“In the position of observer, one can notice some living things”

                                                                        Leonilson

CEASA 1979-07-24, drawing on paper

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“I have this notion that art occurs in the process of life itself, and you don’t have to go outside of the context of your own life. It’s all there, and you just tap into it. You open up to it. You have to make yourself available to possibilities”.

                                                                  David Ireland

“The Work, or just Work, I’m not quite sure”, Shirley Paes Leme speculated over the title for her latest piece when I first visited her new studio.

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From the street one can still see traces of what was once the original house.

Inside the studio, one encounters the minimalist catalogue of the memory of the original house.

From destruction to construction. Work or The Work screams out the ephemeral nature of the materiality of architecture, and also whispers to the residual architecture which became her key objective for this work. 

It was a humble dwelling, a type of tenement that housed many families. It was a patchwork building: a fragile construction with rooms added as the needs and acquisitive power of the residents increased. This house was once the site of  an artistic intervention by Shirley and her students, a result of activities discussed in class. From the outset, the house became an art space, a destination, rather than just an anonymous address whose façade hid the compartmentalized and alienating effects of a capitalism based on exclusion and discard.  Perhaps the artist’s intuition had already picked up on a recent and relatively quick process of gentrification in the neighborhood due to accelerating property values in the neighborhood because of the construction of subway lines nearby.

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Motivated by a feeling of affection for the place – how to ensure its continuity, its sequence? – Shirley fought for a mortgage and, after one year of negotiations, managed to buy the house. The initial project was to construct the studio around the house so as to keep the original structure as untouched as possible.

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Unlike Gordon Matta-Clark, who accelerated the processes of the disintegration of architecture through the elimination of its “semantic vertebral spine”, Shirley’s intention was to prolong them. Matta-Clark’s fissures – houses sliced in half; the elimination of walls, beams, slabs, so as to make a sphere through the center of the building – denounced the ephemeral, precarious and ideological character of architecture as symbolic construction, and also attacked the city’s cycle of programmed obsolescence.

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But what interested Paes Leme was the emotional bond with that place, and hence the desire to embrace it, aware that the precarious and ephemeral quality of the house would match her own, in a process of co-extension of the inevitable: an architecture of consequence.  

In practical terms, it really would be impossible to insist on this type of bond: or, in real terms, it would be practically impossible not to imbricate the antiquity of the house within the novelty of the studio, or to transform it into an active ruin, inside a technological and historicizing narrative. But to demolish it completely and then build its memory would configure a risk. The idea to turn the building into a studio arose when the original residents entrusted the house to the artist as a temporary studio space. How to acknowledge that trust in formal terms after the violence of the destruction?

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But apart from the difficulty in doing this and the high cost, time itself was the defining agent of destruction: time exerted its natural force on the architecture, and it erupted. The house fell down. The team of architects responsible for the present project (Marcelo Ferraz, Cícero Ferraz Cruz, Francisco Fannucci and Luciana Dorbella) suggested a spacious design: a large area of concrete, glass and skylights. The light that floods the artist’s studio through openings in the ceiling is an important point of contact between the new studio and Shirley’s artistic research. What has been termed vernacular architecture –  the primitive tent, clay, the precarious, the informal – analyzed by Paes Leme in her doctoral thesis, shares the common element of light filtering in through the cracks, through the spaces between the stitches.

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“No.Thing Works” 

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“The violence turns to visual order, and, hopefully, to a sense of heightened awareness “, said Matta-Clark. In the cathartic images of explosion in the last scenes of “Zabriskie Point” (1970) by Michelangelo Antonioni, one can see a violently harmonic audiovisual composition. As the house went through a process of destruction, Shirley collected all the wooden planks, bricks, wiring, tiles, and regrouped them as minimalist pieces, invoking Richard Serra, Carl André, Sol Le Witt and Eva Hesse. 

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A kind of inverted geometry, or film played backwards, or even an archaeology rescuing the contingent – residues charged with symbols (the memory of the material itself as raw material) are a constant in the artist’s work: smoke, charcoal, picumã (the sooty residue that collects on the ceilings of country kitchens), photographs of existing formal organizations in space as spontaneous citations of her own work in what she calls installations-appropriations (the photograph not so much a residue of time – Barthes, Sontag – but time itself as material sculpted by the photography – Tarkowski).

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Collecting and cataloguing the debris from the original house, the artist created folds and  ensured a cohesive continuity fed by the ethics of affection, and through the memory of the experiences lived in the house, updated the material’s usability. A constructive fold of affection by memory based on gestures of formal rigor inherited from her teacher, Amilcar de Castro.

The “remember”, specifically the verb, not the noun “remembrance”, is an action activated from yesterday towards the past; a tool for constructing memory. Remembrance is thus an index for cataloguing. So the verb “remember” is the very act of building memory.    What unfolds today is experience. (As for the future, it is sheer illusion: the passage of time, the ephemeral, the active ruin as a later heritage, the afterwards, the “until the end of life”...they all spring from within the paradigm of the now). The verb “remember” deals with transitive objects turned directly into experience.

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The memory of the house Shirley built as a minimalist catalogue is latent. It is not a memorial. It is not dedicated to the memory of that place, because it no longer exists as a place. It exists as Work, which is nearer the scale of an intimate monument, of 1:1. And the intimacy is not exclusive to the artist, because the “intimate” in this monument starts at point 1 on the scale and reaches the other 1, the many subjectivities that, individually and at the instant of reception, will charge this architecture of consequence with their own aesthetics.

By Daniela Castro

 David Ireland was Shirley’s artistic adviser at university in the USA in the 1980s

*The title refers to the address of the artist’s studio in São Paulo          

 BROUWER, Marianne : Dejando al Descubierto. In: Marai Casanova (org.) Gordon Matta-Clark (Valencia: IVMA, 1993), p. 51

  WISNIK, Guilherme, O ‘informe’ e a ponte truncada entre arte e arquitetura. et al, p. 157 In: 27a Bienal de São Paulo: Seminários, eds. Lisette Lagnado. (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2008)

 The quotes in English that occur in the text are by Gordon Matta Clark, from Ted Castle’s, “Stairway to Heaven”, “Flash Art International”, June-July, nº 90 – 91 (1979).

 Installation-appropriation is the name invented by the artist in 1984 to describe an already existing place or space created by anyone, found by chance, which could be seen as an artistic installation or intervention.

TARKOWSKI, Andrej , “Sculpting in Time” (trans)