photos by Hannes Brunner and Marcelo G. Lima
Of space and places
by Marcelo Guimaraes Lima
“There are mirrors for the face but none for the mind. Let careful thought serve as a substitute.”
Baltasar Gracian - The Manual Oracle, 1647
Images are coded and travel the world at great speed in the digital dimension. An ever changing IMAGOSPHERE envelops the planet.
A riddle is entered in the search engine’s text field: the response is a series of images on the graphic template on the screen. This graphically composed group of images will be printed, cut and assembled as a box.
The search engine is like a daring, or perhaps an unconcerned fisherman, throwing his net into deep and murky waters, indifferent to the potential risks of every quest, of every search, of every wish, of every human endeavor.
The assembled images reverberate with textual associations: quasi narratives being produced on the screen of the mind, in the cinema of thought. Everybody can see that the machine has a heart, a poetic mind of its own.
The mind-screen is a blank slate, with its compartments, like a table of categories whose definitions and relations however, exist only in that brief time of the interaction between the eye and the screen. It exists, that is, it persists, as remembrance, as traces of things forgotten, the very stuff of poetry.
From the rectangle of the computer screen to the rectangle of the paper, from the visible object in the light field to the reflected light of the plane, a surface. Cutting and pasting the articulated fields, the hinges and divisions of a body. From two-dimensional space to the space of the room: an elementary lesson on basic topology and topography.
The thought-images confront us now as bodies in space. A kaleidoscope of figures with faces both visible and hidden. They are ready to exchange places, to be assembled and reassembled in the contiguous space of a large tabula rasa.
The large white table in the middle of the room is a strategic field. A field of categories yet to be devised in a newly composed table of knowledge that will confront the shifting landscape of our thought processes, of our understanding of the ever changing limits of things, and of our actions.
The riddle of representation is that the “immaterial” needs to inhabit bodies, surfaces, spaces, in order to be understood, conceptualized, transmitted, in short, in order to be. The mind belongs “out there” in the world of things, images, figures.
Printed images are traces, colored shadows on the surface of a paper sheet, a delicate membrane, folded into a geometric body. Mirrored and connected to other boxes, it is an analogue of the material brain: a compact body made of communicating folded surfaces.
Reflecting on these emerging patterns and spatial structures of Hannes Brunner’s installation, we may be allowed to conclude that without the map there is no territory, that the map is indeed the territory.
