Carlos Miguel Gonçalves

Rogério Taveira and the multiplicity of (im)pressures in an experimental geography of Sintra

CSO - Internacional Congress Author About Other Artwork, online, World Wide Web

This article presents a comparative analysis between Trevor Paglen's Experimental Geography, Didi-Huberman's Similarity by Contact, Gilles Deleuze's Pairs and Triptychs and Rogério Taveira's Prints of Sintra. Thus, the aim of this article is to observe the study of the space of the Sintra hills (Portugal) in the work under consideration. To this end, a progression of the basic concepts is presented in general lines. The results obtained are configured in an essay that proposes to register Taveira's work and creative processes in the light of Italo Calvino's concept of Multiplicity. Finally, the work is confronted with the concepts of Paglen, Didi-Huberman and Deleuze.

1. multiplicity
Similarly to the work "Impressões de Sintra" of Taveira (Reis, 2021), the text Multiplicidade (Multiplicity) by the Cuban Ítalo Calvino appears in literature with the same purpose - to project into the future, values to be cherished in the history of art. In a way, they share the same epistemology of the power of language. Multiplicity is part of a series of lectures to which Calvin was invited by Harvard University in the academic year 1984. "Six Proposals for the Next Millennium" was the name chosen by the author for this set of six lectures. Multiplicity is the fifth proposal of a list that includes Lightness, Speed, Accuracy, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency. Calvino makes it clear that the theme of his lecture is the contemporary novel as an encyclopaedia. An approach that allows the author to establish a "network of connections between the facts, people and things of the world." (Calvino, 2006: 128) He chooses to open the conference with a quote from the novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, not only because he too is Cuban and of a particular linguistic complexity, but especially because they share the ecological vision of the world: a "system of systems". A materialist vision from which, in the knowledge of things, infinite relations between past / future, reality / possibility converge. A demanding vision that dominates, describes and locates everything both in space and in time, through the exploration of the semantic material of words. In the same way, Taveira also establishes an extraordinary dominion over the materials he uses. The charcoal that marks the semantics of the Sintra granite (Figure 1), details the feather of the Great Gull (larus michahellis) (Figure 2), pressed on paper, produces the mark of time in the space of things and in his own creative space. A process that implies a certain relationship between this objectivity of the mark and the surprising subjectivity of the creator. According to Calvino, Gadda operates from a network that connects all things and demonstrates the way in which the contemporary approach has come to permeate relationships in act or potential. (Calvino, 2006: 134) Admittedly, the purpose is colossal! However, both for Gadda and Taveira, it seems that the shared epistemological mestization of a multiple and complex perspective of the world does not impose limits to the ambition of their projects and generates relations between practices, processes and sets. Calvino clarifies: knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that links the major works of both what is called modernism and what is called postmodernism (Calvino, 2006: 137). A culture of our time that makes the totality in potencia, the hypothesis, and multiplicity, its methodology of processes and sets. According to Calvino, are born of the confluence and clash of a multiplicity of interpretative methods, ways of thinking and styles of expression. (Calvino, 2006: 138) Calvino notes that even the extensive and detailed projects that arise in the culture of our time, propose figures that are not very harmonious. Conflict generating vortices that decentralize structures (mineral, animal, vegetal) as a safeguard of an encyclopedic truth. (Im)pressures that describe the present time of facts, determined by the will to do from inside the technique. A network of possibilities of a subjective world-world in which the thickness of confluence is reproduced in each separate and cumulative part. A machine of multiplying the semantic matter that starts from the referents of the drawing with multiple possible meanings. Modes of interpretation that combine condensation with invention, the sense of infinite capacities with expression. A work-container of the future. The collision of time at the point of arrival of this unique territory that reproduces itself and produces us humans: each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a catalogue of styles, where everything can be continuously remixed and remembered in every possible way (Calvino, 2006: 145).

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