2021

It was probably July when we first started to discuss what waste was all about. I had invited Rodrigo for an artistic residency at EGEU, in Lisbon, where the challenge was to find the point where the notions of landscape and desire meet. Rodrigo accepted. For about two weeks, he turned the art space into a studio and went there every day to work. In the end, he came up with a long beam made of concrete and wood, which he later teared into pieces and damped in a bin.

A couple of years on, we are still not sure about the answer. There is certainly a sense, probably emotional, in which memory is also a geography, in a way a geography within geographies, a way of drawing a space out of the space that enables it. It is not clear, however, whether this emotional geography is more connected with the feeling of ephemerality that massively urbanised places may produce, which leans towards the past, or with a desire regarding space and extension, which seems to tend towards the future.

Either way, we have been talking about objects a lot, things we come across in the street. Rodrigo’s body of work consists mostly of beams, cargo straps, canisters and other objects that could as well just have been abandoned or forgotten. Some of his paintings, for instance, do not differ much from a random urban wall, full of tags, drawings and traces left there without a clear intention. Again: nails, beams, tapes, warning signs, cables, walls full of tags - that is a kind of landscape we most certainly often come across, dotted with objects which tend to be regarded as neutral, anonymous or useless for taken out of their function. But what does it tell us either about memory or desire?

As last year we started to write each other endless emails, I took the opportunity to ask Rodrigo precisely this question. At one point he got back to me saying that he was “starting to believe that my [his] fascination with cement is [was] a failed attempt to freeze a small fraction of time, a brief crystallised memory”, immediately shifting from space to time. He finished the same email with a question: “if the cracks on the concrete which is about to collapse are just there to remind me that time is constant and unidirectional, then maybe my concrete sculptures are my way of keeping just a bit of that time for me?”

This brought up some questions. In what way may these objects, which we dare call ‘immediate’, comprise some kind of history? Should they be seen as ruins? Ruins are remnants. Remnants, inasmuch as they entail a history, an idea of passage, imply an emotional tie with space. Time is never perceived in a neutral manner. Time is always space and how it changes. Is that what desire is about - a tension towards a particular alteration in space?

I replied asking him whether he thought he was anticipating the future debris of the current present. If that was the case, then we could be talking about a space where memory intertwines with desire, for desire seems to be more sound when thinking about the future than missing. A couple of months later, he told me that his ideal city wouldlack all the things that emotionally tie him, instead being “a vast field of steel and concrete without memory, where nostalgia would not have a place”.

This point is key. An ideal map where time is steady, still and completed, must also be a map without time. That is the only way for it not to entail the possibility of losing anything, to avoid loss. Otherwise, how would we refrain from missing in a dimension where loss is precisely the way novelty is arisen? As new constructions rise solidly, discrete actions - random gazes, cravings, intentions - seem to be swollen by the surrounding architecture.

But this is nothing new. In fact, it was probably a long time ago when this fascination with ruins started, way before that sunny July. One of the interesting things about ruins today, however, is that they are not merely an element of a modern spleen spirit. More than just a playground for one’s imagination or voyeurism, contemporary ruins illustrate a history of functionality gone wrong as usefulness is lost through usage and discarded for novelty. As construction machines move, materials are lost and waste is produced. Temporary objects, such as traffic signs, warnings and isolation tapes are forgotten and left at a place that becomes theirs. But what do they become, once disposed? What use is a tape tied to a branch or a lamp, dancing in the wind?

Besides the whole neo-kitsch/ready-made romanticism, there is an interesting point about surfaces here. Particularly if we think that the resemblance between these disposed objects and Rodrigo’s works lies in the fact that their surface is deceptive. Urban ruins can only be seen as such inasmuch as they are emptied and disposed of their function. A beam is only a ruin once it loses its function as a beam. The same way, for similar, sculptures and paintings are deliberately deceptive. Without an evident function, uselessness becomes a tone, drawing a new landscape. Ephemerality turns into permanence as these objects, now bodies, fill the scenario.

This is where resemblance moves into the field of imagination (and because of that, into desire, a means of shaping space through time). It is probably not a coincidence that our conversation about waste shifted into the topic of ideal cities. The origin of both seems to be structured by two different times, one solidifying in space, one growing in memory, though running simultaneously: on one hand, overfilling, accelerated rotting, untameable speed, anonymous buildings. On the other, the urge to create an archive in order to save slow, delicate gestures, in order to fix small frames among the chaos, sustain time.

In the end, this why space here also matters. What else could fit this space of memory as well as an anonymous, shiny, ethereal white box? We needed something that could isolate this space so that it does not resemble space itself. Indeed, that is essential to underlining how space may be transformed into something that simultaneously resembles it and subverts it, fixing a momentary lapse, sight, in an everlasting gaze. So that July comes, over and over again.