JULIANA CERQUEIRA LEITE . OUTRAS SIMETRIAS [OTHER SYMMETRIES]

Other Symmetries: Body and Gesture in the Vertigo of Representation

I wrote the image that was the scar of another image.

Herberto Helder

Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s work is fundamentally based on sculpture. And it is sculptural thinking, under tension and in various densities, that presents itself in Outras Simetrias, an exhibition that features essentially sculptures and drawings. In these works, gesturality flows beyond the conventional circuits and meanings typically assigned to it; it is inserted in unsuspected places, articulated with other forms of knowing and doing, calling into question categories that are typically used to frame the body as something stagnant and fixed. Here, the body is in a dizzy state and haunted with phantasmagoria, defying any asepsis that would dictate its presence. The focal point of the artist’s relationship with sculpture lies in her encouraging instability, creating cuts and juxtapositions that invoke other presences and architectures to redefine spaces. For their part, her drawings operate by revealing something latent, which can arise in the gestural act of their making itself and in the dimension of emergent appearance.

Using her own body, the artist created two casts with plastered gauze, each mirroring the other in the same pose. The molds, cut in half vertically along the sagittal axis, where the body is mirrored from one side to the other, are fused perpendicularly. The artist throws herself into the work, and then re-throws herself into it, to generate bodies that create other mirrorings, thus breaking preexisting logics. Another scene, which subverts the dimension of classical sculpture, involves combinations that reveal her sculptures as poems that generate spatial asymmetries. The enigmatic presence of bodies and language gives rise to works that resemble carcasses, cocoons, figures that, in constant mutation, exist somewhere between the human and the animal, like images that move in dreams, in the sky, or in poetic hallucination. They are abstract impressions, nebulous forms in a process of dissolving, lending the representation an aspect that is simultaneously delirious, plural, and nomadic.

The experience with another relationship of mirroring, a key theme for the artist, is a primordial concept in psychoanalytic theory. In the “mirror stage” metaphor, Jacques Lacan posits a perpetual interchangeability between object and subject, problematizing our place in the world. As he sees it, there is a decisive moment when the child recognizes their image in the mirror, and it is from this moment onward that the recognition of an instability comes into play. Here, Lacan is exploring the notion that subjective formation is tributary, returning to Freud’s statement: “the ego is not master in its own house.” This is where spatial coordinates break down, open up, and ultimately incorporate us. And this is precisely what Juliana reveals in her gestures of reconstruction, collage, and juxtaposition of body elements, exposing the fundamental void and the non-coincidence that is inherent to our being, a mirroring that does not reveal sameness, but rather always an otherness.

The work of Eva Hesse, a sculptor who is fundamental for Juliana Cerqueira Leite, inevitably comes to mind here, particularly her first three-dimensional works with anthropomorphic characteristics, made between 1965 and 1966. Those works incorporated what critic Yve Alain-Bois called a “complex operation,” uniting contradictory gestures in a way that harbored doubt, close to boundaries, stretching established limits.

“Chirality” is a geometric property concerning the asymmetry of a molecule, which prevents it from being superimposed on its mirror image. This noncomplementarity is a fundamental idea in Outras Simetrias. Deriving from the Greek word for “hand,” the word “chiral” aptly bears the image of the right and left hands, which cannot be superimposed. This dimension of asymmetry is a constitutive aspect of the biological body and also of the instinctual body that is formed by the clash and instability between biology and language that pierces the body and gives meaning to it.

In the displacements proposed by these works – and in the presence of the artist’s own body – there is a subtle dialogue with questions proposed by Donna Haraway, a philosopher and zoologist who has been investigating the new facets of body technologies that cause profound impacts, such as the traditional split between body and mind. Juliana also probes the hybrid human and machine organism, blurring the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, positioning the body in a dizzying experience that involves the post-gender quality and the heteroclitic and diverse forms of the body in contemporary times.

Her sculptures are also philosophical exercises, in which the body’s tremor and abyssal nature reveal that “the self is another.” After receiving a heart transplant, Jean-Luc Nancy was overwhelmed by the fact that he now had, in his own body, a part of another body: the body is an intruder. The instability sustained in Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s artistic gesture points to a body made of gaps and fissures, from which the void unfolds and the world reinvents itself. A true rupture with the scheme of perspective occurs, just like how the Freudian unconscious subverts the subject, by forging “another mode of imaginarization” that shuffles inside and outside, absence and presence. In her 1963 work Caminhando, Lygia Clark also uses this topological object in her own distinctive way, radically questioning the vertigo that frees space from its rigid coordinates.

The movements of self-defense performed by a dancer and actress, transformed into sculptures, reveal how the body consists of this dissonance. In front of 48 cameras, Meredith Glisson reproduced five instinctual human reactions to existential threats, described by ethology as fleeing, fighting, freezing, frightening, and begging for mercy. Her gestures were transformed into a skeleton – a wireframe – of movements filmed at 60 frames per second. This skeleton was then overlaid with a digital skin, sold as “basic female” in the market of digital objects. The sculptures created by the artist reveal a single second of movement.

In Croire aux fauves, Nastassja Martin reveals that, at moments of intense fright and fear, there is something that precedes us. In her book, the French anthropologist recounts her harrowing confrontation with a bear in the Siberian forest. In this bewildering encounter, she was violently attacked and her body was torn apart, divided in two. Her body was subsequently re-assimilated in a new form: the lacerations, the torn skin, the disfigured face, the claws and teeth of the bear with which she fought. Everything came together into a hybrid. This mirroring, like the one proposed by the artist, is fundamental for overcoming the dualistic conception by which we typically see ourselves. The anthropologist survived and, in her body, she incorporated something of the bear. She writes about the abysmal experience of opening oneself to alterity in the most radical way imaginable: “There are no longer absurdities, strangenesses, or fortuitous coincidences. There is only resonance.” This is the same vertiginous exercise explored in these “other symmetries.”

Bianca Dias