THIS IS ABOUT AN EXPERIENCE
And there is no experience that is not collective. The house, the cat, the plant, the image, the color, the sun, the sky, me, the other exist. But the house is only the house because the cat, the plant, the image, the color, the sun, the sky, me and the other exist. The plant is only a plant because the house, the color, the image, the sky, the sun, me and the other exist. That image is only that image as other images exist, the colors as other colors exist, the sun as the sky exists, I as the other exists. Nobody isalone. We are only in relation to the world. So if this is about an experience, this is about encounters.
To have an experience it is necessary to make peace with time. We cannot control, despise, contest, renounce time, it is necessary to revere, cultivate, accept time with the entire body. Our relation with time cannot be a struggle but rather a dance. Then, if what we have lived was an experience, this narrative is a manifesto.
THIS IS A MANIFESTO
Claim the event: the encounters and its duration! Its natural duration, whatever it may be. Let us reclaim the time of the experience so that we can share what the body remembers.
This experience was born from a year, a pandemic year of reclusion and urgency. And never before was so important to live in the present. Neither before or later, but now. Stop and look, you are here.
We stayed together from march to march, allowing ourselves to shuttle, give and take, invent contours, hide, show, jump, go back, discover. An intimate dance with time. Twelve months drifting. The word “planet” originates from the Greek root planaomai which means “to wander”, “to lose oneself”. So “being adrift is the first attribute of all bodies in this universe”, writes Emanuele Coccia. Let us reclaim that nature!
To wander is to give time the possibility to deliver chance. To lose yourself is to allow chance to decipher what is hidden in front of you. The gaze wanders over the images, lost until perceived. Combine elements, feel the colors, drift back to find a place, stay there. Reveal.
Chance is the greatest gift for those who create, as Peter Pál Pelbart writes, “it is a magical or fictional chain of events, a concrete delirium, capable of shuffling places and time”. But to gain it you have to say yes. Yes, to start the game. “Knowing how to assert chance is knowing how to play”, provokes Nietzsche.
In the cocoon house we created, we chose to say yes, despite all the doubt that came from outside, even with all the fear. And in this inaugurated game, in this set up time of experience, we reaffirm life even though we are in the midst of death.
Manuela Eichneris a multifaceted visual artist living and working between São Paulo and Berlin. Her practice ranges from videos to performances, collaborative workshops, illustrations, installations, and more. On these different fronts, she often departs from the mass media images found in magazines, and systematically resorts to the principles of collage, rupture and connection with plants.
Video Cigarra Filmes
Video direction, photography and color Vicente Otávio
Photography assistant Vitor Campanario
Video edition Ernesto Filho
Soundtrack Marcelo Cabral
Mixing Daniel DvBz
Photos Debby Gram
Graphic design Thiago Eichner
Text Julia Feldens
Translation Camila Leichter
Web Design Guilherme Galarraga
Print shop Insign
São Paulo, Brazil
2020-2021