THE MEMORY OF WATER (2017)
Assigning visibility to the invisible as an object-image, the art work is historically associated to imaginative, cognitive and reflective production mental processes of images and concepts. The sensorial, emotional and intellectual perceptions’ and interpretations’ convergence deployed by the cultural object, from such perspective considered a contextualised simultaneous phenomenon of artistic practice and knowledge production, activates human imagination to produce efficient iconography and symbology whose temporary and volatile concepts of beauty, be them either conceptual and immaterial or objectual and material, translate and synthesise all cultural systems’ complexity and multidisciplinarity, and of that inherent to its specific spatial and temporal context. Both a reproduction and a cause of imaginary images and concepts imagined by man within all and each historical and cultural contexts, his iconographic and symbolic patrimony, the cultural object-image constitutes itself as man’s intra-representation and inter-projection, a grasping tool for expression, communication and knowledge.
Hyper-accelerated contemporary transnational and transcultural processes of high-lightened complexity and interdisciplinarity are simultaneously the designed cause and accidental consequence of a multitude of movements, transformations and hybridisations within realms such as economy, politics, environment, media, communications, art, entertainment, public health, human rights or demography. Permeating as many immense possibilities as conflicts, contemporaneity is marked by a challengingly fluidity as Bauman observes, franticly unstable and uncertain in its paradoxically simultaneous expanded universality and compressed fragmentation.
Formerly considered as static independent entities, one regarded to the threatening service and deep affectation of the other, it is today indisputably evident that nature and society unite within a continuous and mutual interaction whose balance is mandatory not only to the natural world and its self-generating ability’s ransom but to the human social worlds’ configuration and preservation. In such enticing and haunting times of flows, currents and circulations, The Memory of Water considers water as the binding element of nature and culture occupying their in-betweeness dimension. In fact, underneath its life destructive and generative ability, its landscaping properties, its function as a resource and as a transport route, lies water’s social nature as the forming and shaping substance of social worlds and theirs correspondent ideals, values, habits, norms, traditions, behaviours, symbols. It matters water’s meanings in offering ways of thinking of the world’s past and making of the world’s future. It matters The Memory of Water’s semiotics.
Imbued by a simultaneously emotionally cathartic and intellectually analytical purpose over contemporary social world’s fluid contradictions, The Memory of Water’s spatial and temporal minimal and conceptual composition recreates the atmosphere of a swimming-pool, exploring liquid social world’s incongruent opposing forces.
Additionally to the observer’s ever distant closeness around the composition inhibiting the observer to actually merge with the composition, it is his elevated, perhaps levitational, solitary position in the pool diving board’s edge which is privileged, yet opposed by the absorbing ambient sound work, as such inviting, provoking, defying the observer to introspection and reflection through which he may plunge in the work and within himself, his own internal and external world, and pushed to unexplored, unbounded proportions, personal objective and subjective territories. As a fluid contradictory realm, to immersion withstands emergence, to contraction, expansion, to proximity, separation. Ignition for renewed or ransomed perspectives.
Surface embedded oxidation and stains suggest time and memory evocative of spatial and temporal social places of playfulness, calmness and safeness, yet only available to those who are and have been privileged to accede such places. Water stands as the generating and perpetrator symbolic element of life and nature, yet contained within freedom suppressing imposed obstacles and invaded by plastics’ and metals’ plunged aggressive artificiality. Fragile individual and randomly shaped watery life elements spatially arranged at equal level invoke the precarious condition of communitarian equal coexistence and diversity tolerance. Exploring nowadays liquid and malleable era’s complexity, vulnerability and uncertainty both in society and in individual, whose variety of perceptions and interpretations resulting of the sensorial, emotional and intellectual experience is augmented by the reflexions’ variety of natural and artificial light in the water as some sort of a kaleidoscopic effect, The Memory of Water negotiates the subjective concept of contemporary social and natural worlds’ balance as a necessary condition for their own united sustainability.
Ricardo Escarduça