Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

About clouds and whirlwinds:

notes from a visit to Choreographies of the Impossible^[1]

Daniela Teixeira Dutra Viola
Psychoanalyst
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Crédito: Fotografia de Samesyn (2023), de Igshaan Adams. © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Usado com permissão.

Choreographies of the impossible, the name of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, alludes to the reality of the body. From the Greek khorus (“circle”) and graphe (“writing”, “representation”), choreographing is graphing space with body movement. The curatorial project starts from the question: “How are moving bodies capable of choreographing the possible, within the impossible?” (LIMA et al, 2023, s/p). In this proposal, the “idea of ​​choreography is based on the enigmatic nature of the artistic fact and, therefore, on everything that is neither exhausted nor evident. In what we can name as secret, mystery or infinity itself” (LIMA et al, 2023, s/p).       

A choreography is, then, writing with the body. In its approach to the field of art, psychoanalysis can maintain silence in the face of the enigmatic nature of the artistic fact. And you can read the enigma of writing, the way you read a symptom (MILLER, 2011a) – the symptom being that in which we identify what is produced in reality (LACAN, 1974-75), the impossible (LACAN, 1972-73 /1985). Even though the psychoanalytic perspective of the impossible does not appear textually in the curator's letter, it is with this reference that a psychoanalyst walks for a few hours through the wide spaces of the Pavilion. And you find a Biennial drawn by lines of force such as territoriality, segregation and diversity. The aim of an “impossible meeting” begins with the formation of the team of curators, made up horizontally of researchers with different trajectories, origins and races. The set of works demonstrates the commitment to giving space to what is on the margins. You can see a profusion of organic materials, odors, textures, sounds, languages ​​coming from the ends of Brazil and the world. There is a blurring of the boundaries between artistic object and natural object, art and political manifesto, concreteness and immaterialnes. In the midst of “artivism”, insurgencies of the outside of meaning.

In the “Lesson on “Lituraterre””, Lacan (1971/2009, p. 108) comments on the “intrusion” of psychoanalysis in literary criticism. He states that, if he proposes the literary text to psychoanalysis, it is by approaching it by showing its failure: it is by demonstrating where psychoanalysis makes a hole.

It is through this method that psychoanalysis could better justify its intrusion into literary criticism. Which would mean that literary criticism would effectively renew itself due to the fact that psychoanalysis was there for the texts to measure themselves against, precisely because the enigma remained on its side, because it remained silent. (LACAN, 1971/2009, p. 108)

Wouldn’t this “method of intrusion” be a guide to bringing psychoanalysis closer to the artistic field? Faced with the enigma, one reads the “it is written impossible” (LACAN, 1971/2009, p. 119, author’s emphasis) that experience with art sometimes provides.

In one of his last writings, Freud (1937/2017) stamped the “impossible profession” mark on psychoanalysis, which enters a series alongside education and government by including the dimension of failure in its practice. Interpretation is insufficient in the face of resistance, negative therapeutic reaction and compulsion to repeat, noises of the death drive. “There are almost always residual phenomena” (FREUD, 1937/2017, p. 331). From considerations about symptomatic remains and the limits of an analysis, he slides towards femininity, a “continent” that is impossible to decipher in the field of sexuality, approaching in his own way the real – a “residual phenomenon” in his work.

And it is around the impossible inscription of the sexual relationship for the speaking being that Lacan (1972-73/1985) will define the real as that which never stops writing itself/being written. There is no existence of sexual intercourse in language, hence the infinite and always failed attempt at its impossible inscription. Desire, on the other hand, “is inscribed by a bodily contingency” (LACAN, 1972-73/1985, p. 126) and depends on the phallic function, which operates what he calls the “regime of encounter” (p. 199): before a certain object, it stops not being written.

Miller (2011b) recalls that the notion of impossibility arises from the fact that it is unthinkable to reward the fundamental lack in the psyche. And that the real, as it is inassimilable, can only be introduced by a “no”. This means that there needs to be a symbolic articulation to consider that something is impossible. According to him, in analysis, the transition from what never stops being written to the regime of what stops  being written takes place through crossings. “We then see ourselves realizing our ability to do what previously seemed out of the question” (MILLER, 2011b, p. 143). There is an echo that impossible obstacles can give way, he says. Beyond the clinic, this shift from the impossible to the contingent can guide a reading of the artistic field in its edge dimension, as that which, by overcoming the negative that enunciates impossibility, gives a certain testimony of the real, even if for an instant.

A map of the real: Igshaan Adams and his “line of desire” 

Créditos: Fotografia de Samesyn (2023), de Igshaan Adams. © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Usado com permissão.

In a Biennial toned by territories and borders, by the earth in its various forms of organic and mineral composition as the basis of the objects, an installation condenses in a remarkable way the dances of the impossible. By South African artist Igshaan Adams^[2] , the work Samesin – translated from Afrikaans as “communion” – occupies a large area of ​​the 2nd floor of the Pavilion. The vast carpet map is not the cartography of a place, but a kind of “graph” of a non-place, formed by a tangle of threads and fringes. In the air, suspended over the fabric of this abstract map, you can see skeins and wires also punctuated by stones and beads, like precipitates of what could not be written on the ground: an allusion to the “dust clouds” that form in the fields around starting from the steps of the riel, a traditional African dance characterized by the lightness of the feet on the ground, as the artist informs.

Adams says the installation is crossed by “a line of desire”. For him, his work is inspired by the political and social issues that mark his place of origin, referring to the segregationism of Apartheid in South Africa. His carpet map draws the paths of the desire for freedom, as well as recording the traces of the steps of a dance. There remains the enigma embedded in the weaves of this tapestry, in each bead that keeps a secret about whoever sewed it, in the unusual cuts and meanders of fringes – borders that look more like coastlines seen from above.

As I walk through Adams’ map – like someone walking through Borges’ “immense maps” (1946/1982), those that have the same dimension as what they represent –, I think about Lacan’s flight over the Siberian plain described in “Lituraterre”. The weave resembles the relief of furrows and coastlines, while the suspended wire structures evoke clouds. However, this is “Lituraterre” upside down: instead of waters that break from the cloud and rain in a ravine of the earth, bodies write with their feet on the ground, raising the dust that forms the cloud – this unusual and contingent object . The artist sews his art with the thread of desire from this encounter, a bodily contingency, which also takes place in his studio, frequented by a collective of women embroiderers, who dance and sing while weaving a map without borders, averse to any apartheid.

In a reading of “Lituraterre”, Laurent (1999) highlights the “pure trace that operates” without meaning anything in the flow of waters seen from the Lacanian flight. In the words of Lacan (1971/2009, p. 113), “erasure of any trace that is previous”. What is inscribed is a coastline, a heterogeneous line at all points, a separation that is not a border and, above all, that does not delimit an interior and an exterior. Based on Lacan's indications about the stroke of the calligrapher and the painter, Laurent (1999, p. 80) relates this stroke to the movement of fort-da: “it is not just the phonematic opposition o-a, fort-da, but the gesture itself that counts, since it bears the inscription of this trait”. And this gesture is the movement of the body that draws a limit between meaning and the field of jouissance.

With this reference, we can read the lines drawn by the feet in the riel, in a meeting of dancing bodies, or what is woven by the hands of the weavers of “communion”, as the writing of something beyond that which the political meaning of a border represents. As Miller (2010) emphasizes, when postulating salvation through waste, in sublimation a socialization of jouissance is at stake. In other words, the jouissance of the One intertwines with the discourse of the Other, in order to become part of the social bond. Adams’ installation is exemplary of this inscription. There is a shared desire for freedom, so that the social and the political are embroidered in the work, but not literally – perhaps, “Lituraterrelly" – in this effect of meaning that a contingent encounter fosters. It is through the line of desire that a map is embroidered capable of overcoming segregation, preserving in its weave the mysteries of a dark continent.

Cloud, turmoil, whirlwind: enigma-image of contingency

A cloud is “the semblance par excellence”, states Lacan (1971/2009, p. 114). In “Lesson on “Lituraterre””, there is a function for this semblance in the writing eroded on the Siberian plain: “what is revealed by my vision of the flow, in which erasure predominates, is that, when produced among clouds, it conjugates with its source”, because it is from its rupture – from the rupture with the field of the signifier – “that this effect rains in which what was matter in suspension is precipitated” (LACAN, 1971/2009, p. 113-114 ). The cloud introduces the dimension of the signifier, which, as a semblance, dissolves in the breaking of the waters. And there is joy in the rupture of a semblance: what rains in reality and presents itself as ravines of water – an image that Lacan uses to develop the notion of letter. It is a writing in reality, “what rained from the semblant as what constitutes the signifier” (LACAN, 1971/2009, p. 114). This writing does not decal the signifier, but goes back to it when given a name.

The cloud, this fleeting suspension of particles, is an image of contingency. Laurent (1999) indicates that in this passage from the cloud-semblance to erasure in the real there is an abolition of the imaginary. In the transition from the impossible to the contingent, a world of clouded images, there is no metaphor, but a blurring of meaning. If “The real is a strictly what has no meaning” (Lacan, 1976/2016, s/p), perhaps nebulosity is a way, via contingency, of evoking meaninglessness.

The philosopher, historian and art critic Didi-Huberman (2013, p. 10-11) asks: “Now, what can you know about a cloud, if not by guessing it and without ever fully apprehending it?” The cloud cannot be read in the way of a stable and delimited image. It is an impossible horizon for decipherment and tends to appear in works of art throughout history with a certain unfamiliarity.

In his work Dentro do nevoeiro, architect Guilherme Wisnik (2018) also stops in front of a cloud. In a research that starts from the striking “clouding” character of contemporary architecture, he explores the universe of vaporous images of the current world and demonstrates how the mists that hover over art are part of a response to the hypervisibility of our time.

Cloudiness and a lack of clarity and definition can take on both negative and positive signs in today's world. After all, the image of a cloud is not univocal. If, on the one hand, within it we find ourselves increasingly controlled and expropriated of the cognitive means to map it, on the other, the poetics of blurring and delay, in art, are the strategies that best oppose the regime of sharpness of fetish images that feed the “society of hypervisibility” in which we live, and which is the hidden pair of financial and digital clouds. (WISNIK, 2018, p. 307)

Wisnik proposes the notion of enigma-image as a counterpoint to the clarity of fetish images that populate the hypervisibility and hyperexposure of contemporary culture. The installation Samesin, by Igshaan Adams, follows this enigmatic lineage and operates, for those who hover in its gaps, like a cloud that blurs the excesses of a hypervisible world.

An enigma-image that is also coupled with a writing of the real and that is part of the Brazilian cultural repertoire is the “devil in the street, in the middle of the whirlwind”, a contingent and disturbing figuration that bursts into the crossing of the book Grande Sertão: Veredas (ROSA, 1956/2019). A “whirlwind” is a turmoil, an important image in Lacan’s last teaching (1977/2016, s/p) to represent what, from desire, whirls around the hole. Whirlwind, mist, dust cloud, unfamiliar fog, turmoil which, perhaps, many of us from Minas Gerais with roots “from deep in the backlands, from the cerrado, from the interior of the wild”,[3] or simply marked by the letter of Rosa, know from our most hidden memories filled with amazement. In the middle of the way, sometimes, there is a whirlwind.^[4]

Créditos: Fotografia de Samesyn (2023), de Igshaan Adams. © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Usado com permissão.

References 

BORGES, J. L. Sobre o rigor na ciência. In: História universal da infâmia. Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 1982. (Trabalho original publicado em 1946).

DIDI-HUBERMAN, G. Diante da imagem: questão colocada aos fins de uma História da arte. Tradução de P. Neves. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2013.

FREUD, S. A análise finita e a infinita. In: Obras incompletas de Sigmund Freud: Fundamentos da clínica psicanalítica. Tradução de C. Dornbusch. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017. (Trabalho original publicado em 1937).

LACAN, J. Le Séminaire, livre 22: R.S.I. (Inédito). (Trabalho original proferido em 1974-75).

LACAN, J. O Seminário, livro 20: Mais, ainda. Tradução de M. D. Magno. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 1985. (Trabalho original proferido em 1972-73).

LACAN, J. Lição sobre “Lituraterra”. In: O Seminário, livro 18: De um discurso que não fosse semblante. Tradução de Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2009. (Trabalho original proferido em 1971).

LACAN, J. Atas de encerramento das Jornadas de Cartéis. Pharmakon Digital, v. 12, nov. 2016. Disponível em: http://encerramento-das-jornadas-de-estudos-de-carteis-da-escola-freudiana/. Acesso em: 01 fev. 2024. (Trabalho original publicado em 1976).

LAURENT, É. A carta roubada e o voo da letra. Correio – Revista da Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise n. 65, abr. 1999.

LIMA, D. et al. Projeto curatorial: coreografias do impossível. Sobre a 35ª Bienal de São Paulo. 2023. Disponível em: https://35.bienal.org.br/sobre-a-35a/. Acesso em: 01 fev. 2024.

MILLER, J-A. Le salut par les déchets. Mental: Clinique et pragmatique de la désinsertion en psychanalyse, n. 24, abr. 2010.

MILLER, J.-A. Ler um sintoma. AMP Blog, ago. 2011a. Disponível em: http://ampblog2006.blogspot.com/2011/08/jacques-alain-miller-ler-um-sintoma.html. Acesso em: 01 fev. 2024.

MILLER, J.-A. Perspectivas dos escritos e outros escritos de Lacan. Tradução de Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2011b.

ROSA, J. G. Grande Sertão: Veredas. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019. (Trabalho original publicado em 1956).

WISNIK, G. Dentro do nevoeiro: arquitetura, arte e tecnologia contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ubu, 2018.

Notas

[1] This text is the result of the visit of one member of the editorial team of Derivas Analíticas to the 35th Biennal of São Paulo, entitled Coreografies of the impossible, in October 2023.

[2] Igshaan Adams was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1982, where he lives.

[3] From the song Lamento sertanejo, by Gilberto Gil (1975).

[4] “Redemunhos” or whirlwinds are spiral winds that tend to appear suddenly like whirlwinds of dust in vast, deserted terrains on hot sunny days. They are relatively common in the so-called Brazilian “sertão”, and their image is (un)familiar to those who have had experiences in rural areas in the interior of Minas Gerais, like the author of this text on the farms and from legends of her childhood.

English version by Ana Helena Souza.