Cildo Meireles: The Physics of Social Space begins with a question that, broadly formulated, concerns the relevance of analyzing contemporary art production through the lens of cultural identity. This is a delicate point, as it implies the existence of physical and conceptual limits and boundaries—and the identification of fixed points in certain relations of alterity, akin to a form of territorial demarcation within the fragmented universe of contemporary discourse.

Amid discussions and writings, particularly since the 1960s, this topic has been accompanied by the difficulty of establishing concepts of identity across any field of knowledge, given the period of division and questioning caused by great political upheaval and the frequent shifts in scientific paradigms, blended with the general belief that the world was in expansion. Concurrently, one faced a series of social contradictions, generating spaces of exclusion, not only in the so-called “peripheral” countries like Brazil but also in economically dominant nations. A widespread situation dominated by the binomials of stability/instability: order/chaos, which, although appearing as dichotomies, in reality manifested as a state of entropy.

In the visual arts, the 1960s were marked by trends that either incorporated popular manifestations and absorbed mass media products—disrupting the hegemony of the so-called “elite culture” in favor of a popular culture—or arose from language research that fit into the unfolding history and theory of art, such as Minimalism, Process Art, Anti-Form, and Conceptual Art. Despite the differences among these trends, they all shared a desire to fragment, amplify, reduce, and reinvent the art object. In other words, there was a need to see beyond the object, which was not only loaded with aesthetic value but also ethical significance. There was a movement toward the destruction of boundaries separating the authorial figure, which increasingly dissolved—though not entirely—entering the common reflective space of the viewer, the ‘physical’ agent and essential component in the mental composition of the work. The power of the work no longer lay in its materiality. Nomadism began to emerge in the visual arts.

In this dissertation, I focus my attention on the body of work by Cildo Meireles created in the 1970s, a period of intense production and political and social upheaval. During this time, the artist began developing Eureka/QuenteTerraCega or Eureka Blindhotland (1970/75), which he considers the core of his work—a project that includes objects, sound experiences, images inserted in periodicals, and installations. From these works, I selected Espelho Cego (1970), Mebs/Caraxia (1970/71), Sal Sem Carne (1976), and Casos de Sacos (1976).

The group of works that constitutes the object of this research was generally understood as a metaphor for social space. This view aligns with Simon Marchán Fiz's, who, in recognizing less self-reflexive versions of conceptual art, proposes subdivisions of this movement. Following this conception, Meireles’ works would be related to what Fiz calls "ideological conceptualism," where "the artistic work (...) is a social subsystem of action" because it is organized and organizes itself based on production conditions connected to the socio-historical context, regarded as moments of flow. These works, by referencing the paradoxes of spatial limits, point to situations where social and physical systems intertwine, following a contemporary view aligned with the physics of non-equilibrium systems.

Cildo’s reflections on space appear as a continuation of an apparently contradictory form. In the relationship between the individuality of each piece created and the simultaneous search for a "synthetic expression" where the various segments of production, with their own reflective instances, connect to the body of the work. It was based on the premise that, already in the 1970s, we find many of the elements that would shape his later works, which includes two installations conceived in the late 1960s and 1970s but only realized in the 1980s, such as Desvio para o Vermelho (1967/84) and Através (1983/89), which conceptually approaches the work Malhas da Liberdade (1976). The latter, chosen to close the research, appears as a simple and logical structure, yet functions as a kind of index of complexity within the totality of the artist's works due to its generative structure quality. According to Cildo, Malhas da Liberdade is a "module for materializing very remote aspirations, concretizing a type of external, furious space." When evaluated as an aesthetic experience linked to the cultural realm, Malhas da Liberdade emerges as a kind of sign that points to the complexity of the dynamic action of the subject in the face of a movable and disorderly structure of cultural topology.

To put it succinctly, the investigations into the limits of space presented in the dissertation begin with the installation Espaços Virtuais: Cantos (1967/68) in conjunction with Desvio para o Vermelho. In both works, these issues develop from living sites, in this case, the domestic. In Espaços Virtuais, the alteration of common rules of visibility, by subverting the logic of Euclidean mathematics, leads us to a point of intersection where action is impossible. The space presented as a fragment in Cantos is structured, in Desvio para o Vermelho, as a habitable environment. The "deviations" result from the "submission" of objects to situations of tensioning certain principles of physics, such as ethical deviation (excessive chromaticity) and perceptual alteration in the three parts of the installation: Impregnação, Entorno, and Desvio.

In Eureka/QuenteTerraCega, the space—previously within the realm of the habitable, domestic—expands the notions of spatiality, inspired by the phenomenon of black holes, and explores situations arising from the clash between center and periphery: ghetto-like situations. In Quente Terra Cega, the environment becomes a "territory of densities," where the relationship between weight, volume, and mass puts into question the insignificance of mass in relation to volume, or the value derived from the meaning revealed by the object's appearance, as opposed to its weight or material index. The gaze proves insufficient to decipher hidden identities. With a high degree of scope, Sal Sem Carne—an LP album, one of the works linked to the project and the subject of study—clearly points, in several instances of its realization (including the design of the cover and the format of the record), to the "noise" in communication between two cultures. The difficulty in distinguishing each of the languages allows for the emergence of a space where a third, unnamed voice occurs—a conjunction of collective action without territory.