This exhibition is the result of the artistic research carried out by Marcelo Moscheta in the Alentejo region, following his residency at Pó de Vir a Ser, in Évora. There, he found the opportunity to work in the sculpture studios whilst developing a focus on the geology of the region. Continuing his journey, in which walking is established as an artistic practice, Marcelo Moscheta deepened a reflection in the Alentejo, in his own words, “interested in the wandering condition of humanity and in the way the connection is established between the territory and a body in constant motion. With stone as the primary witness to the transformations caused by constant movement, the surface of the world becomes his field of action, and the natural landscape his place par excellence.”

Walking as a mode of attention and a poiesis within the territory is accompanied, in Marcelo’s work, by a profound rhythm: time.

Time is evidence and form in the rock; it is in the stone that heterochrony and prolonged metamorphosis manifest, whose material evidence opens up the possibility for the creation of scales, narratives, compositions and assemblages, a geology of its own. Sculpture, in this context, is also a post-disciplinary epistemology, where art and science intertwine as complementary forms of producing knowledge.

Body, geology and sculpture as situated composition: these are elements that persist in the artist’s work, as can indeed be observed in his most recent creations. In Léxico Lítico (Every Stone is a Small Mountain) (2023), for example, the sculptor collected sedimentary rocks in the Serra da Lousã, which, “after thousands of years of sedimentation, accumulation and solidification, have turned into stone”. Or, indeed, in the works of the series Do Discurso do Caminhar (2023), where the artist “creates a play of random encounters” between text and image, drawing on notions such as “wandering, movement and interventions in urban and rural landscapes”. This interplay becomes an alter-territory, which evokes a poetic connection with the viewer and invites a situated walk through the places represented in the exhibition. The interplay or exhaustion of the combinatorial possibilities of the material is equally present in the work “Autopoiesis #1 (floating stone)”, in which Marcelo Moscheta forms a glossary of elements that echo the philosophical etymology of the word autopoiesis: “the description of systems capable of creating and sustaining themselves from within”. Lexicons, vocabularies and glossaries are classic forms of scientific organisation and classification, which here, once again, are transformed into an artistic investigation, a generative disorder for other ways of producing and organising knowledge, and which invite the audience to undertake a new inquiry into the natural elements presented in the exhibition.*

In Marcelo Moscheta’s encounter with the Geology of Attention, in Pó de Vir a Ser, a shared field of work and desire is finally revealed. Precisely there, in the stone sculpture workshops of the former Évora slaughterhouse, stone is suspended as raw material, and sculpture emerges as a practice of knowledge and attention:

“We seek that which transforms, recombines and merges in a movement as ancient as it is contemporary within the rock, in that which constitutes us and also in that which surrounds us. What moves and varies on the seemingly finished surface of the crust, in a form? How might we draw attention to this small yet effective scale of transformation in things, in matter?” *

* The quotations in the text are by the artist Marcelo Moscheta.

** Quoted from www.podeviraser.pt.

Credits

MIRA Galerias | MIRA FORUM

Directed by Manuela Matos Monteiro and João Lafuente

Communications: Manuela Matos Monteiro and Beatriz Vital

Assistant: Beatriz Vital

Marcelo Moscheta, b. 1976, São José do Rio Preto, lives and works in Coimbra.

Marcelo Moscheta is an artist whose practice is structured around displacement — physical, geographical and conceptual. Walks, expeditions and residencies shape his work, which brings together science, geography, memory and landscape in poetic and material investigations. Throughout his career, he has travelled to places such as the Arctic, the Atacama Desert, the Tietê River and, more recently, Portugal, where he lives and is conducting his doctoral research. His works combine empirical precision with critical sensitivity, reflecting on the human presence in the territory and on the ways of measuring, representing and transforming the world. Through drawings, frottages, installations and the collection of natural materials, Moscheta builds a body of work that functions as an affective and archaeological cartography of her journeys.