And now all earth is clay
Marcelo Campos - 2008
“The city gives the impression that earth does not exist”.[1] Robert Smithson.
When Brígida Baltar says “dust” she means “my home”. Initially taken from her own house, the brick dust from Baltar´s home has crossed other lands, transmuted into mini-bricks to fill gaps in the floors of London galleries, been scattered in tile patterns in Argentine art spaces, creating corners, forests and parquets in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro museums.
The artist´s earth projects approach the production of Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson. Earth was used in the art of the 1960s and 1970s to break the primazia of reason. Now Brígida Baltar blends into the Brazil of the popular brick factories of Juazeiro do Norte. She carries out actions with the brick workers, mixing the house dust to the soil of Cariri. She builds bricks, interested both in the landscape of the rustic brick factories in the wood clearings, and in the low tech process.
However, “a fragile and fractured world envelops the artist” [2]. Thus, Brígida poetizes the land, the immensity, always paying attention to detail, to that which is within hand´s reach. She manipulates “stupid tools”, as Heizer would call them, whether because they are inserted in archaic processes (wooden brick molds), or because they aim to achieve impossible tasks (such as collecting fog and dew). She seeks a kind of invisibility, drawing objects and spaces towards her own body, as seen in Francesca Woodman´s images.
The opposites and paradox are accepted. In the trip to Juazeiro, the artist sought dried and cracked earth from the sertão (arid hinterlands), but found a muddy place. So she decided to make us aware of the instability of objects and nature, turning our attention to states of transformation.
The desire for the earth projects created an immediate exchange with the sertão region. And such an exchange actually happened one morning in Juazeiro when Brígida encountered brick workers at work on the Taquari road. At first sight, the brick workshops of Juazeiro resembled unfinished cities or mythical constructions. There was a “primordial grandeur” in those images that placed one in front of mirages. They simultaneously looked like castles and ruins. An aspect of “singular wilderness” defined the brick workshops of Cariri.
Again, Brígida put herself in front of walls, fences, limits (because, at the end, fog is a wall on the landscape). The interest was renewed into simple actions. Brígida Baltar makes out of herself a crossover line and symbiosis, in the house, at the margins of the sertão lakes, at the limits of mountain roads, on tree tops, at the sea shore.
“Desert is less nature than concept, a place that engulfs boundaries.” [3]
In the imaginary about the deserted sertão, boundaries lose their meaning. In Juazeiro, Baltar operated a “desert conscience”. Less destruction and torridity, and more construction, the possibility of living in harmony with the local nature, dams, lakes. With the earth project, Brígida worked attentively and carefully, directly observing a naturally and culturally complex ambient.
The encounter with Juazeiro do Norte places Brígida Baltar on the space-time frequency of a bucolic Brasil, but no less dynamic, alive, pulsating. To arrive in Juazeiro and to find the rough brick constructions is to experience quasi-utopic places. We are in Brazilian lands.
[1] Smithson, Robert. Uma sedimentação da mente: projetos de terra [1968]. In: Cotrin, Cecília e Ferreira, Glória (orgs.). Escritos de artistas, anos 60/70. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2006, p. 184 |
[2] Ibid., p. 183
[3] Ibid., p. 193.
[Brígida Baltar and Marcelo Campos talk in the afternoon of July 4, 2008]
[M] Brígida, since when have you been interested in working with bricks? Which actions do you make with brick dust?
[B] I think the first action was to transform the bricks from the house where I used to live into dust. This happened in the mid-1990s. That was a lot of bricks and quite a few walls. I started to interpret this as the disappearance of something that, at first, is very solid. Because the idea of ownership can be very fixed and stable. It´s like the house dust could travel to other places. And then this dust could also serve other purposes, other constructions, other landscapes. I made mini-bricks with this dust and then interventions on gaps, empty spaces, little occupations, small jobs, as you like to say.
[M] The earth is raw material and so is the brick, because it´s structural, elementary. The sertão is often seen as raw material for Brazil. It seems as if we are before something atavistic. But this is fiction, it´s an attempt to render origins as a myth.
[B] The brick, even in dust form, will always be brick, it´s always structure, because this notion comes attached to the material. I think that´s why I´m now doing constructions. The forests I draw, for example, are constructions, and so are the tiny parquet floors. I made two books I called Devaneios e Utopias (Daydreams and Utopias). As they are brick-books, it´s like making these ideas possible or concrete. The nature of the sertão was matter for me. I went there to see the landscape, the land, the soil, something very elementary for our fancy that needs mythologies.
[M] I see constructions all over the pages of “Art in America”, in works from the Medium East, etc. You´ve dealt with Utopias. Has politics, in an almost inevitable way, informed your work?
[B] I guess so, but in a way not so evident. I´ve enjoyed working with the “less”, in the meaning of the non-spetacular, of the ephemeral, that can be something now and to break off later. And when I think of more defined forms of the work, such as the forest made of brick dust, the landscapes in general or in books, I think a positive, committed sense comes along.
[M] But constructions have their reverse side too. The world collapses at every instant. Maybe the political attitude should rather come from precisely the small. Beuys used to say revolutions are us.
[B] Well, we now love these immense brick workshops. They look very strange on the landscape. They look like tribe homes or castles. You said the title of this text could be castles or ruins. It´s a good idea and I think it summarizes our joy with this project.
[M] Smithson comments that construction processes are heavy, rude, they have a kind of devastating primordial grandeur, sometimes more interesting than the finished project.
[B] Yes, I feel like taking the whole brick workshop inside the gallery once and for all. The beauty of that simplicity. Those coarse bricks drying in the sun... Nowadays there are attempts to build houses with raw clay again, like those of pau-a-pique or stucco. Part of the Great Wall of China was built with raw bricks, without the firing, as were entire cities in Africa and desert regions, not to mention our traditions. And these houses keep the ideal temperature, don´t burn charcoal, don´t consume energy. It´s beautiful to think the house can return to being earth like this. I love it. They are living houses, like plants, that are born and die.
[M] What if it rains? Is there always a threat?
[B] The base must be well structured, with rocks, and the roof must be firm. Monica Soffiatti, a friend of mine, likes this subject and attends experimental workshops in eco-villas. She uses to say a good clay house can stand a storm. It´s like wearing boots and hat.
[M] How was your encounter with Juazeiro, which, incidentally, is the name of a tree?
[B] It was the impact of imagining a place with cacti, drought, cracked soil, and finding a mix of several realities, of a nature which is very humid, which impressed me and made me dive into the mud, and, in addition, a city of intense commercial activities, street vendors, lan houses, religious people all over the place.
[M] And what about the brick workshops? There are challenges, they look like sphinxes, decipher me or I devore you. Have you planned actions, performances, photographs? How can they be transformed into art?
[B] I performed a very simple action. I molded 16 bricks.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Marcelo Campos - 2008
“The city gives the impression that earth does not exist”.[1] Robert Smithson.
When Brígida Baltar says “dust” she means “my home”. Initially taken from her own house, the brick dust from Baltar´s home has crossed other lands, transmuted into mini-bricks to fill gaps in the floors of London galleries, been scattered in tile patterns in Argentine art spaces, creating corners, forests and parquets in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro museums.
The artist´s earth projects approach the production of Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson. Earth was used in the art of the 1960s and 1970s to break the primazia of reason. Now Brígida Baltar blends into the Brazil of the popular brick factories of Juazeiro do Norte. She carries out actions with the brick workers, mixing the house dust to the soil of Cariri. She builds bricks, interested both in the landscape of the rustic brick factories in the wood clearings, and in the low tech process.
However, “a fragile and fractured world envelops the artist” [2]. Thus, Brígida poetizes the land, the immensity, always paying attention to detail, to that which is within hand´s reach. She manipulates “stupid tools”, as Heizer would call them, whether because they are inserted in archaic processes (wooden brick molds), or because they aim to achieve impossible tasks (such as collecting fog and dew). She seeks a kind of invisibility, drawing objects and spaces towards her own body, as seen in Francesca Woodman´s images.
The opposites and paradox are accepted. In the trip to Juazeiro, the artist sought dried and cracked earth from the sertão (arid hinterlands), but found a muddy place. So she decided to make us aware of the instability of objects and nature, turning our attention to states of transformation.
The desire for the earth projects created an immediate exchange with the sertão region. And such an exchange actually happened one morning in Juazeiro when Brígida encountered brick workers at work on the Taquari road. At first sight, the brick workshops of Juazeiro resembled unfinished cities or mythical constructions. There was a “primordial grandeur” in those images that placed one in front of mirages. They simultaneously looked like castles and ruins. An aspect of “singular wilderness” defined the brick workshops of Cariri.
Again, Brígida put herself in front of walls, fences, limits (because, at the end, fog is a wall on the landscape). The interest was renewed into simple actions. Brígida Baltar makes out of herself a crossover line and symbiosis, in the house, at the margins of the sertão lakes, at the limits of mountain roads, on tree tops, at the sea shore.
“Desert is less nature than concept, a place that engulfs boundaries.” [3]
In the imaginary about the deserted sertão, boundaries lose their meaning. In Juazeiro, Baltar operated a “desert conscience”. Less destruction and torridity, and more construction, the possibility of living in harmony with the local nature, dams, lakes. With the earth project, Brígida worked attentively and carefully, directly observing a naturally and culturally complex ambient.
The encounter with Juazeiro do Norte places Brígida Baltar on the space-time frequency of a bucolic Brasil, but no less dynamic, alive, pulsating. To arrive in Juazeiro and to find the rough brick constructions is to experience quasi-utopic places. We are in Brazilian lands.
[1] Smithson, Robert. Uma sedimentação da mente: projetos de terra [1968]. In: Cotrin, Cecília e Ferreira, Glória (orgs.). Escritos de artistas, anos 60/70. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2006, p. 184 |
[2] Ibid., p. 183
[3] Ibid., p. 193.
[Brígida Baltar and Marcelo Campos talk in the afternoon of July 4, 2008]
[M] Brígida, since when have you been interested in working with bricks? Which actions do you make with brick dust?
[B] I think the first action was to transform the bricks from the house where I used to live into dust. This happened in the mid-1990s. That was a lot of bricks and quite a few walls. I started to interpret this as the disappearance of something that, at first, is very solid. Because the idea of ownership can be very fixed and stable. It´s like the house dust could travel to other places. And then this dust could also serve other purposes, other constructions, other landscapes. I made mini-bricks with this dust and then interventions on gaps, empty spaces, little occupations, small jobs, as you like to say.
[M] The earth is raw material and so is the brick, because it´s structural, elementary. The sertão is often seen as raw material for Brazil. It seems as if we are before something atavistic. But this is fiction, it´s an attempt to render origins as a myth.
[B] The brick, even in dust form, will always be brick, it´s always structure, because this notion comes attached to the material. I think that´s why I´m now doing constructions. The forests I draw, for example, are constructions, and so are the tiny parquet floors. I made two books I called Devaneios e Utopias (Daydreams and Utopias). As they are brick-books, it´s like making these ideas possible or concrete. The nature of the sertão was matter for me. I went there to see the landscape, the land, the soil, something very elementary for our fancy that needs mythologies.
[M] I see constructions all over the pages of “Art in America”, in works from the Medium East, etc. You´ve dealt with Utopias. Has politics, in an almost inevitable way, informed your work?
[B] I guess so, but in a way not so evident. I´ve enjoyed working with the “less”, in the meaning of the non-spetacular, of the ephemeral, that can be something now and to break off later. And when I think of more defined forms of the work, such as the forest made of brick dust, the landscapes in general or in books, I think a positive, committed sense comes along.
[M] But constructions have their reverse side too. The world collapses at every instant. Maybe the political attitude should rather come from precisely the small. Beuys used to say revolutions are us.
[B] Well, we now love these immense brick workshops. They look very strange on the landscape. They look like tribe homes or castles. You said the title of this text could be castles or ruins. It´s a good idea and I think it summarizes our joy with this project.
[M] Smithson comments that construction processes are heavy, rude, they have a kind of devastating primordial grandeur, sometimes more interesting than the finished project.
[B] Yes, I feel like taking the whole brick workshop inside the gallery once and for all. The beauty of that simplicity. Those coarse bricks drying in the sun... Nowadays there are attempts to build houses with raw clay again, like those of pau-a-pique or stucco. Part of the Great Wall of China was built with raw bricks, without the firing, as were entire cities in Africa and desert regions, not to mention our traditions. And these houses keep the ideal temperature, don´t burn charcoal, don´t consume energy. It´s beautiful to think the house can return to being earth like this. I love it. They are living houses, like plants, that are born and die.
[M] What if it rains? Is there always a threat?
[B] The base must be well structured, with rocks, and the roof must be firm. Monica Soffiatti, a friend of mine, likes this subject and attends experimental workshops in eco-villas. She uses to say a good clay house can stand a storm. It´s like wearing boots and hat.
[M] How was your encounter with Juazeiro, which, incidentally, is the name of a tree?
[B] It was the impact of imagining a place with cacti, drought, cracked soil, and finding a mix of several realities, of a nature which is very humid, which impressed me and made me dive into the mud, and, in addition, a city of intense commercial activities, street vendors, lan houses, religious people all over the place.
[M] And what about the brick workshops? There are challenges, they look like sphinxes, decipher me or I devore you. Have you planned actions, performances, photographs? How can they be transformed into art?
[B] I performed a very simple action. I molded 16 bricks.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
