For the title of this exhibition, which comprises a group of quite varied works that either stem directly from or are in some manner inspired by a personal experience of the artist, a journey across the Amazon, from Iquitos to Belém do Pará, with long stops at riverside locations, Cristina Lamas used a word from the Tupi language: “pororoca”. This word indicates a natural phenomenon that consists in the formation of giant waves, generating a roar when the river waters meet the sea.
The use of this Tupi word that describes the clash between the fluvial current and the ocean poses a comprehension challenge to the viewers, most of whom have little knowledge of Amazonian culture, and are thus unfamiliar with the word and its origin. To ask what “pororoca” means, to engage with the idiom contained in this word (here, we use “idiom” to refer to a “topian”, non-universal language): such is the first demand this exhibition makes on its viewer. This initial encounter might lead us to think that the exhibition has an ethnographic ambit and intent, that it is made of images that illustrate cultural specificities we are unable to translate, like the linguistic idiom of its title. No, such ethnographic content is completely missing here; in no way do these drawings, digital collages, objects and words inscribed as graphic elements denote any stance from the artist that may be read as ethnographic or naively enthusiastic. We do not find here the facile and always quite showy effects of reportage-like depictions. And yet all this work of Cristina Lamas, starting with its title, is impregnated with motifs that suggest an encounter with that “other” world, not a world of archetypes but a world that offers what we so lack: an experience. Hence, this exhibition is not solely the result of an artistic experience. Preceding it, or accompanying it, there is another experience, one that implied living and feeling a reality that is not easily decipherable, a world made of untranslatable words, such as “pororoca”.
That word gives a voice to the Amazon river. It is more a matter of making it speak in its own language than of speaking about it, i.e. displaying it as an object, showing it as a landscape (not a single landscape can be found in this exhibition). When I say this, I am already entering a level of interpretation of this work that is connected with ecological subjects, with issues related to the life of the Amazon river and all other rivers and ecosystems, with animal and vegetal life. The collages, drawings and other media that make up this exhibition eloquently suggest that there is no reason to separate human “subjects” from non-human “objects”, that we must acknowledge the existence of a life that is common to all.
To give a voice to what is voiceless, to make the Amazon speak the language whose lexicon contains the word “pororoca”: these are enunciation issues, and enunciation issues are, by definition, political issues. This may not have – and indeed does not, being much subtler and alien to the logic of monological assertion – the type of communicative evidence or transparence we nearly always find in what is known as “artivism”, a somewhat new portmanteau word that describes a recent trend involving the revival of a politically engaged artistic stance; however, this exhibition by Cristina Lamas in no way ignores the current ecopolitical issues, the need to ensure the survival of ecosystems and what must be done to ultimately rescue them. At this point, mention should be made of some experiments that have been carried out in some parts of the world, especially Latin America and New Zealand; in them, a juridical personality has been bestowed on a number of natural elements (rivers, forests, animal and vegetal species), thereby enabling them to defend their own causes. One of the most interesting such experiments was the constitution of a “Loire Parliament”, i.e. a “constituent process that is real and fictional at once” that led to a series of “hearings” organised by a committee led by French writer and artist Camille de Toledo. The inaugural hearings, in 2019, were held in the presence of Bruno Latour. The archive of the proceedings was published as a book (a collection of hearing minutes, so to speak), Le fleuve qui voulait écrire (Manuella Éditions and Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021). The Loire river was not the only one to “gain a voice” and the ability to “write” thanks to this parliamentary “scene”: so did the whole ecosystem that the river represents and preserves. “A legal terrestrial uprising” was being simulated there. Presently, the attribution of a juridical personality to natural elements is already guaranteed by the Constitutions of certain Latin American countries (such as Ecuador).
It can be said of this exhibition, without deviating it into improper or roundabout paths, that it organises in its own way a hearing for the Amazon’s great roar, the “pororoca” that is its colossal voice. At this point, all the issues of the non-human or decentralisation of the human come into play: something that modern thought, especially all ecological thought, must do, or else risk (as it often happens) falling into the anthropocentrism and geo-construction that lie at the source of the catastrophic logic that has led us to this point.
This exhibition is thus, thematically speaking, part of a major current in contemporary art. And it does so discreetly, without emphatic proclamations, closer to an opaque writing of loose words and letters (formal opaqueness) than to transparent sentences; closer to the fragment than to totality (which, as we know since Adorno, is the non-true). We can detect in it some touches of ecopolitical art, but free from any concessions to feeble and comfortable subject matter.
Then, there is a notion that must be mentioned: the notion of place, the “topian” as a starting point: all the elements that are present here in a variety of artistic media have been marked by their place of origin, there is nothing “utopian” about them, even though that place is not named here. Of course, the exhibition’s title immediately takes us into a certain geographic universe, and the tridimensional objects on display even include a green neon piece that replicates the cartographic line of the Amazon’s course. Consequently, the viewer should look at this exhibition by projecting it onto a map with a double nature: real and imaginary. A real topography (of which “documents” are shown: images that may be, for instance, charts of medicinal herbs) that, in the end, becomes a topology of imagination.
As we have already stated, there are no landscapes here. By definition, the landscape is an appropriation of nature by man, an aesthetic “terraforming”, to use a term from a particular vocabulary of ecological thought. In the landscape, nature neither speaks nor writes, it has no voice. It is the object of the human gaze, which codifies it, generating aesthetic and cultural statements. In these works of Cristina Lamas, there are no traces of such aestheticising. There is an enunciation and a voice that are on the side of the images, of the elements treated in the drawings and collages. To give a voice is the task of that word that acts as the title – “pororoca” – and sounds strange or foreign to our ears. We instantly realise that that word is no part of any Indo-European language. To offer it in this manner to the exhibition’s visitor constitutes a programme that is at the same time an injunction: it tells us that we must face the untranslatable without ignoring it and start listening to languages as if we were witnessing the original scene of the world’s creation and naming.
António Guerreiro