In dystopian times, I ask myself whether there is still any sense in calling on the dead. Approaching certain past events and places is like awakening phantoms, and phantoms are always the result of some failed attempt at resurrection. Museums are my witness.
During periods of rapid change, history no longer lets itself be understood as a fixed point, but as a point of departure. In the same way that we should never forget that maps never are actual territories.
In this return to the city, the temperature is different: it has been raining for days and there is a dissonance between the sounds coming from outside and the thoughts still organizing themselves since my last stay here.
Walking along the beach, staring at the horizon, it seemed to me for a moment that time had returned to when this place was in a kind of original state, when no country existed here, but as a space that will remain as eternity, with no rigid separation between body and mind, matter and spirit.
Rio, Casa, France, Brazil, Africa and so many other places that still make their presence felt in this city. Memory is always with us, pursuing us and spreading stubbornly on the walls like coats of paint.
The king fled; the architect and the painter, for so many other reasons, joined him, inventing this place, conjuring up a whole city, and so setting up paradoxes that have always been innumerable and insoluble.
The official architecture is always thought to be the image of how our bodies are disposed in space and establishes what they should become to the extent of their obligations.
Millions of human beings, men women and children, were enslaved, brought over from Africa, and lived under inhuman conditions. Violence, humiliation, escape, resistance and revolt always coexisted throughout this history, and the consequences cannot be effaced or ignored. Bodies always organize to regain potency, in spite of the regime or situation.
Exile perhaps produced the richest, harshest and most perverse experience possible. A friend told me that journeys are like an abyss: we never return anywhere.
Even today, to draw aside the mist that masks the past is a difficult and painful task. That cruel history of the colonized and uprooted unfolds into an endless succession and retrogression of conflicts in pursuit of what is missing and will always be wanting.
The quest for equality anywhere and everywhere, should not be an end, but a starting point. Nothing is taught, but indoctrinated: we all know different things about everything, about times, times that overlap in a chain of facts and events, interlinked and intercut, that draws us closer to one another.
In that light, words and images too are a map in progress, a map with no very clear or definite legend, exposing the doubt between image and sense.
Looking at family albums I perceive that, in the space of four generations, people have lost significance; outlines and identities dissolve in their faces; they become just anonymous individuals, overlaid on a world without relief.
The sound of the blows of many solitary hammers can destroy enormous walls, what once was will not return on the new floor of the rebuilt house. Memory fails, it is deficient; even mourning becomes impossible, useless. We are left to remember and go on missing the dead, which is just another way to go on loving.
We should not forget that living means finding ways to get close to reality, amid the banality of the empty stereotype of the images whirling around us. But how can the facts be restored and things be made to burst out into an already shapeless world?
How can the past be recast with the possibility of future? To varying extents, everywhere, we are the updated versions of the foolishness of buried pasts.
The city of the present has changed, expanded into buildings, population, deadlocks and into a mute, reconstructed forest incrusted into the hills. Not even the dichotomies that accompany us at present in the writing of this time seem to signal and far-reaching solutions. A philosopher used to say that "What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the still intact identity of their origin; it is the dissension among things. Is is disparity.
History always extinguishes perspectives that go beyond the will of whoever writes it.
All existence is made of encounters, fissures and frictions, but do not be deluded into not seeing the atrocities cloaked in delicacy; cordiality should not be what unites us.
Through betrayal, in a world without relief, people become like glass. - Have you seen what happens to broken objects when they are glued?
-Laércio Redondo, Rio de Janeiro 2013
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