Mauvais Alphabet As an Exercise in Misreading
Text by Maykson Cardoso
Translation to English by Rob Packer
1. From the World of Form to the World’s Form
Of all the possible starting points to begin to comprehend Alfabeto maldito (Mauvais Alphabet ), there is one that says much about the forces at stake here: this is the fact that this collaboration is the first that Joélson Bugila and Jorge Menna Barreto sign together, as a “work of art”. It is therefore possible to begin by thinking of this particular alphabet as emerging, above all, from a meeting of sensibilities, providing an exercise to distill issues both artists have developed over the course of their careers: which, without any doubt, leads to a panoramic re-viewing of specific works allowing us to see a more direct relationship between their previous activities and the work they present here.
Jorge Menna Barreto’s concerns—in language, translation, the construction of a complex relationship between these two interests with both site specificity and, most recently, with agroforestry cultivation and food activism—have resulted in a series of projects that have become more complex with each turn. Among his latest work, projects stand out, such as Sucos específicos ( Site-specific Smoothies , 2014), made of edible wild plants with properties related to the site specificity of where they grow; Restauro (2016), which was part of the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, where the artist created a restaurant offering food made with ingredients grown in agroforests located close to the metropolis and which at the same time provided space for a series of educational activities, including bringing agroforestry farmers to speak with visitors to the Biennial each week; and, lastly, Londelion (2017) at London’s Serpentine Gallery, consisting of producing ice cream with dandelions—perhaps the best known of so-called “weeds”—and a significant presence in London’s parks. These projects show the scale of the artist’s evident concern, which is fully aligned with his stance towards environmental responsibility and other possibilities of producing food that can withstand the processes of environmental devastation.
The most recent works of Joélson Bugila, in turn, bear witness to a type of expression capable of combining a kind of graphic thinking with experimentation in sculpture, collage and, to some extent, image, without neglecting the demands of our every day. That is to say, the artist has made an extremely pertinent use of form and content, without one being prioritized to the detriment of the other. In the past year, his extensive research with printed newspapers, above all Brazilian ones, has brought about a group of work that, on the one hand, deals with matters in black and white (in other words, with the materiality of paper but also with journalistic material) and insistently looks, on the other hand, to find a place for inventiveness between one column and another—what the artist calls “free space”. Thus, if in some of the artist’s works he gives emphasis the day-to-day violence of Brazil’s cities, he expresses in each word of the headlines he cuts up and collects to compose texts in collage; in others, he cuts up and collects “free spaces” to construct a vibrant image of landscape, like someone looking for the last corner of freedom to reinvent the world in the midst of a planet devastated by the news.
That is, one has to bear in mind that this Mauvais Alphabet is the result of two different ways of thinking and if it has to do with the world of form and, as such, with the problems of art, it is by mutual agreement with respect to ethical responsibility of those diligently looking for—or betting on—other outcomes, even when it seems like there is no way out. Thus, even with the differences in relation to how they work with the world of form, Joélson Bugila and Jorge Menna Barreto meet in the hope of changing, even minimally, the world’s form and we should understand this as: changing minimally how we have lived in the world, changing our perspective in how we look at—and our relationship to—the world.
2.
Mauvais Alphabet can be immediately linked, as a title, to the level of the letter. But, if so, it would cause any other effect than that of leading astray whoever looks at it from this perspective. Setting the title against the world, we can see that we are not in front of any recognizable letters: there is not, in this alphabet, anything to represent the units of sounds—the phonemes—that make up a language. Even its ordering is organic, mutable, wild: it does not begin with a and end with z, and perhaps even does not have an end… is a work in formation. And even though the images could suggest a secret code to be unravelled—as if they were hieroglyphs or pictograms—, any attempt in this direction will be likewise frustrated.
It turns out that this alphabet is indecipherable as a matter of principle. This is due to the fact that it emerged as an attempt to underscore the experience of a human faced with a language that is completely strange and inaccessible: the secret language of plants. Therefore, faced with this and these letter-plants, a human is not faced with the experience of reading, but rather with misreading —as Jorge Menna Barreto named another of his projects—, with an aim to deconstruct this human, all too human way of reading. Consequently, Mauvais Alphabet forces us to take a stance: that we do not know enough about the world, or rather, that our knowledge is limited to our condition as humans constituted in and by a language that is ours alone. In these terms, the ways of thinking among some Amerindian groups could come to our aid to offer us finally a different conception of the world, just as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro teaches us, summing it up in a few words at the beginning of one of his articles as: “the conception of a world inhabited by different human and nonhuman species of subjects or people, that apprehend the world according to distinct points of view”1.
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The project Mauvais Alphabet is the fruit of an immersive experience by Joélson Bugila at the agroforest Sítio São José, in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro State, in partnership with Jorge Menna Barreto, who took part in every step of this experience. The artists had invaluable collaboration from the woodsman, Jorge Ferreira, an expert in the region’s native forests, and from the photographer Rafael Guedes, responsible for the photos that gave rise to the images in the work and the publication. In all its stages, the project received support from Sesc in Paraty, which also hosts the exhibition.
1. VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, E. Perspectivismo e multiculturalismo na América Latina. In.: O que nos faz pensar. n. 18. setembro de 2004.