Art Residency Immersion in [territory] Olhos d'Água: a little story about transient  residencies 

“It is clearly a change in tone, from ‘aspiration’ to another place that does not arrive to satisfy usual  questions, or the conventional answers we are accustomed to. It is the new spirit of the time, this  imperceptible environment that can incite us to see in wandering, or nomadism, a socially  exemplary value in many ways.” 

Michel Mafesoli, Sobre o nomadismo: vagabundagens pós-modernas, 2001. Paths and escape routes: thinking about the residency. 

The idea throughout the journey as an art historian and curator was to construct paths that would  enable the elaboration of coordinates for the composition of a mental map that could encompass  imaginary and fictional spatialities belonging to the territory of art. A desire to build interconnected  communicating vessels through associations of ideas and writings that, in a flow opposite to the  globalizing impulse to unify everything, would not aim to reach a safe harbor but a point of escape,  from where lines lead both to a dense, closed forest, to the center of a turbulent, flowing river, and  to the eye of the hurricane. Places where the obscure, the dangerous, and the unknown pulse. And  where the imagination, which never ceases, flourishes. 

This is a small note on travel displacement. 

One of the lines traced from the escape point of this mental map leads to the landscape of the  cerrado, where I find myself, move, and dive into, occasionally emerging. It is in this setting in  Central Brazil that I am lodged. From this point of view, I live, see, speak, read, write, and comment  on the world. I am surrounded by a landscape of low trees, with twisted branches and textured  trunks. There are large leaves and small leaves. And the flowers, when they appear, are luminous  points, of a shy and sweet grace. Little sculptures. And all this with opalescent skies that reveal a  landscape that presents itself to the eye without much fanfare. The cerrado is my surface of  geographic insertion, a setting for the creation of fictions where art is the central device.

This is a note of settlement for a travel displacement. 

Instead of a turbulent river and the eye of a hurricane, there is a water spring embedded in the red  earth. From there, a thread extends and lodges itself in my imagination. It may seem foolish to swim  in the current of a water spring, as it is such a small part of a vast territory. But, as a spring, it is  there, occupying a significant space. It is existence. Here, the "olho d’água” (water spring or literra  ly eye of water) is both materiality and metaphor for what comes next. 

The massive presence of references to natural phenomena so far in this text is not merely a figure of  speech, nor a chimera, much less a triviality. Nature emerges here as a fertile medium for drawing  parallels with situations that postulate art production as the mainstream. Referring also to natural  phenomena, this expression is commonly used in the art world to denote the hegemonic course that  determines the valuation positions for artistic productions. An “olho d’água” in this sense, is  countercurrent. 

The Project Território Centro-Oeste. 

“In the countryside, the gods still descend to men, he (Ulrich) thought, we are someone, but in the  city, where a thousand times more events occur, we are unable to relate them to ourselves: and thus  life begins to become this notorious abstraction.”  

Robert Musil, O homem sem qualidades, 1930/1943. 

Displacement, migration, mobility, wandering, vagrancy, and ambulation are expressions that point  to various instances of meaning related to the phenomenon of a state alteration that at first appear to  be changes of a spatial order, but ultimately derive from the subjects' desire to assign their own  meanings to existence. Being in transit affects all subjects, from the most remote forms of  nomadism. 

The stimuli that provoke movement have diverse roots and find meanings in distinct historical and  social moments: they may be driven by the myth of the dreamed land, as in the case of the Guarani  indigenous peoples, always in search of the land without evil, or they may originate from a will for  

modern and curious wandering, typical of the flâneur, the passionate observer of metropolitan life, a  type who emerged with the growing urbanization at the end of the 18th century. In any case, this  compulsion for movement contradicts the notion that the domestic is the “natural” habitat of the  human being when it is, in fact, a construction that frames the subject within a global logic of living  and coexisting.

When we bring the issue of displacement into the realm of art, and specifically into the context of  art residencies, which in our case are located in a rural area, we face lines long traced by the actions  of artists and intellectuals who sought, since the eruption of the first metropolises, to distance  themselves from the urban, city pattern, governed by strict schedules and normative behaviors, and  go towards the archaic, the idyllic, in an attempt to establish a new geography; an imaginary  geography. 

Intersections and passages: exposing the immersive process. 

The exhibition Território Centro-Oeste: Interseções was derived from the project of the art  residency Imersão em [território] Olhos d'Água that inaugurated the residency program of the  Núcleo de Arte Centro-Oeste (NACO), located in Olhos d'Água, in the municipality of Alexânia.  During two weeks, six artists – Dalton Paula, Daniel Pellegrim, Iris Helena, Ricardo Theodoro,  Santhiago Selon, and Thaís Galbiatti – based in the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do  Sul, and the Federal District, gathered to participate in a process of sharing and production. 

The guiding idea for this cultural project arose from the desire to celebrate the Central West region  through a geopolitical reflection that would allow for problematizing the notion of border,  considering globalization not from the perspective of universalization, but through the lens that  enables the articulation of differences arising from the encounters of the artists with the local  geographical, cultural, social, and semantic particularities, generating mixtures, hybridizations, and  contaminations that appear in artistic reflection and production. 

The Olhos d'Água/Central West territory is considered here as a living space, where ideas can arise  and proliferate from the meeting of what each artist brings with them, what happens within the  group, and what emerges when confronted with the local environment. It is, for the art context, a  porous space, where fiction and reality are shaped through states of poetic confluence. 

In this sense, this first residency did not aim to thematize the encounter or seek a point of  convergence between artistic poetics that would enable a production aligned with some curatorial  principle. What motivated the selection of the six artists was the diversity of their paths and the  plurality of their poetic visions. 

The immersive process lasted 17 days, which may seem brief – a mere scratch in time. However,  this feeling deepens for those who choose to dive into an experience of displacement that removes  the artist from their home environment and everyday obligations.

The experiences lived during this time take on unusual dimensions and are reflected in the  production, as was the case with the group's visit, early in the process, to Dona Geralda’s house,  where a festival for the Divino Espírito Santo was taking place. This proved to be emblematic for  understanding the cultural, social, and religious context of the place. Other interactions with the  community contributed to this panorama of territorial recognition, such as Dalton and Iris's visits to  local residents’ homes; the mural painting at the house of sisters Dina and Lia, made by Santhiago  with participation from a group of local boys; the first exhibition held at Dona Cecília's Bar  Museum, conceived by Daniel; the drawing workshop for children in the town square led by Thaís;  and the photographic and video recordings by Ricardo. 

In addition to the experience of living within the community, the artists brought their ways of  thinking and dealing with the image that emerges in various supports and languages, such as  photography, installation, drawing, painting, and object-making, along with the propositions and  themes that form their research universe, such as memory, ruin, decolonialism, body, subjectivity,  ancestry, contemporaneity, space, fragmentation, and voids. 

The exhibition design project was developed in line with the curatorial concept, which opted to  design a space that emphasized the idea of a fluid pathway, reflecting both individual and  collaborative processes during the residency – the passages – as well as selected works from the  artists' existing production repertoire, aiming to point to indices of their individual trajectories as  well as the “deviations” in their paths. Ultimately, the intention was to relate the multiplicity and  experimental nature of a production created in a zone of impermanence and instability arising from  an internal process of “reterritorialization.”