Matheus Rocha Pitta: The Fool's Year

“Faced with the image, we are always ahead of time."

Georges Didi-Huberman


"The Fool's Year,” by Matheus Rocha Pitta, at first glance offers a visuality that is familiar to us. We are faced with a succession of images of protests published in newspapers. That is, a vast repertoire of photos that have become part of the day-to-day world since the so-called "Arab Spring" in December 2010. Soon after, we see that this series is organized into twelve sections to form a calendar in which each of the 365 days of the year is represented by a clipping of some demonstration around the globe. But amidst this sense of familiarity, a subtle and important subversion is inserted, that is, instead of the contestatory messages, the artist has introduced the inscription "April 1, 2017." So we are facing an entire year that becomes one and the same day. An eternal April first which, we know, means the day of the lie in Brazil, while in Europe, the same date with the same meaning, was baptized with the name “Fool’s Day," which can be translated as “dia do louco” or “dia do tolo.” 

Having completed the work we see today in Berlin during a residence in 2016, the artist came across some little known data about the origin of the expression that baptizes the exhibition. In a quick visit to Wikipedia we found that in the Middle Ages, New Year's Day was celebrated on March 25 in most European cities. In some areas of France, the New Year was a week-long holiday that ended on April 1. So some writers suggest that the “fools” of April 1st appeared because those who celebrated on January 1 were amused by the fact that some people celebrated on that date. That is, those who celebrated at another time were considered crazy because they were going against the official calendar. This anecdote, at its limit, exposes the arbitrariness of the conventions used to measure time. Somehow, Matheus' calendar is a tribute to "fools"—every day of the year is a day of madmen, of fools. A condensed year, frozen in a single day, or a single initial day dilated and diluted into one year.

In addition to the compression of time, or the crystallization of time, we witness the withdrawal of the content of messages from the cries to emphasize the characteristic language of the protests, as well as the repertoire of gestures there. Arms raised, crowds, numerous faces that become a single uniform mass. One of the meanings of this strategy was already well understood by Claudio Oliveira in a text about the work "To the Winner of the Potatoes": "(...) through this procedure, Matheus restores the importance of the gesture of the winners’ gestures by raising or kissing the cup. Without the trophies, with potatoes, these gestures are displaced from their most obvious purpose: the idea that by receiving the trophy, by lifting it and kissing it, they are celebrating receiving the prize, which is what they fought for. Without the trophy, these gestures appear like what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called means without end, that is, the gestures are exposed in their own mediality and not in their purpose."

If in the work cited this strategy of substitution presented potatoes, we now have the inscription "April 1, 2017." This act that "interrupts" time on a calendar is echoed in Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). In a text about "The Fool's Year," Matheus cites part of the 15th thesis of Benjamin's essay, in which we read: "Thus, calendars do not mark time in the same way as clocks. They are monuments of a historical consciousness of which there seems to be no longer a trace in Europe a hundred years ago. The July revolution also recorded an incident in which this awareness was expressed. After the first day of combat, it was found that in several Paris neighborhoods, independent of each other and at the same time, shots were fired against tower clocks. An eyewitness, who perhaps owes his prophetic intuition to rhyme, wrote: "Qui le croirait! On dit qu'irrités contre l'heure De nouveaux Josués, au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour."

Placed here, for Benjamin, is the difference between the chronological-scientific time marking of the clock and the philosophical-historical one linked to the calendar. On the one hand the empty and homogeneous time of continuous history, of the spleen of Baudelaire; on the other, time with physiognomy, marked by rupture, by the ability to stop the day, to stop the clocks, to interrupt the course of history, perhaps, to make a revolution. Therefore, one must shoot the clocks’ hands off to stop the flow of empty hours.

Now, in withdrawing the political demands of the protests and including an eternal April first in his calendar, Matheus seeks precisely to "stop time," to establish an interruption, and with the same move, to stop a certain narrative. If one of the major symptoms of our time is an automatic adherence to time, time of capital, time of progress, which only knows how to look forward and preferably quickly, nimbly, and productively, if we agree that the dynamic that reigns and alienates is that, then "The Fool's Year" reminds us that the chance to get out of this automatism lies in a diverse relationship with time. Matheus establishes a deviation in the flow of time, who knows, perhaps for something new, unheard of, to come. Less than a choice in the face of the binary relationship truth vs. lie, "April 1, 2017" establishes an area of uncertainty. Or rather, the idea of ​​truth and lie on the calendar is connected to the adherence to time: a fool would be one who does not follow his time, which doesn’t suit his era.

At this point, the artist's work immediately refers us to the thinking of two authors, Friedrich Nietzsche and Giorgio Agamben. In his essay "What is the Contemporary," Agamben starts from Nietzsche's reflections in his "Untimely Meditations" in order to draw a connection with contemporaneity closely linked to the way we relate to time. "Nietzsche places his demand for "actuality," his "contemporaneity" in relation to the present, in a disconnection and a dissociation. He who truly belongs to his time, is truly contemporary, is the one who does not coincide perfectly with it, nor is suited to its pretensions and is therefore, in this sense, archaic; but precisely because of this displacement and anachronism, he is able, more than others, to perceive and apprehend his time. Contemporaneity, therefore, is a singular relationship with time itself, which adheres to it and at the same time, distances itself; more precisely, this is the relationship with time that it adheres to through a dissociation and an anachronism. Those who coincide very fully with their era, who adhere perfectly to it in all respects, are not contemporaries since precisely because of this, they can not see it, they can not keep a fixed eye on it."

In dialogue with this thinking, "The Fool's Year" evokes a kind of productive anachronism. Productive because this interruption does not mean paralysis, it is rather not to look for norms and imperatives, even in the distressing disorientation that harasses us incessantly. Matheus seems to be saying that the possibility of transformation lies in something that precedes any message on a poster. It is not a question of disqualifying messages, nor of celebrating only the form of protest, but rather of signaling to the structural flux in which this occurs. Short circuit automatism—the dynamic that reifies everyone daily—with which we deal with time: there lies the chance to usher in another relationship with the past, present and future triad.

The installation of the show at the Contemporary Athena Gallery strives for a certain deautomatization of perspective. Each month of the calendar is framed, with the cutouts glued to the glass, forming twelve pictures that are undoubtedly,  each one, small windows. The gallery is located inside a shopping center and the walls on which "The Fool's Year" is displayed were, until recently, a large showcase. We enter the exhibition space and the gallery is empty. It is only when we turn back that we come across the work. The common expectation of seeing the main walls of the space occupied is thwarted. Upon exiting, this simple gesture calls for a closer reading, the need to look twice. Body and perception attempt to adapt to this subtle twist. There is also a link with the outside, as if the work actually belonged to the street. We are in the gallery, but looking, metaphorically, to see what is happening outside.

This active gaze then turns to the twelve months of the year that bring an anonymous multitude carrying in their hands, with their arms raised, inadequate time, the time of the insane. A planetary procession in which all are coordinated, purely and simply, by a date, as if time stood still and could be displayed on each poster. Matheus establishes here an intensive temporality, such as Walter Benjamin proposed. It is through a non-linear time, in which present and past can converge outside of progressive continuity, which the author conceives of as his theory of history. Benjamin's concern was for the interruption of its ghostly cycle of repetition. This is undoubtedly a central problem and in his essays appears in the form of an urgency: to free time from a linear conception that ends up sustaining a story that is nothing more than canonization from the point of view of the victors. According to Benjamin, history must be the object of a construction. Linear time prevents this construction by working with an immobilized past and a present annulled in its active possibilities. "History is the object of a construction whose place is not "homogeneous and empty" time, but a time saturated with "nows."

Thus, the repetition of the same "April 1, 2017" consists of an intentional mismatch with chronological time affiliated with the dominant values ​​of productivity, development, goal, performance, speed, effectiveness, execution, enjoyment—the time of the "winners." The artist gives us a year saturated with "nows" where each one cries out for an interruption in the reifying cycle that establishes what we know as "naked life." We are faced with a victory of the calendar over the clock.

At its limit, "The Fool's Year" emerges as another step in a poetic program developed with high doses of coherence and experimentation over the past fifteen years. Here we find the central elements of a research that mobilizes the urgencies of the present, but without transforming them into a kind of commodity. For this would be to replicate—in the sphere of art—a way of dealing with political reality just as society does in its niches most co-opted by capital. On the contrary, Matheus Rocha Pitta sweeps the present against the grain, inhabiting it entirely but in a constant mismatch, for he knows, following Agamben, that "to be contemporary means to be punctual to a appointment which one can only miss."

Luisa Duarte