The Body Tells a Story of Identities

1/04/2000

 

Del Pilar Sallum (São Paulo, SP, 1952) works with the body, inciting loneliness and memory. In her series Ataduras, she molds metallic wires, obsessively and thickly, around her fingers and hands. In this way, they are transformed into platforms. Molded wires, rolled and hollow, become sculptures about emptiness, loneliness, the memory of the physicality that created them. Withdrawn of the metallic conglomerate, the artist’s body disintegrates, turns into the past. The sculptures created become then receptacles of memories, recipients of remembrances, pods empty of life.

In her video-performance works, the action of roll and unroll the wires that is repeated incessantly becomes an extension of the body- more specifically the hands- consistently chosen by the artist as a vehicle for the construction of an intimate and embarrassing work. The experience of the material construction of the bandage sculptures, executed through the physical absence, is radicalized.

Here the process that is done in the time doesn’t get anywhere, stablishing a circular narrative.  The temporality of roll/unroll is imprisoned, like a melody on a scratched vinyl. The repetition of the zigzagging action stablishes a relationship in which any vestige of causality is erased.  As from the translucency, emerges a schizophrenic relation: by repetition, we become intimate and accomplices of the autist rolling/unrolling. With a disenchanted view from linear narratives proposed by the production system, we stablish a promiscuous identification with that compulsive body, destituted of the possibility of escaping of its unceasing and empty trajectory. 

Another series of the artist, Impressões (Impressions), shows a huddle of fingerprints of the artist’s fingers, made of copper, alternately concave and convex, from her thumb pressed in sand and clay molds. The multiplication of her sculptural fingerprints becomes an obsessive record of body and identity. Translated into a multiplicity of shapes that seek, through the amount of replicas, to register the impossible copy in its similarity, the hurdle unfolds in a bulk of non-standardizable elements.

The small thumb-sculptures, together, become elements of the contemporary ideal. Sometimes they remind us of marine shapes, like shells and shellfishes, stubbornly sprouted on the surface, sometimes take eschatological forms, inaccurate swelled excretions as unwanted and unavoidable multiple.

 

The Body tells an Identity History of Identities in Brand New in Brazilian Art - A Trends Guide; 2000 Publishing Iluminuras SP, p. 52/54

 

Katia Canton