A ação abrasiva do estar presente: registros de um tempo contínuo

Abstract

This dissertation is built as an artist's book — a montage of textual fragments, image notebooks, and bibliographic notes — where time and ruin operate as both material and method to compose an imagetic and theoretical atlas of multiple artificial landscapes. The research begins with the subjective experience of urban walking and is grounded in delicate empiricism, a concept proposed by Walter Benjamin, to investigate how the landscape, particularly that of the city of Belo Horizonte, registers and reveals wear as aesthetics, memory, and language. By articulating ruin as becoming and matter as symbolic field, the work proposes corrosion as an artistic gesture, establishing a creative process in which time acts as co-author. The reflection on time as a transformative agent is informed by authors such as Emanuele Coccia, who understands metamorphosis as a fundamental condition of life, and Milton Santos, who conceives technique as the empiricization of time in the production of space. The use of chemical and biological processes on metal plates challenges the boundaries between technical control and unpredictable action, inscribing in the body of the work a living and unstable temporality. This experimentation resonates with the practices of Anselm Kiefer and Tacita Dean, artists who engage time as a constitutive element of image and matter, revealing impermanence as aesthetic power. Intertwined with these investigations, family memory acts as a guiding thread that weaves together the various materials of the work. Archival photographs, dreams, and ancestral narratives emerge as traces that exceed the individual sphere, composing an intimate and collective archaeology of the image, in dialogue with Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of survival and Sophie Calle’s idea of the subjective archive. The photobook, as a hybrid device, becomes a space for inscribing domestic time and unofficial history, in which the body and the home merge as memory supports. The photographic image is understood as trace, specter, and archive, functioning as a field of friction between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and imagination. Walking through the city challenges individual structures and turns the walking subject into an amalgam of sensations. Some are crossed by fear — or the courage required by the act of being present — others by curiosity, and most by the necessity of displacement in the metropolis. Participation in the Núcleo Nômade de Fotografia inserts the collective and performative dimension of walking as a method of meaning-making, reaffirming the body in transit as an aesthetic and political operator through Art-Based Research. This dynamic reveals relations between the artist’s body and the body of the city, the creative practice in a collective studio, and the presence of this studio within an institutional museum space. In this context, the city is simultaneously ruin and gesture, stage and archive, territory and language. By articulating visuality, writing, and matter in constant metamorphosis, this research proposes a mode of artistic practice grounded in listening, fabulation, and the gesture of lingering over what tends to disappear.