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The Weaving of the Body
The pure and untamed body of a new-born comes ready to be shaped, branded
and oriented into a direction, a meaning and a desire. Later, the human
being, while looking to his own body and unto other's, will recognize a
strange duplicity: a socialized body that carries the interdiction sign,
and then another one, underground by nature, which in privacy transforms
these signs in objects of desire. At this time a subtle game of seductions
is unfolded, of successive apparitions and disappearances, created
fictions of one's own body.
It is true that the body has to be concealed, but perhaps the most
important issue may not be the birth of interdiction. At least for us it
is more interesting to view the other side of the issue, the ritualisation
and investment of the body , the metamorphosis of the subjects under the
theatrical effect of garments.
Who can reassure us that its origin was not subtracted to the utilitarian
aspect and was in fact born under the strange fascination that garments
provoke, that the real leit motiv of its birth was not of
aesthetical reasons? To dress as a ceremonial act, though with different
characteristics of those of the public ceremony, comes very close to
ancient rites, but for only one reason: due to the highly emotional level
that presides to it. This emotion is directly related to the fact that it
is an initiatic act. In the public rite there is as well an
unfolding of a game that aims to dominate the universe through the
repetition and the staging of its forms, its gods and heroes.
The very essence of femininity is linked to the ornament,
to the construction of the artifice, to the subtle staging of dresses.
From this point of view, the true essence of femininity does not root in
the realm of the natural. It resides exactly in its extinction.
Artifice signals the moment where Nature is given death through the
creation of a sign that hovers above natural shapes, re-signifying them.
There is a deification in this act, a divinization, an investment in the
realm of the sacred, very close to ritual.
This is an amazing process of a silent erotic relationship
with our own body, a narcysical addition, whether by the discovery of
one's own shapes, exposed or concealed by the garment, or by the touch of
the materials that dress a body, both in a material and spiritual way, by
one's own private dreams. In this investment of the body, it is mainly its
character of occultation and revelation that encloses a strong sensual
component, this exasperating game destined to the eyes. The body is
transformed into a primordial object, in a space of affective
organization.
Antonio Conceição Junior confers to his creations the ambivalence that
is natural to his particular condition of an encounter between East and
West. Above all he realizes the task of reconstituting paths between
semi-reality and the imaginary that presided over the historical origin of
this encounter.
And from this East, "where everything comes from, day and faith (...)
where god may perhaps exist in reality and commanding everything..."
(in Álvaro de Campos, Maritime Ode) comes now the ritual
character, the staging of the ceremony, semi-divine figures that cross in
space without really touching the surface.
In today's world, the mythical East is still a place for dream,
since it has not been totally decoded by the Western matrix.
Thousands of centuries of history and of culture are not
easily annihilated by two hundred years of technological advances, and
everything is yet to be resolved. Therefore, in Antonio's work we are sent
to those ancient sources of inspiration, to barbarian cities in which men
lived together with gods, where garments radically incorporate its
deifying component.
If, in the case of his masculine clothes, the main archetype is that of
the warrior, fully contained in its lines and invested of meanings and
conventions, in the feminine case the preference is given to the excessive
proliferation, almost chaotic, of materials. In this chaos, in the
shapelessness, the feminine body emerges divinized, woman-goddess with
attributes of gentleness or cruelty, always through the creation of an
absolute intangibility.
The search for this deification responds in the best of ways to the impass
that today's world has incorporated, to the loss of values, and to the
exhaustion of archetypes. All objects are intended as fetish, yet only
some carry with them the sign of transcendentability . Only through a
clear and radical assumption of the fetish element it is possible to to
recover them to the imaginary world, freeing them from the fast and
ephemerous parade of merchandise. But here the reference is paramount. It
requires the existence of a link direct or indirectly linked to a corpus
symbolicus, a symbolic body.
Then, invested of meanings, the objective acquires a perenity that comes
from its liberation from time.
In the work of Antonio Conceição Junior it is space, and
not time, that defines the coordinates. We find a geography, not a story.
We are confronted with difference, not with evolution. It is the
route of an unceasing nomadic journey, that goes and returns - nomadism -
crossing deserts and reaching fabled cities, meeting goodness and fanatism
and the great masses of people of the East and solitary men drunk of gods.
This is the answer to the exhaustion, to the falseness of merchandise.
Knowingly or unconsciously, Antonio transmutates frivolity into concepts.
In the banal and successive parade of models, Antonio introduces a
powerful fetish element, that deification that has become his trademark.
The bodies are travelers to spaces of an imaginary that is simultaneously
personal and universalist.
Inhabitant, himself ambivalent, of that East/West, Antonio sinthetyzes in
his work the permanent deambulation, inattentive to the superfluous and,
therefore, it is not surprising at all in this man, but rather inevitable,
the emergence of essentiality.
Carlos Morais José
Writer, Journalist, Anthropologist
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