Jonas Arrabal — Um fantasma é aquilo que fica

What are we of what remains?

The black liquid flows between white fragments, fills the gaps, solidifies. Melted bitumen poured over crushed shells pauses in mid-movement. Jonas Arrabal captures not only the traces of time and the sea, but also what leaves no trace – the event, the heat, the mixture, the ghost – running thinly just beneath the tangible, the perceptible.

Âmbargris is a rare substance excreted by whales, found floating or in the depths, valued like gold. In the series, an impressive black bitumen evokes this ambiguous richness of viscera and remnants as it slides between barnacles, shells, and sand across the translucent surface of life. Jonas Arrabal creates a kind of alchemy of refuse. “From the water comes this wealth,” he says, “fossil matter that has existed for thousands of years, prior to the existence of any civilization.” What is there, floating? Being preserved or suffocated?

I think of the title Jonas brought to unite the works: Um fantasma é aquilo que fica (A ghost is what remains). It is a title that carries a history, a movement. Ghost comes from Greek already bearing the idea of apparition: of a specter or soul from another world – phantázein – which in turn comes from phaínein, “to show,” derived from phos, “light,” something that shows us something to be seen, that casts light. Fable, fantasy, phenomenon also emerge from this same nest of the ghost, along this shoreline between what exists and what no longer exists. I wonder whether what Jonas shows us are ghosts, or whether we are the ghosts in another order of time: what are we of what remains?

Jonas’s works operate in the spectral register of the coastline; they are the mark that remains when the effect is exhausted, “the edge at the hole of knowledge,” as Lacan said. Jonas writes between movement and mark, in the space between what is tactilely inscribed on glass and what leaves no mark but leaves presence. Between the land where we stand and the liquid insistence of the sea.

Ambergris – with the dust of time and fossil matter spread over glass – reminds me of microscope slides, used to investigate the invisible that passes through everything. These slides are expanded to the scale of our bodies, visible to the naked eye, understood with the calm of contemplation. Its unfolding, Nami-nokori, passes through the playful process of preserving waves on paper – both firm and fragile – and floats in the frame pinned like collected butterflies. Nami-nokori is a Japanese expression that unites the physical image of the sea receding with the melancholic feeling of something that has gone but left traces. A ghost is what remains. The mark of absence. Refuse sculpted by time, by the erosive action of sea and wind. Objects beyond human control or manipulation. Their form is the mark of inevitability. The artist observes and translates – to translate is to construct. To displace. What remains when the water recedes? Salt.

If phaínein is the gesture of casting light, of making appear, what appears when foundations are exposed? In Esboço de uma arquitetura colonial, Jonas does not erect a building – he reveals the skeleton of what was crushed to build it. Sambaquis are artificial mounds of shells, skeletons, utensils. Tãba (shells) plus ki (heap). Deposits of time accumulated by peoples who inhabited the Brazilian coast approximately five thousand years ago. Since the seventeenth century, they were destroyed to obtain lime used in colonial constructions – especially sugar mills. The sketch here is refusal. Jonas does not complete the colonial edifice. He stacks white cement, shells, and barnacles into stainless-steel cylinders. The vertical form suggests column, structure, foundation – but it is a sketch, never a complete building. Ruin before being built. Left as a ghost: an apparition of destruction, without becoming a monument. Ruin. Here, to sketch is to show (phaínein) what sustains: the crushing of millennia-old layers of Indigenous memory.

There is a passage from Walter Benjamin to which I constantly return: “The aesthetic of ruins, of the fragment, is an aesthetic of construction, a combinatory activity that wants to exhibit itself as such. Ruins, fragments, are the noble matter of creation.” What lies in ruins, the significant fragment, the shard. Pieces from different domains that form new meanings. Ruins are not the past; they are the present, the now.

Bleached coral is not the reef it once was – it is its skeleton. Vertebrais are two bronze works supported by remnants of coral: marine structures that preserve life for many beings. “The coastline is what establishes an entire domain as forming another frontier,” writes Lacan. Corals are organisms composed of a calcareous skeleton and small polyps that live grouped together, creating over time the topography of reefs. Jonas mentions a study on coral bleaching related to environmental changes – light incidence, pollution, rising temperature. Increased atmospheric CO2 produces chemical reactions that acidify the water and affect zooxanthellae – algae that live in symbiosis with corals. Without them, corals lose their main source of nourishment. They bleach. They die. Here, they become pedestals for bronze. The bronze vertebra rests upon the calcareous skeleton of dead coral. Column upon column. Structure upon structure. What supports what?

In Dasdevastações, bitumen and salt inside stainless-steel boxes. “It presupposes an accident,” says Jonas. Oil that seeps and encapsulates blocks of salt. It is not water; it does not mix; it traps. An echo of the historical devastation of the sambaquis now in the form of an oil spill. The contemporary vocabulary of environmental catastrophes – beaches covered in oil, dead animals, destroyed ecosystems.

Jacques Derrida, in History of the Lie, writes that the fabulous and the ghostly share a trait: they belong neither to the true nor to the false, resembling instead an irreducible kind of simulacrum or virtuality. Neither full presence nor total absence. The ghost is what remains without a body, what acts without substance. Arrabal’s works operate in this spectral register. The shells encapsulated in bitumen are neither alive nor dead – they are suspended, frozen in a time that does not pass. The salt that stains the cement is not the water that evaporated – it is its trace, its chemical shadow. Everything here inhabits this in-between zone: the vestige that proves nothing, yet insists on appearing.

A ghost does not haunt – it bears witness. Jonas’s materials carry overlapping times. There is no nostalgia or lament. There is estrangement and light. The sensation that we simultaneously belong and do not belong to the same time as the sambaquis, the shells, the fossils, the corals. “It presumes an existence prior to ours and that will probably exist after us as well,” says Jonas. The salt that once made the body float when there was still a body. Now, in the absence of skin, it flows. The sea recedes and carries something of us with it. What remains is salt on the surface of cement, the shell embedded in mortar, oil upon stone. The ghost is not what departed – it is what remains without our knowing it remained. Thus the fragile wheel of the world is pushed forward. The question echoes: what are we of what remains?

Omar Salomão