a tryptic to talk about women,
memory,
and infrastructure
A room with a semi-suspended agricultural implement; a laboratory that begins to be covered by yam roots and leaves; a stage-set alluding to open-air community kitchens, the volcanic activity, and which establishes a dialogue, diluting its boundaries, between the so-called productive and the reproductive work. Accompanying this, a patchwork sound installation with excerpts of autobiographical narratives about female participation in the stew, which resulted from community meetings/talk shows.
Like the names of the boilers, the archives encapsulate their own dramaturgies, and working with the set of compilations that were made from the research developed in SULFUR involves some operations, similar to those of cutting and cooking or sewing.
For this exhibition, we used a tryptic that aligns industrial language and other technologies, including the technologies of memory, representation, and nonconformity, with the conception of care work as an infrastructure that holds everything together. Machinery supports associated with construction or earthwork are used, as well as symbolic supports alluding to habits of coexistence, biographical records or foundational myths.
machine-woman
an agricultural implement suggests an anthropomorphic shape, and screens with video essays complete its intention: a woman with several arms that, as part of a production line, each one (and each hand) performs its function relative to housework: washing, peeling, breaking - the cut as a badge - and serving. The repetitive sequence could lead to a closed circuit, claustrophobic even, and without the ability to escape/ be disrupted, but it is there that some 'errors' in the assembly line are introduced, making way for the subversion of the docility norm of female bodies.
lab
a collection of totems that, as a whole, allude to the 'laboratory mysteries of the earth' and, at the same time, to the experiences — historical or contemporary — of women on the island. Items or objects in medicinal jars make reference to the connotation of the waters of Furnas with healing and of the feminine as a useful category for its commercialization. A pasta-mother grows during the time of the exhibition, symbolizing the raw dough that was left in shared ovens in community villages as a gesture of thanks & sign of courtesy to the next user.
production/reproduction stage
a stage-kitchen-set where volcanic activity is recorded, a geo-kitchen and a collection of representational 'errors' taken from contemporary google maps and which enter into dialogue with the phantasmagorical imaginary of the village of Furnas as described in past centuries by visitors and whose boiler names [such as that of Asmodeus] attest.
Photography by Mariana Lopes
manual for hacking sulfur in care
7 containers, 10 arms, 1 pot
I. crouch down, analyze the containers and don't touch the machines, we are in a laboratory for care thinking and the information is revealing of palpitating and sometimes frustrating invisibilities
II. here and now, think of the artifacts as heavy machinery, clues signaling structures of reproductive labor and care
III. clues are archives of little-narrated histories and dirt a subjectivity open to a fragmented geopoetics
IV. here and now, the machines and structures of industrial work are transformed into light heavy machinery
V. imagine your body as an aqueous being of water where 60 to 90% are fluids, think about taking care of your body and of others as it should be taking care of water and the lands
VI. sulfur occupies about 0.034% of the earth's crust and is found in yellowish crystals that are neither orange nor gold just as these fish are neither orange nor gold
VII. containers as first cultural devices, containers for mythological archives capable of revealing more or less (un)real oral hi/stories to us
VIII. sabotage the knife as an essential working tool and transform it into undead work: the maneuvers become the essence of laborious choreographies: cut, peel and cut yourself, make the error, loop
IX. wash, wash yourself. we washed so much that it became invisible, watery exchanges essential as stories of underwater creatures are for the creation of the beginning of this fishery world
Reina Del Mar
Photography by Mariana Lopes
descriptive memoir
Caldeira das Furnas is a stage where a peculiar story is presented and where History is re-presented. Here, the gestures which are passed on by generations after generations are shown or hidden, executing or responding to what we call unwritten gender scripts.
If we want to locate women’s place on this stage, we can find them in the audience, not assigned with the leading actresses role (which would be due to them). Considering the amnesia of the archives — and with women’s presence camouflaged in the background of the steam, the slopes and the lagoons — it is the objects, the names of fumarolas, the tiles of the Parish, what is told by the orature or what was described by some 'illustrious women' what make us aware of their everyday life and the symbolic weight of the feminine.
Women, as the land, are seen as natural, inexhaustible and exploitable resources. Machine-women, women with multiple arms, women nonetheless, are never armed enough for all the work they are expected to perform. Telling their History — opening a crack — is the aim of this ‘anthropoetic’ exercise, which will transport us to the machines that sow and revolve,
to the visceral dwellings and the bodies that sweat,
to the healing and bubbly water, announcing the laboratorial mysteries of the earth,
to the reconstruction of totems.
The sulfur laborious practices are archaeologies: archaeologies of labor and steam.
exhibition
may 2022
Curator
Reina del Mar
Producer
Mafalda Fernandes
Sound designer
Inês Malheiro
Textile panel
Tilo
Graphic Design
Irina Pereira
Institutional partner
Ministério da Cultura - Républica Portuguesa
Acknowledgements
Anda&Fala - Associação Cultural
Centro de Monitorização e Investigação das Furnas
Cerveja Korisca
Cofraçor - Cofragens e Construções, Lda
Escola Básica 2,3 de Capelas
Escola Básica 1,2,3/JI de Furnas
Expolab - Centro de Ciência Viva
Fábio Botelho
Festival Tremor
Gui Ruivo
Insco
Junta de Freguesia das Furnas
Maria Parceiro
Maria Pic-nic
Marques Britas SA - Grupo Marques
Parque Terra Nostra
a tryptic to talk about women,
memory,
and infrastructure
A room with a semi-suspended agricultural implement; a laboratory that begins to be covered by yam roots and leaves; a stage-set alluding to open-air community kitchens, the volcanic activity, and which establishes a dialogue, diluting its boundaries, between the so-called productive and the reproductive work. Accompanying this, a patchwork sound installation with excerpts of autobiographical narratives about female participation in the stew, which resulted from community meetings/talk shows.
Like the names of the boilers, the archives encapsulate their own dramaturgies, and working with the set of compilations that were made from the research developed in SULFUR involves some operations, similar to those of cutting and cooking or sewing.
For this exhibition, we used a tryptic that aligns industrial language and other technologies, including the technologies of memory, representation, and nonconformity, with the conception of care work as an infrastructure that holds everything together. Machinery supports associated with construction or earthwork are used, as well as symbolic supports alluding to habits of coexistence, biographical records or foundational myths.
machine-woman
an agricultural implement suggests an anthropomorphic shape, and screens with video essays complete its intention: a woman with several arms that, as part of a production line, each one (and each hand) performs its function relative to housework: washing, peeling, breaking - the cut as a badge - and serving. The repetitive sequence could lead to a closed circuit, claustrophobic even, and without the ability to escape/ be disrupted, but it is there that some 'errors' in the assembly line are introduced, making way for the subversion of the docility norm of female bodies.
lab
a collection of totems that, as a whole, allude to the 'laboratory mysteries of the earth' and, at the same time, to the experiences — historical or contemporary — of women on the island. Items or objects in medicinal jars make reference to the connotation of the waters of Furnas with healing and of the feminine as a useful category for its commercialization. A pasta-mother grows during the time of the exhibition, symbolizing the raw dough that was left in shared ovens in community villages as a gesture of thanks & sign of courtesy to the next user.
production/reproduction stage
a stage-kitchen-set where volcanic activity is recorded, a geo-kitchen and a collection of representational 'errors' taken from contemporary google maps and which enter into dialogue with the phantasmagorical imaginary of the village of Furnas as described in past centuries by visitors and whose boiler names [such as that of Asmodeus] attest.
Photography by Mariana Lopes
manual for hacking sulfur in care
7 containers, 10 arms, 1 pot
I. crouch down, analyze the containers and don't touch the machines, we are in a laboratory for care thinking and the information is revealing of palpitating and sometimes frustrating invisibilities
II. here and now, think of the artifacts as heavy machinery, clues signaling structures of reproductive labor and care
III. clues are archives of little-narrated histories and dirt a subjectivity open to a fragmented geopoetics
IV. here and now, the machines and structures of industrial work are transformed into light heavy machinery
V. imagine your body as an aqueous being of water where 60 to 90% are fluids, think about taking care of your body and of others as it should be taking care of water and the lands
VI. sulfur occupies about 0.034% of the earth's crust and is found in yellowish crystals that are neither orange nor gold just as these fish are neither orange nor gold
VII. containers as first cultural devices, containers for mythological archives capable of revealing more or less (un)real oral hi/stories to us
VIII. sabotage the knife as an essential working tool and transform it into undead work: the maneuvers become the essence of laborious choreographies: cut, peel and cut yourself, make the error, loop
IX. wash, wash yourself. we washed so much that it became invisible, watery exchanges essential as stories of underwater creatures are for the creation of the beginning of this fishery world
Reina Del Mar
Photography by Mariana Lopes
descriptive memoir
Caldeira das Furnas is a stage where a peculiar story is presented and where History is re-presented. Here, the gestures which are passed on by generations after generations are shown or hidden, executing or responding to what we call unwritten gender scripts.
If we want to locate women’s place on this stage, we can find them in the audience, not assigned with the leading actresses role (which would be due to them). Considering the amnesia of the archives — and with women’s presence camouflaged in the background of the steam, the slopes and the lagoons — it is the objects, the names of fumarolas, the tiles of the Parish, what is told by the orature or what was described by some 'illustrious women' what make us aware of their everyday life and the symbolic weight of the feminine.
Women, as the land, are seen as natural, inexhaustible and exploitable resources. Machine-women, women with multiple arms, women nonetheless, are never armed enough for all the work they are expected to perform. Telling their History — opening a crack — is the aim of this ‘anthropoetic’ exercise, which will transport us to the machines that sow and revolve,
to the visceral dwellings and the bodies that sweat,
to the healing and bubbly water, announcing the laboratorial mysteries of the earth,
to the reconstruction of totems.
The sulfur laborious practices are archaeologies: archaeologies of labor and steam.
exhibition
may 2022
Curator
Reina del Mar
Producer
Mafalda Fernandes
Sound designer
Inês Malheiro
Textile panel
Tilo
Graphic Design
Irina Pereira
Institutional partner
Ministério da Cultura - Républica Portuguesa
Acknowledgements
Anda&Fala - Associação Cultural
Centro de Monitorização e Investigação das Furnas
Cerveja Korisca
Cofraçor - Cofragens e Construções, Lda
Escola Básica 2,3 de Capelas
Escola Básica 1,2,3/JI de Furnas
Expolab - Centro de Ciência Viva
Fábio Botelho
Festival Tremor
Gui Ruivo
Insco
Junta de Freguesia das Furnas
Maria Parceiro
Maria Pic-nic
Marques Britas SA - Grupo Marques
Parque Terra Nostra