Rebussados

…and in the beginning (of writing) there was the rebus game: a kind of phonetic addition of drawings which, “by means of things”, objects, gestures and numbers, none of which were related to the verbal meaning of the written words created, enabled human beings to communicate and understand one another.

The first known rebus is the drawing of a reed, which signifies reimbursement (to put back in one’s pocket), a gesture that Os Espacialistas repeat endlessly through the dialogues and exchanges of meaning they create with the objects they carry with them, with the function of measuring and mediating the poetic reactions they develop in the spaces through which they pass. These are objects of medi(a)tion of real and imaginary intensities between body and space, some previously chosen, others found along the way (which also walks us), as we correspond with them and listen to them speaking among themselves.

Spatialist images, from the outset named photographic sketches, due to their relationship with drawing as a device of thought, perception, movement and revelation, are by nature rebus games. 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 the texts and fragments of Gonçalo M. Tavares, as poetic machines for the production of beginnings and vice versa.

Images, words and objects, with diverse real and imaginary origins, depart from the space of the books produced together and come together in an exhibition at the Bissaya Barreto House-Museum, in the form of rebus games. Through things, bodies and fragments of text, dialogues of proximity and biographical correspondence are generated between the spatialist imagination of everyday life and the memory of the caregiving doctor who inhabited it.

Rebussados is an exhibition of sweets 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 discover hidden forms of intimate resistance to life. The name of the exhibition is the sum of the word rebus, “by means of things”, with the word rebuçado, which means “hidden face, concealed, and mouth covered, through which words emerge and food enters”, reflecting the choice of the images and texts presented.

It is a rebus game, bearer of counter-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, on the scale of the body-house of each one of us, where we all return to commune with the presence of those we most imagine, cultivate common gardens, plant dialogues and share stories in the company of those with 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 the capacity to imagine one another in the conversations spread throughout the house, where dialoguing and sharing rebussados are possible unwrapped ways of inhabiting.

“They are sweets, my sir!”

texto: Os Espacialistas + Gonçalo M. Tavares