DENISE GADELHA

REVERSO is one of the most emblematic works in the series for establishing temporal connections beyond the moment of its presentation. It marked the beginning of procedural thinking, in which new projects took up and re-instated previous occurrences. REVERSO was created to participate in the LARANJAS collective that was supposed to occupy the Iberê Camargo Gallery, but ended up spreading throughout the entire Usina do Gasômetro. Then, it was presented on the 4th floor ceiling, in retrospective connection with CONDENSABLE – an intervention carried out in the Lunara Gallery hopper in the same year, in the same building, one floor above. On the occasion of the individual CONDENSABLE, the audience looked down as they walked over 4,000 fragments originating from four large photographs of the sunset, which thickened near the funnel-shaped flow. REVERSO, on the contrary, asked the subject to look up, virtually in the same direction where the “evening had run” in the past. The choice to use such images in this location was in line with the positioning of the Usina do Gasômetro, which, like the Iberê Camargo Foundation, is on the banks of the Guaíba, a favorite setting for enjoying the sunset in Porto Alegre.

After the exhibition, when I received the work in the apartment, I found the best use of space in the corner of a small room, separating the halves into perpendicular walls. The “other echoes” of REVERSO come from the record of the work at the accident site, as it was stored perpendicularly, exploring nuances in the transcoding process. However, such experimentalism is completely random, but it responds to the spatial characteristics of its new venue, in this case room 2 on the 2nd floor of the Iberê Camargo Foundation. There was an initial study based on the plan, which appropriates the inclination angle of the wall where the work will be installed, while replicating the grid logic used in the skylight lighting.

The objective is to propose a fusion between the unfolding of the work REVERSO (whose history of transpositions and reversals is inherent to its logic) and the specificity of the installation's location. I look for ways to “activate” the space, enhancing its perception. So, symbolically, the “echoes” are like operating elements in the equation established between architecture and visitors, in order to stimulate the perception of the space's peculiarities through fragmentary mirroring. When observing how striking the lighting grid on the ceiling is, it seemed natural to appropriate this structure in the methodology for dividing the modules of the work. It was then that I realized how much what was executed does not coincide with what was designed by Álvaro Siza. Between the project and its implementation, it is the imponderable that gives the final contours to reality.

The record of the REVERSO work at the accident site will be broken down into fragments  distributed over two grids, one representing the design established in the architectural plan, and the other in proportion to what was built. Thus, creating a loop that refers to the fractal: the repetition of the whole reconstituted in different scales in its parts. The mirroring of the division of the division that leads us to the experience of integration.