Paula Scamparini | ORUN - Oi Futuro Flamengo

towards social rearrangement, which builds mutual universes, may lead to transformation. Concepts only have an impact on a very limited domain. I think of empathy as a way to create worlds, and this goes through the creation of interim fictions. There are recognizable, shared, accessible fictions, as a sort of suspended space that houses imageries, ideas, sensations, which we share, depending on how a trigger is pulled.

There is something that presents itself as a form of intimacy - such as beauty shared but untold - as they do not belong to the discursive order. But there are also fierce shocks in the exchange process. And I face them expecting to be able to access places that, although quite uncomfortable, are plentiful of reinvention in themselves and of the world.

There is something in the darkness, in the noncontingent, a dreadful unknown that I look for. The forest, the ocean... entities of such magnitude, which touch me deeply, and also make me move.

All this modus operandi of the artist translates itself also in the body and in materiality. And it is in the matter that some historical wounds may be translated: the pigment that translates the skin tone is made of clay; the mold which shapes the work is the body.

Vermelhos: the pieces ultimately head towards a common shade, which reverberates the issues themselves raised by the artist. Reviving the work of building clay tiles using the enslaved people’s legs as molds is also reviving the symbolic character of such practice: the imprisoned body that becomes the raw material for a social and physical construction, used as structural parts of the places of power and ownership. While reviving this process, the artist reminds us that colonial architectures — physically and socially — were built upon the exploitation of enslaved bodies. The flesh structure in these constructions is, thus, evidenced.

Humans that exterminate humans; humans that exterminate other species. Time is like the wind on sand dunes, unveiling and covering existences and resistances. In the South Turtles do not age. All the time, species and cultures become extinct. But how can we speak of humankind when there are so many ways of living and perceiving the world? Who is this ánthrōpos in the Anthropocene? Once again, it is the official version that suppresses all others supported by mechanisms of power that transcend simplistic understanding.

How does your research about ecosystems encounter the present time — such critical times when we head towards social, economic, climatic and ecological collapse?

I understand that the space in this context — with which the artists may interact —is precisely that of a propositional space, which not only resumes or resembles, but also projects impossibilities. Everything is possible if we get rid of the perspective of the constructed reality. Suggesting re-elaborations of the world is possible through ideas that, at a given point in history, may seem unreachable. I am not saying artists will change the world, but I believe that they are capable of feeding imageries and prompting thought.

This way, they may operate as instruments so that changes take place in other people.

It is precisely in this scenario that art becomes indispensable, and not superfluous, owing to its flexibility to adjust by creating crucial modus operandi for its embodiment in our time and in the years to come. We do not foretell the future, but we can search through the present in a deeper way. We resort to a time for thought that few people have, we build our repertoires with such an aim in mind, and deliver such thinking to a larger number of people. We create more ecosystems, among so many existing ones, we propose chain reactions, whose purpose is not accumulation; we aim at retaking the present time, at observing and placing each interlocutor in the very position in 23