Os Espacialistas + Gonçalo M. Tavares

Photography and Installation

… and in the beginning (of writing) there was the rebus:

a kind of sonic addition of drawings that, “by means of things” — objects, gestures and numbers that had nothing to do with the verbal meaning of the written words they created — enabled human beings to communicate and understand one another.

The first known rebus is the drawing of a cane, meaning reimbursement (putting something back in one’s pocket), a gesture that Os Espacialistas endlessly repeat through the dialogues and exchanges of meaning they create with the objects they carry with them, objects whose function is to measure and mediate the poetic reactions they develop in the spaces through which they move. They are objects of medi(a)tion of the real and imaginary intensities between body and space: some chosen beforehand, others found along the way (which also walks us), as we correspond with them and listen to them speak to one another.

The Espacialist images, from the outset called photographic sketches, because of their relationship with drawing as a device for thought, perception, movement and revelation, are by nature games of rebus. Narrative accounts of attention, in which spaces, bodies and objects engage in performative dialogue across various real and immaterial scales. Affective contradictions that have long inhabited the vicinity of Gonçalo M. Tavares’s texts and fragments, as poetic machines for producing beginnings, and vice versa.

Images, words and objects, with diverse real and imaginary origins, emerge from the space of the books made together and meet in an exhibition at Galeria Carlos Carvalho, in the form of rebus games. Through things, bodies and fragments of text, dialogues of proximity and biographical correspondence are generated between the Espacialist imagination of everyday life and the memory of the doctor and caregiver who inhabited it. Rebussados is an exhibition of sweet treats for the poetic imagination of each day, where relationships of communion between body-space, face-mask, gesture-object and image-text, in permanent deviation, unwrap and reveal hidden forms of intimate resistance for life. The title of the exhibition is the sum of the word rebus, “by means of things”, and the word rebuçado, meaning “a hidden, concealed face and a covered mouth through which words emerge and food enters”, a reflection of the choice of images and texts presented here.

It is a game of rebus, bearer of contra-additions, metaphors and care. Created from various ways of presenting dialogues and correspondences between text, image and objects diverted from their habitual trajectories of meaning, at the scale of the body-home of each one of us, where we all return to commune with the presence of those we imagine most, cultivate common gardens, plant dialogues and share stories in the company of those from whom we have learned to fix chance and whom we miss.

Through one and many forms of attention, Os Espacialistas + Gonçalo M. Tavares invite us to return to the primitive garden of writing and to exercise our capacity to imagine one another in the conversations scattered throughout the gallery space, where dialogue and the sharing of rebussados become possible, unwrapped ways of inhabiting.