Ayla Tavares: Coisas que se movem lentas

One Step Forward and I am No Longer in the Same Place

Just over a year ago, we saw Earendel for the first time. The image of the most distant star ever known was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2023, snatching the title that Icarus had held since April 2018. Earendel's light was emitted 900 million years after the Big Bang and took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. Billions of years and we were only able to see it just over 400 days ago, relying on technology and a stroke of luck. It was a rare alignment of the galaxies located between us and Earendel that opened up this tiny gap in space-time. It is almost as incredible as it is unbelievable. It is like verifying the fabrication of fantastically real worlds. Scientifically proven, but absolutely invisible to the human perception of time and space.

These are the other possible worlds that Ayla Tavares presents us with in Coisas que se movem lentas [Things that Move Slowly]. In her practice, the artist from Rio de Janeiro is fascinated by the concrete and magical nature of time. This began in her relationship with rural maracatu — a cradle of language that builds matter and from matter builds language — it takes shape in ceramics, an ancestral technology that carries time as part of its material and has it as a constituent part of its process. Time is also present in our interest in the millenarian movements that mark the presence of things in the world and our ability (or willingness) to perceive them. As Chico Buarque sings, again and again, while I am writing this text: Don't be anxious, don't Because nothing happens right away Love [the world] is in no hurry It can wait in silence Deep in a closet [the universe] In the mail Millenniums, millenniums In the air.

In the series Matéria Matéria (Matter Matter), the works are approximately the size of the open palms of her hands. Clay is one of the oldest raw materials used by human beings. A kind of oral history told through the hands. An archaic, ancestral gesture that comes close to drawing and writing, taken up again in each of the pieces. They contain a kind of grammar of natural or organic shapes, as well as strange beings with teeth, scales, and small claws. These forms are joined by graphite drawings in a kind of archaeology of natural, historical or astronomical phenomena that are almost unimaginable to us. These ceramic bodies are like sphinxes that show us new worlds with the choreography of mountains, the drop that takes years to actually drip, the movement of tectonic plates, and the formation of a coral.

Ayla Tavares' own artistic process also tells other stories. In Escrituras 1 [Scriptures 1], she brings together samples of all the clays she has worked with in recent years. It is like a kind of family album or scrapbook, which the public will be able to leaf through. These are stories to be read by the hands, drawing our attention to the artist's interest in the performative character of constructing an artistic object. Uma forma sempre úmida [An Always Humid Shape] is comprised by a continuous act. The ceramic rings that we see in the aquarium hold a bull's head inside — the name given to the initial shape that is made in the first gesture of modeling clay. It is as if each bull's head holds within it every possibility that has ever existed, that exists, and that will exist in ceramics. The form constructed by the artist captures the flow of water from the aquarium, humidifying the bull's head inside. It is thus kept alive, in a state of expectation.

In our first conversation about Coisas que se movem lentas [Things that Move Slowly], Ayla pointed out that this exhibition would be a kind of celebration of her relationship with ceramics. A relationship that began by chance in 2017, when the artist was trying to resolve technical issues for an installation project she had in mind. After several unsuccessful tests, a friend suggested she try a solution using ceramics. The project never got off the ground, but Ayla became interested in the possibilities and challenges of using ceramics, and has been working with it ever since. But there is another celebration here: of our presence in the world, or rather, the way we choose to be present in it. I keep thinking that these ceramics are also eternal objects-billboards-sphinxes: And who knows, then Rio will be Some submerged city (and) The divers will come and find them. The echo of those old words, Fragments of letters, poems, lies, portraits, Traces of a strange civilization. What will our stories say about us – which in other times will be other chimeras told by other masters?

Fernanda Lopes