eventual suffocation caused by the ropes that attach them to the ground, that the strong wind, whistling musically along the trail of women made only of soul, makes a point of destabilizing. Concerned about disintegrate the sterile identitary conventions of the body, they assume what Lovecraft says in Alienation: “His solid flesh had never been away”. Therefore, to proceed, the object-body is thrown ahead. Recovered, serves as a counterweight to the next movements of the soul.
____________________
¹ The idea of a saturated time of "nows" originates in Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History". In particular, in the passage in which appears, as an epigraph, the text of Karl Kraus: "The Origin is the Target", where one reads, precisely, that the history consists of the saturation of "nows", something that seems to mobilize the Ginaiques.