Institutional spaces: corners

Institutional spaces: corners is a performative proposal in which the artists, wearing safety clothing, will stand facing one of the corners of the exhibition space and rest their foreheads on this corner, with the intention of preventing the walls from falling. The performance is continuous, lasting several days and with a pre-scheduled time.

This service is an absurd attitude within the practice of property security, but it makes its day-to-day care visible through concrete action. In other words, we all know that the walls of the exhibition space will not fall. The act of holding (in every sense of the word) the wall with the body is an unnecessary action, but it raises the question of a daily act of the security work – preventing harm from happening. Because, as absurd as the idea of the walls falling down may be, if it happens, we will avoid it.

Another possible issue to be noted is the placement of the bodies as a metaphor for the institution, one of its apparatuses, and when absent, would not allow institution operation. A review of what drives and sustains the institution on a daily basis, with the desire to provoke a discussion about institutional hierarchies and visibility. What, in fact, sustain the institution? Which names are in evidence and which are not?

The performance takes as direct reference the work by Cildo Meireles, Espaços virtuais: cantos and, in particular, photographs of people next to this work, which create the illusion that their bodies are breaking through walls. During a talk, we remembered a photograph by Cildo Meireles, used as some of the images on the cover of the album Sal sem Carne [Salt without meat] and in the work Zero Cruzeiro – a man facing the corner between two walls of a mental hospital in Goiás. It tells a story of a man who had been leaning his forehead against this corner for more than a decade, day after day, during his surveillance hours, so a depression was created in the masonry wall; a hole at the height of his head. Despite this damage caused by the mental health system user, we speculate that his presence there is what could have sustained the walls of that institution for so many years. Following this perspective, we performed the same – remaining on the margins, at the intersection between the boundaries of the institution, perhaps its most fragile area.