Héctor Zamora | As Circunstâncias

From September 2 through 23, Héctor Zamora (Mexico City, 1974) is presenting, at Luciana Brito Galeria, the solo show As Circunstâncias. Consisting of two works that combine performance art with sculpture, the show invites the viewer to ponder questions related to the iconography of gender, a burning issue currently.

The work Platônicos [Platonic], to be enacted in the house’s living room, is based on the classical male iconography, represented in a stone sculpture, which will be modified through the actions of a professional stonemason. A nude torso, tense muscles, exposed genitals, a grave visage and focused gaze have been recurring characteristics of the representation of the male human figure in Western culture, since classical antiquity.  David, a sculpture by Michelangelo in the Renaissance period, is perhaps the most emblematic example of this iconography. But the importance of that sculpture lies not only in the perfection of its form. The biblical hero is also the symbol of a civilizational project based on rationalism and virility, one which has guided – and oppressed – us until today. 

In Platônicos, the request that Zamora has given to the stonemason is to transform the human figure into a set of Platonic solids. These are the five elementary polyhedron volumes of spatial geometry, whose faces are congruent and identical: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedral, dodecahedron and icosahedron. In the dialogue Timaeus, written around 360 BC, Plato associates these forms with the fundamental elements of nature: fire, water, air, water and the constellations of the sky, respectively. The action proposed by Zamora can therefore be understood as a sort of “return to the origins,” or even a gesture of man’s reconnection with his own nature.

Nevertheless, despite the poetic beauty of the task assigned by the artist and the professionalism of the person executing it, the action is, from the outset, destined to fail. After its initial sculpting, the stone becomes molecularly unstable, complicating any further attempts to resculpt it with the precision needed for the Platonic forms.  So, regardless of the stonemason's skill, the outcome of this arduous and noisy process will be mainly shapeless chunks of stone, scattered haphazardly throughout the home's modernist setting.  This scenario presents a stark contrast between the idealistic premise and the somewhat catastrophic results. Zamora challenges us to consider the gap between theory and practice that we often observe in our daily lives. While this gap is the topic of many commonplace jokes, it also has deep philosophical roots in the inherently androcentric Greco-Roman culture, which is the central focus of this work.

For its part, Movimentos emissores da existência [Emitter Movements of Existence] starts with a scene where multiple women tread on earthenware water urns that are still unset and pliable.

To create this work, Zamora began with the iconic image of a woman with a ceramic pot of water balanced atop her head. This everyday practice of women transporting large volumes in such a manner is present in various cultures, including those from Western Greco-Roman origins and extending to Asia, India, Africa, the Americas, and, naturally, Brazil. To carry a load that weighs nearly as much as her own body, the woman needs not only strength and skill but also finesse. After all, quick movements do not combine with balance. The Western mindset unfortunately ended up associating this image with that of a useful and proud, but docile woman. Proof of this are the lessons in etiquette from not too long ago when middle-class girls were encouraged to carry objects on their heads, as a way of practicing an erect and modest posture. It is hard not to associate this image to every sort of disciplinary regime to which the woman is submitted, from the most remote times until today. This brings to mind a relatively recent saying: beautiful, reserved, and at home.

By inviting the women to step on the pots, Zamora poses an interesting interplay with this iconography, intervening both literally and metaphorically in its meaning. The act of taking the pot off from one’s head and putting it onto the floor, to then step on it with one’s feet, can be read as a gesture of refusing the utilitarian and submissive submission to which the woman has been relegated throughout the course of Western history. Nevertheless, because the pots are made of unset clay – and therefore malleable – the resulting gesture is not one of destruction, but rather of transformation. When pressed under the women’s feet, with a combination of force, precision and finesse (the same skills required for the pots to be maintained on top their heads), what were previously utilitarian objects become thought-provoking sculptural elements, reminiscent of uterine, vaginal forms. It is impossible not to perceive the surprising capacity for transmutation demonstrated by this group of women as a metaphor for day-to-day female life.

The exhibition’s title, like that of this last work, were both borrowed by Zamora from the beautiful book Atlas do corpo e da imaginação, by Gonçalo M. Tavares. In the Atlas, Tavares draws inspiration from many authors from the fields of art, philosophy, literature and architecture to creates entries that urge the reader to think about the relationship of our body with the world. At a certain moment, Tavares writes about an “existential musculature,” which urges us to move vitally, interacting with our surroundings. In his view, there are different ways for us to use this musculature, the most powerful of which is linked to a transformative quality – to the making of movements, as well as to the creation of “situations” (a term that Tavares, in turn, borrowed from Guy Debord) which have the potential to transform, even if momentarily, the reality that surrounds us. It is this sort of happening that Gonçalo M. Tavares calls Movimentos emissores de existência, a term which, not by chance, Zamora chose for the work.

In our present time, when the failure of the civilizational project is increasingly evident, Héctor Zamora invites us to reflect on various manners of coping with the challenges we face in the current Anthropocene era, along with different ways to use our “existential musculature.” Is it wise for us to continue – through the use of force and various forms of violence – to maintain a civilizational project that seems more exhausted every day? Or could it be that with finesse, sensitivity and precision, we can and should unite to transform what we once deemed unchangeable?

Helena Cavalheiro

sep/2023