Installation
> approximately 3200 personal items belonging to the artist, 32 metal
shelves 2 metal drawers, 15 light tubes, stationary in various quantities, 2
media players, 1 ten-metre adhesive vinyl display e 34 markings on adhesive
vinyl (total variable dimensions)
+ Brazilian Statistics Institute (IBGE) Form > 11 A4 color sheet filled out by hand by Leonardo Araujo Beserra
+ Brazilian Statistics Institute (IBGE) Form > 11 A4 color sheet filled out by hand by Leonardo Araujo Beserra
Things is an
attempt to reconstitute — in an almost detective-like way — the chronology of a
life (1985 – 2018)
from its accumulated material over the years. By listing and making public all the
artist’s disused objects, the work runs counter conventional autobiographies:
here, the idea is not to start from the author’s memories, but to use the
materiality of objects to force memory (and oblivion) in radically unforeseen
directions.
Displayed without any censorship whatsoever, and organized both alphabetically and chronologically, the more than 3,000 items listed here function less as the artist’s personal museum and more as the communal archive of a generation. Its title, a reference to the eponymous book of French writer Georges Perec, Things: a story from the sixties, from 1965, testifies to the impersonality of the enterprise. After all, the (unrealized) project of making one’s exhaustive inventory was also taken from one of his essays:
Taking the shape of a large immersive installation, offering different types of classification, Things also refers to the form and symbolic function of a labyrinth. From the earliest mythologies, they work as powerful metaphors of the individual: to get lost and to get found there is to lose and to find oneself.
Displayed without any censorship whatsoever, and organized both alphabetically and chronologically, the more than 3,000 items listed here function less as the artist’s personal museum and more as the communal archive of a generation. Its title, a reference to the eponymous book of French writer Georges Perec, Things: a story from the sixties, from 1965, testifies to the impersonality of the enterprise. After all, the (unrealized) project of making one’s exhaustive inventory was also taken from one of his essays:
"This panic of losing my traces was followed by a fury of preserving and classifying. I kept everything: letters with their envelopes, movie tickets, air tickets, invoices, checkbooks, brochures, receipts, catalogs, conventions, daily newspapers, dry marker pens, empty lighters, and even gas and electricity bills from an apartment I had not lived in for more than six years and sometimes spent a whole day sorting and sorting, imagining a classification that would fill every year, every month, every day of my life." ("The places of a ruse" In Thinking / Classifying, 1985).
Taking the shape of a large immersive installation, offering different types of classification, Things also refers to the form and symbolic function of a labyrinth. From the earliest mythologies, they work as powerful metaphors of the individual: to get lost and to get found there is to lose and to find oneself.
Self Portrait > 02 strips of snapshots, framed (28 x 28 cm), 2010
Process > recording of the material's organization at the artist's house, São Paulo,
between January
and September 2018
> Portuguese only
+ Critical reviews > Demographic Census 2018: Things by Leonardo Araujo Beserra