THERE ARE ALWAYS PLACES ALONG THE WAY | 2018
Sandra Baía’s work holds an inescapable relation with space and body via its sculptural facet. It consists of a discipline, or a methodology, anchored in relations of physicality, particular to that which is sculptural and tridimensional. Such confirmed sculptural work is adjoined by a vocabulary of materials inscribed within its transition to an imagery and symbolic dimension embedded in the titles of Baía’s works. As such, the language, the word, is also a ductile material transformed by the artist, nominating one other perspective of the work. The recent sculpture dated from 2017 and entitled “Simplicity Isn’t Simple” stands as an example. It consists of a polished aluminum parallelepiped volume resting on the floor’s level whose form is altered, as if it had been subjected to a small torsional stress or a physical impact. The parallelepiped volume’s shape is almost regular and, by itself, a simple form, as the title may evince. However, such evince, such tautology, establishes a linguistic ploy with the observer in the sense that what is told by the work’s title is not an exact description of the object, rather its condition as an object set before the observer confronting the latter through its apparent and transformed truth. Furthermore, the work’s gleaming surface accentuates the torsion inserted in the reflecting material, fostering a morphological and visual alteration as cherished by practices of representation in painting and quite present in contemporary sculpture as well.
One other work, “Entalada” (“Wedged”), dated from 2018, consisting of a sphere whose surface is also bright and reflector (a plastic and inflatable body), has been installed between two buildings near their top, capping the construction as something immutable, wedged and static. The entitling nomination, again as a language, is paradoxical, since this sculpture would convert into a displaying screen reflecting the surroundings, transforming and visually reconfiguring space and place, hence opposing the term “wedged” by means of the expanded image moving in the surface.
Both referenced works relate to the entitled sculpture “Is There a Place Before Arriving”, which is temporarily installed in Lisbon’s public space addressed as Terreiro das Missas (The Services Yard).
The structured form, composed by industrial raw materials as typical in Sandra Baía’s work, resembles either a container, a box, a scaffolding, or a frame for the entitling sentence which is presented in neon lettering. Flaunting its monumental scale, such structure advances its double meaning. One of its meanings recalls the ceremonial table where, similarly to an altar, fishing ships were blessed before departure when heading for Terra Nova’s seas during the codfish fishing season. The other meaning possible to account to this installation consists of its transitory condition, much as a mobile and temporary structure, as something in a construction process, as something becoming. Such as anteriorly referred, the word exerts a symbolic role within this context and, with regard to this particular case, such role contradicts both the place and its memory within the city’s dimension, as while it is situated alongside the river, nearby past maritime quests, it is however inexorably riveted to the imaginary of someone departing and someone arriving. It adheres to those places charting the path to a certain destiny while conserving such course’s memory, however much exposing the impossibility of its recapture. “Is There a Place Before Arriving” is the poetic form signalling such former and plural place, equal to the announcement of the path’s pre-existing condition which, within a proposition enounced in relation to the concrete measure of its geometrical and mathematical progression, consists of a map’s fold disclosing only the following pleat.
Its sculptural facet revisits constructivism, since it self-presents to a place which recaptures other places through the word’s incandescence, figuring as a riverside Pharos. Its condition as a project is proclaimed by the preliminary drawings. From their inception, these drawings consist of the thought’s autonomous expression whose practice, liberated from the etching hand, is the constitutive root for the word’s container and, thus, for the places evoked by the artwork which are merely known to consist of the deposit of this place of arrival, celebration and reinterpretation of this public space, and which expands accordingly to the river’s flow.
João Silverio