Viscera in Vice Versa

   A reflection about art and power in Brazil, as well as the artist herself being a victim of medical error. In 2006 she also held an exhibition at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo with 72 photographs and released the book with texts by the poet Decio Pignatari and the curator Diógenes Moura. In 2007 she held the same exhibition in Curitiba at the Museum of Photography and also presented a monologue about her work with the actor Rodrigo Spina.

critical texts

Others:user instructions * Diógenes Moura/2006 - Curator of the Pinacoteca of Curitiba

   Vilma Slomp photographs like someone who wants to be heard. In her own words, her images are not a "story made up of heaven or hell." However, those very images seek and form a voice that carries other voices and one single voice - that which speaks and listens at the same time that 'lesser other1 plunges into (and beyond) the world. And what would that world that world be - the geographical circumscription of a threat and its swaying between life and death? if that is what it is, the images in Vísceras in Vice Versa are the final ones until the moment when each of their doors are opened. Let the light that shines through give rise to a mother tongue, incorporating the great other. Hence, this series of images translates the period between 2004 and 2005, when Slomp soliloquized a kind of guesswork with her unconscious, later ready to dedicate the outcome to the external-inside' world.

   In the middle of this journey, there is a letter, that is, one tone that turns "language into the fabric which affection is made of'.

   In the letter, a victim.

Herself.

   A medical error "renegotiated" what would be photographer's next images after the 'Illusion' series, first started in 2001. That is when Slomp decided to "publish" a novel about what the next and future days, would be like, which could perhaps be the near and the future between art and power.

   The days of then and the days of now. They are spun from amalgams, from the north and the south of reality; from the north and south of reality, from a voice that shouts while another voice glide down the balustrade.

   If there is "a grudgeless heaven" as she claims, the letter translates a world of hierarchies that foretells the force of nature in each of these photograph.

   Do they hurt? Yes, they do. They hurt as much as the art of reason, as the masked like it hurt cry trance unknown that morning March. Hurt can hurt as much as the art of reason; as the masked face and diluted lies in the mirror told by liars can hurt. They hurt as little (as little?) as someone who tears oneself open can hurt when disclosing to alien eyes a common point, as fragile (fragile?) as the word. Something that will reveal both to the lesser and to the lesser and to the great 'other' a language that can be understood when the same user instructions are applied - those that record the memory of time and other that transfer the territories of thought to all places.

Diogenes Moura / 2006

Title * Angela Jesuino Ferretto, lecture at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine, May 199

Natur/allie - Décio Pignatari/Curitiba July 2006

"Quand il faisait beau temps au paradis perdu"

Beaudelaire

   When Vilma puts life in photo: metaphor. When the phot in life: metalanguage. But iconic and symbolic signs merge (at grips). For the metaphor the camera captures what had already been ordained worddly, even if fortitously: to choose is to force the thing to take care of itself as if posing for meaning that is not sure of being there: Ex-photo, Holy Family, Wound-licking, Greek tragedy, Museum, Roots of memory. Metalanguage: the thing shoots the photo, records it, denounces and reveals the photo foto-camera. The zero degree of this visceral operation can be seen in the absurd, inconspicuous landscape called Sea of rain. And But in other dialogues where misleading names are used or none, in harmonious imbaolance od reticular textures: Short circuit, Redemption.

   With Vilma, gray deluding black can be inferred as joy.

   Under the quasi-sarcastic judgement of the moby-dickean eye of My mother's navel, viscera and organs that are at same time owesame and comical-gruesame My livervis gone, Tongue power. Alsoin molds, the metalic roses in twisted ribbons are sent crematorium: Secrets by a bedside table of a hospital Venus.

   Refined naive, she widens the objective eyelids of painful diaphragms in filmic entrails, like a dying body diagnonsing the photography. Or rather, the history of photography, from Nièpce to Rio Branco,(saying hello to Atget from the Rain/sea to a derelict house filled with furniture debris uninhabited by a stray dog.

   Dark melancholic-oswaldian solar canon(1) aimed at friends and foe expose-and-be-exposed under the light that is far from "light" - that is the slompian camera.(2) From openings and crevices on a wall or the Dada-inspired genital slope, to an outrageously beautiful frame of a teen aged nakedness under scribbling caresses of a fern (unexpected academic upsurge),(3) pasionaria and passionate Vilma Slomp strolls along the painfully paradisiacal landscape of her bioluminosity.

(1) Allusion to a poem by Oswaldd de Andrade (1890-1954) on on-five road photographers of the twentes in Brazil.

(2) From the series Illusion

(3) Allusion to Dolores Ibarruri (1895-1989) Spanish symbol of revolutionary woman in the civil war

Décio Pignatari / Curitiba July 2006