Anna Paes — Olhar o Céu e Ver a Terra

To create a star, an artist travels through societies, countries, and planets within her backyard. With a single ticket, she collects diverse sediments, mineral pigments, basalt, quartz, lazulite, green jasper, and dust. Back in her house-bag-box, these materialities accumulate in a warm and plasmatic embrace.

As time dilates, the artist transforms and translates them into brilliant enigmas. She tears, dampens, crushes and agglutinates remnants of civilization into ancient novelties, inscribing symbols for other regiments — the sun, the moon, the equinox, the solstice, and the changing seasons. The new skin becomes stone, and thus the artist invents a geology.

To read the marks left on the matter, the visitor can consider them images, writings, or alphabets. It is important that they also dilate in time, extending an invitation to resonances. Consider knowledge as a neo-fossil — to live from what one knows, a degree of fiction is necessary.

Thus, we mediate heaven and earth, the cosmic pulse and human finitude. A single body of work brings together beginnings without ends — wombs and tombs — like an insistent palimpsest that endures by reinventing itself. This is the desire that mobilizes the politics in the first creative gestures.

To remake the pulp as if remaking the flesh of the world; the spark of synapses, the melanin in the strands of hair, the navel of memory. From the imagined stars, the ruins are gnawed and the leftovers are archived for the next experiments. We see the earth again after looking at the sky.

Bia Coslovsky