Seeking out such complicity, as Marta Mestre observed, often employed the construction of new vocabularies and repertoires, where “language” might serve “as a means to create a common ground.”212 A similar search for new vocabularies to sketch, respond and embody different approaches to curating, artmaking and education can be seen in various other contexts internationally. In Europe, for example, the project/publication Vocabulaboratories aimed via collective laboratories and text invitations to create a kind of inventory/dictionary that might bring together “words that act as slides or doors” that can open up and connect and “make
211 The audio points of view are available (Portuguese only) on the Nucleus blog:
https://nucleoexperimental.wordpress.com/category/acao-conjunta-2/
212 Interview with the author, July 30th, 2015, Rio de Janeiro.
concepts become a/effective for what we do.”213 In Brazil in 2014 artist Cristina Ribas’s initiated a similar lab and publication project, made all the more potent given the recent context street protests. The book and website Vocabulário Político para Processos Estéticos (Political Vocabulary for Aesthetic Processes) was created via a series of encounters with a broad cross-section of artists, activists and researchers to develop a compilation of entries that could enable contagious intersections across political, artistic and social practices.214
For the Nucleus, attempts to structure new vocabularies were modest but also vital collaborative and hopeful gestures. Program titles formulated word-concepts that embodied notions of action, dialogue and mutuality such as “irradiation,” “acolhimento,” “ação conjunto”
(action together), “DouAções,” museu/escola (museum/school) or emphasized the sensorial such as “encontros multissenoriais” (multi-sensorial encounters). The latter, as a monthly series, recalled Domingos use of titles as word-theme-material concepts for example: “O museu vivo”
(Living Museum) “O museu à escuta” (Museum to Listening); or “Paro-penso-olho-movimento”
(I stop, I think, I see, I move). It was as if in creating “words with ears,” as Mestre suggests, that perhaps critical and affective bridges might be constructed.
Like the marginalia of medieval texts, these listening-word-actions operated in marginal relation to the museum-text.215 But also, critically beside, productively experimenting, constructing and cultivating other possibilities to the “centrality” of the museum as a collection of objects. Morais was already arguing for such possibilities, in connection with Domingos in 1971:
The new museum doesn’t have to store paintings or have a physical site. What it needs to do is propose situations. The collection will be only documentations of things presented, films, slides, photos, recordings, because the object (art work) can be a situation, an event, a happening.216
Later in 1973, as part of the research conducted by the Unidade Experimental on publics visiting MAM, particularly to the gardens, Morais would further emphasize new ways of thinking about
213 Paz Rojo, Manuela Zechner and Anja Kangieser eds, Vocabulaboratories (Amsterdam: Lisa Stichting, 2008) Available online https://archive.org/stream/VOCABULABORATORIES/VOCABULABORATORIES_djvu.txt
214 Cristina Ribas, Vocabulário Político para Processos Estéticos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Aplicação, 2014) Available online http://vocabpol.cristinaribas.org
215 Curator and educator Veronica Sekules uses the metaphor of marginalia in medieval texts to discuss the relationships between the worlds of contemporary art and education (and the latter in particular) in relation to
institutions. Veronica Sekules, “The Edge is not the Margin,” in Access all areas ed. Helen O’Donoghue (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2009) 232 -253, 246-249.
216 [Author translation, Portuguese original: “O novo museu não tem que guardar quadros, nem ter sede O que tem que fazer é propor situações. O acervo seria somente de documentos das coisas realizadas, filmes, slides, fotos, gravações, porque o objeto (obra de arte) pode ser uma situação, um acontecimento, um happening.”] Interview with Frederico Morais in Célia Teixeira, “Livre som do domingo,” Unknown journal, May 29th, 1971, Frederico Morais Archive, Research and Documentation Center, MAM-RJ.
museums and collections when his research suggested that for those visiting MAM there exists another collection – a “poetic collection” that is the “silence, noise, breeze, stones, vegetation.”217 The Nucleus attempted to expand this “poetic collection” to an ongoing praxis of researching, documenting and collecting experiences of artist-work-public relations. One important initiative in this vein was a program called “encountros multissensoriais” (multisensory encounters) that explored the museum, its architecture, gardens, collection, and exhibitions through the sharing of experiences between the blind and seeing. This project was developed in collaboration with the Nucleus of Cognition and Collective Research (NUCC) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and had the goal of experimenting with the boundaries and perceptions of accessibility – the tactile, the sensible, the auditory, the verbal, the visual, and the olfactory. Naturally, as MAM itself was key to the Brazilian vanguard’s phenomenological and sensorial leap into space and time, these sensibilities interwove with the multisensorial choreography of these encounters. Each, in turn, challenged the retinal primacy of the aesthetic experience within the museum. A slower more tactile rhythm was adopted. Franz Weissman’s Neoconcrete geometric sculptures embracing and (re)tracing the fullness of empty space, shifting from inside to outside, in a manner similar to Clark’s Caminhando, became literally embodied temporal transitions. Tunga’s anthropomorphic comb with a flowing gold mane of copper wires became a talisman of palpable sensorial strangeness. While there was often discussion of issues of access and creating “a route” of “touchable” works, the focus was not on experimenting toward a future applicable model; the experimental was rather embraced as both method and content.
Various artists with works on display at the museum (such as Tatiana Greenberg, Ricardo Ventura, Claudia Baker, Cabelo, and Laura Erber) participated in the encounters facilitating new perceptions of their works. Ricardo Ventura was fascinated when one of the blind participants recognized the wood he had used to create his sculpture Dois sobre dois (Two on Two) as jatobá saying it’s a kind of wood that makes your skin hairs stand up. This led to in depth exchange on materials and process while other participants explored their perceptions of the work’s shape,
217 O Jornal, March 11th, 1973. Discusses the “Laboratório de Criatividade (Unidade Experimental)” Creative Laboratory (Experimental Unit) under the direction of Frederico Morais. [“The research aimed to expand the notion of the collection, moving beyond a traditional idea of how a collection is understood – as paintings, sculptures, books, furniture – that there exists a poetic collection: the silence, noise, breeze, stones and vegetation. The material resulted in research, more than 30 tapes, photography, reports were incorporated into the museum’s collection, which in practice is an expansion of the notion of a collection.” Author translation, Portuguese original: “A pesquisa procurou ampliar o conceito de acervo, partindo da idéia de que alem do que tradicionalmente se concebe como acervo – quadros, esculturas, livros, moveis – existe um acervo poético: o silencio, o barulho, a brisa, a pedra, a vegetação. O material resultante da pesquisa, mais de 30 fitas gravadas, fotografias, relatórios, foram incorporados ao acervo do Museu, o que é na pratica, a ampliação da noção do acervo.”] Morais also discusses the Unidade’s research in his interview with Renata Wilner, 77-78; and Frederico Morais, “Dimensionar o Museu,” in “O Museu em questão.” Caderno B, Jornal do Brasil, August 30th, 1975, in Roberto Pontual Obra Crítica, eds. Izabela Pucu and Jacqueline Medeiros (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2013) 279-286, 284-286.
temperature, form, and equilbrium. The sculpture comprises two beautifully curved pieces of wood, reminiscent of dumbbells but also of embryonic-like forms. Many drew analogies with the curvature of the spine and one person, who particularly touched Ventura, described the piece as reminding them of their mother’s cheekbone.218 The encounter opened up radically different forms of aesthetic judgement, accessible only through an expanded sensorial temporality.
Professor of psychology and coordinator of NUCC, Virginia Kastrup, identifies as key aspects of the program: working with artists, adopting the experimental as method, willingness to divest prior knowledge, exchange between research groups, and what she described as access to the “noble” part of the museum.219 The latter distinction emphasizes that it is not only about providing the possibility to touch original artworks but also to qualitatively access artistic forms of thinking and making together with artists, curators, and educators. Artist/educator Bianca Bernado, who along with Bernardo Zabalaga co-led the monthly series for the Nucleus in 2012 – 2013, describes a particularly rich encounter titled “O eco do meu corpo no mundo” (The Echo of My Body in the World) that opened up new ways of thinking about access beyond the tactile, challenging touch as a necessity and pointing to other possibilities.220 This furthered the program’s experimental method as a series of horizontal encounters between research groups, artists and participants.221 Domingos Guimaraens presented his work Risco (Risk) featuring a video of the artist amidst approaching traffic writing the word “risk” on the road. The artist’s narration of the making the piece coupled with the sound of oncoming traffic, soliciting cries of
“Be careful” and “Watch out!” together with the participation of flautist Guilherme de Carvalho, gave the encounter a richly textured and embodied quality achieved through voice and sound.
This experimental mutuality shifted the encounters from being perceived as about/for those with “deficiencies” to a genuine exchange of other sensory “efficiencies.”222 Recalling Oiticica’s Parangolés, this experimentality was enabled by collective wearing and watching (here
218 Bebel Kastrup and Virginia Mota, “Um encontro com a obra dois sobre dois de Ricardo Ventura,” 2012, Blog, Nucleo Experimental de Educação e Arte, PDF 1-5, 3 https://nucleoexperimental.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/um-encontro-com-a-obra-dois-sobre-dois-de-ricardo-ventura_bebelvirginia_ok.pdf
219 When interviewed Kastrup had recently returned from a conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on questions of accessibility and the blind. After experiencing a mediation for the blind at the museum, while acknowledging the competency of the educator, she noted that the “access” seemed to be to secondary objects or objects “like” those on display rather the artworks/primary objects themselves. For Kastrup MAM rather offered access to what she describes as the “noble” part of the museum. Interview with the author, July 22nd, 2015, Rio de Janeiro.
220 Educator/researcher Ana Chaves lead the multisensorial encounters program for the Nucleus in its first year of experimentation in 2011. In 2012 -2013 artist/educators Bianca Bernardo and Bernardo Zabalaga co-coordinated the encounters. All the Nucleus’ artists, educators, researchers and cultural producers collaborated with the program.
221 Interview with the author, August 31st, 2015, Rio de Janeiro.
222 The idea of efficiency and deficiency comes from the observations of Camilla Alves and Virginia Menezes de Souza, both blind, who acted as mediators for the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Museum is the World in 2010 at Casa França Brasil. Their work for the exhibition was developed in collaboration with myself and Luiz Guilherme Vergara and the educators Ana Chaves and Maira Dias, both of whom were part of the Nucleus and were supervisors of the mediator team for the Oiticica exhibition as well as Virginia Kastrup, her student Juliana Moura and the NUCC team who stress the importance of conducting research with rather than for blind people.
what might be called a tactile conviviality) not only of those participating, but also as a kind of happening observed by other museum visitors. Vital to this process was the presence of trust – between research groups, the institution, participants, and artists – curiously facilitated by blindness itself. As philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart has noted when habit gives no guarantees trust is vital – indetermination, trust, experimentation, creation go together.223 Here the figure of the blind person, one that historically conjures necessities of dependence and intellectual fascination, mobilized both a literal and metamorphic feeling one’s way in the dark, opening up fissures between institutional habits and emergent possibilities where, like Jacques Derrida writes in Memoirs of the Blind, the body proper – here understood as both individual and collective – is an instrument, the drawer of the drawing.224 A process that affects a kind of multisensorial invasion and expansion of the scopic margins of vision to give us, both the blind and seeing, back our eyes; that is a more textured, slowed down, open, readied, and willing mode of experiencing.
Another encounter began with us sitting on small stools in MAM’s gardens. We must have been about twenty, maybe not even. In a small gesture of welcome, Bianca and Bernardo invited us to simply breathe, corporally listen to the space, time and moment. A light breeze enfolded us and we all began to gently sway. Lula Wanderley described to me that he “learned to come and cry in MAM’s gardens.”225 There is something magical, affective, wholly singular in those spaces, that breeze…This breeze, affectivity, and openness became sensible instruments, tools of practice, a resonant body instinctively and expansively drawing itself. As Virginia Kastrup remarked on a subsequent experience with Israel, one of blind people involved in the encounters, who in the midst of a workshop and thoroughly immersed in the moment turned to her and said “MAM is with us.”226
Affectivity and relaxed openness, is how Morais described the key essentials of MAM as a space of Carioca art. 227 Writing in 1980 and lamenting the institutional crisis post the 1978 fire, he argued that a certain joyfulness and involving generosity that engaged the public in the artists’
creative process characterized the institution’s programming at its most expressive.228 A legacy of which imbued the multisensorial encounters. Experiencing, experimenting, touching were all
223 Pelbart’s essay “Acreditar no mundo” explores the work of William James particularly through the lens of the philosopher David Lapoujade and the place of trust as a necessary resource to inhabit risk and foster creativity. Peter Pál Pelbart. “Acreditar no mundo.” O avesso do nilismo: Cartografias do esgotamento. São Paulo: N 1 edições, 2013, pp. 305 – 324, p.319
224 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993/Paperback edition 2007), 4-5
225 Interview with the author, July 22nd, 2015.
226 Ibid.
227 Frederico Morais. “Balanço /.80 – 2 A crise do MAM e a vanguarda carioca.” O Globo, December, 1980.
Administrative files, Research and Documentation Center, MAM-RJ.
228 Ibid.
simultaneously interwoven, tentatively seeking out new territories where, as Derrida notes, “[t]he experience or experimenting of drawing (and experimenting, as its name indicates, always consists in journeying beyond limits), at once crosses and institutes these borders.”229