Solo Show
Flying Rivers
Member of the 3rd Season of Exhibitions 2022 - Sala Roy Kellermann
Address
Rua XV de Novembro, 161 - Centro, Blumenau - SC, Brasil
Date
From July 7 to August 24 of 2022
Where
MAB - Museu de Arte de Blumenau
"Breadth holds within it an aspect of the invisible. Large sizes, long periods, deep complexities, elude human comprehension, revealing themselves only at a distance, over time, or to minds with coronary capacities."
By Julio Refosco
Flying Rivers is the name given to a meteorological phenomenon that escapes our direct perception. The name itself makes you think – Flying Rivers?
Related to a perceptible thing known to us, the rivers, we expand the perception to this phenomenon recently discovered by science and which, despite the great importance it has for our lives, is still little known, and, worse, is threatened by our current way of life to be.
Flying Rivers are streams of water that move from one place to another in the atmosphere. But is there water in the atmosphere? Yup. Atmospheric air can contain water up to 4% of its volume.
Water in the gaseous state is called atmospheric moisture. It’s because is in the gaseous state that we do not see this water and, guess what, this water in the gaseous state that allows the organization of clouds and rain, as well as many other meteorological phenomena.
Clouds, for the record, are formed by water already in liquid form, small droplets that fall in the form of rain when their weight is greater than the force that keeps them in support.
And how does the water end up in the atmosphere?
Water stocks are distributed among continents, seas and in the atmosphere and circulates between them in the movement we call the hydrological cycle.
Two phenomena contribute to water entering the atmosphere: evaporation and transpiration. Transpiration has a large share of forests; it is a phenomenon in which plants transpire water in the form of steam.
The arrangements of the atmosphere are the result of a long evolution. Evidence show that the biotic components were not only the result of a preexisting environment, but that they actively acted to create the biosphere, which we can call our home, to which we are not always giving due care, by the way.
In this evolutionary process, vegetation, especially this group of life we call forest, played a fundamental role. And as you know, South America has a fantastic set of ecosystems, biomes, and biological diversity.
But what about the Flying Rivers?
Flying rivers are this huge volume of water that has evaporated from rivers, lakes and seas, and from the transpiration of living beings, especially from the set of forest plants, which, form flows and follow a geographic distribution, wind patterns, displacement of air masses, heating, conditioned by relief patterns and land cover once in the atmosphere, in gaseous and liquid form.
Transpiration is greater when there is greater metabolism and greater biomass. As is well known, tropical forests have high rates of growth, biomass and diversity, and that is why these forests have the capacity to send impressive amounts of water into the atmosphere, to recirculate this water, to feed ecological processes in different geographic regions, reinforcing the integration of life into the biosphere.
The organization, the ordering, the repetition of patterns and the scale of phenomena, both large and microscopic, are impressive. Weather, climate, meteorological phenomena especially have this quality of impacting our limited perception, which does not reach a complete understanding of many of them.
GLOSSARY
Hydrological Cycle
Biogeochemical cycle that occurs in the biosphere, in which water moves between the oceans, the atmosphere and the continents, influenced by solar energy.
Biotic Components
Name given to living beings and the organic matter resulting from them, when considered in the composition of ecosystems.
Biosphere
Part of planet Earth that contains life and is approximately 20 km thick.
Biomass
Organic matter, of plant or animal origin. Matter of which living things are composed.
Metabolism
Set of chemical reactions that occur in a living organism.
Technical Report
By Cássia Pérez
Time and the invisible, two concepts that are very close due to the lack of clarity we have about them. Time is only perceived once it passes, in which it becomes an accomplished and finished deed. The invisible is only perceived when it becomes visible, therefore completely modified from its original state. The Flying Rivers also enter this contradiction. They are fliers, but not in the way we readily imagine. They are in the deepest soil where humanity is established, they know no borders, they are not adept at politics or any moral restrictions that may exist for life on top of them. They integrate biomes and the most diverse geographies, becoming responsible for the distribution of water across the planet. They are fliers when hitting trees, clouds and moving around the planet, they are so invisible and at the same time so visible and obvious that it goes unnoticed many times.
But time brought with it understanding, which consequently brought human power over the layers of the world. More and more, the human being started to interfere in this force of nature that should be invisible and omnipresent, untouched. We invented a predatory project that alters the speed of time, makes any invisibility visible, brings flights that should be distant.
Celaine Refosco leads us to reflect on these interferences that do not measure consequences. The acts of modifying time, the invisible, the flying. She presents us with paintings that give us the impression that we are flying. The invisible is the spectator, the artist opens nature, shapes and colors that leave us unclear about the specific narrative.
She invited us to reflect: why do we insist on bringing the invisible to light, changing the course of time, cutting the flight of what keeps us alive? We are as fragile as what we change, we create fractures in the external that fracture our internal. We imagine that we are capable of flying, but the truth is that we were all along looking for the objective in the wrong place.
It is not necessarily in what we glimpse of the unknown, in the thirst to make it reveal itself, but in the invisible that has been here with us all along, keeping us alive as we struggled to exterminate it.
Curatorial Text
By Celaine Refosco
The Flying Rivers exhibition is made up of three sets of works, which talk about the same issue from different, even opposing, perspectives.
One of the groups is about the Flying River’s phenomenon and the joy in discovering it, knowing it active and named, imagining its complexity and power, envisioning the vastness of life and the balance built over unspeakable times, acting on us. It is a set of oil-painted canvases, in large formats, exposed against walls, which presents the artist's perceptions as if they were fragments of scenes, visions of a bird, understandings of fish, water paths, vapors and waterfalls.
The other is the disappointed face, a set of charcoal drawings and acrylic paints on tulle, which brings attention to problems through attitude, the impact of Seeing Through, and discovering the consequences of human insanity on the perfection of the planet Earth. There are ‘laminated' tulles, designed and painted, exposed in groups and suspended from the ceiling. They form three-dimensional blocks and invite the viewer to look through them, other drawings, other paintings, the other side of the room, the other side, beyond, as if, in some miraculous way, exercising the look through art, could, build lucidity in the mind and heart of the beholder.
The third group is formed by small-format canvases, called Naked Ground, painted with oil and encaustic, and speak in a hollow voice, about destruction.
The Exhibition
By Celaine Refosco
There are fewer processes that occur slowly, such as plant growth, especially of trees and noticeable trees. Even so, what happens calmly and in an integrated way, is barely visible to human eyes.
Especially to the humans that we are, inhabitants of an old and decadent world, which has seriously broken the balance founded between objectivity and subjectivity. We perceive little, we understand partially, we intuit badly, or we don't even intuit anymore, unbalanced, confused, mistaken.
Flying Rivers are water distribution systems across the planet. They are invisible and unspeakable because they are so broad, complex, subtle, and smooth. Invisible in the constancy of their presence and in the efficiency of their results in the comfortable maintenance of life. They cause the impression that nothing happens. precisely because they always happen. Until they are broken, or rather, they have. Been. broken, and then yes, we begin to realize, through no longer being as we always were, that in fact we were.
They are immense operations that integrate biomes and landforms and operate as interconnected climate systems. Intuited by the native peoples since the beginning of time, understood and researched by science for a short time.
One of these integrated systems, perhaps precisely the one that coined the concept, operates in Latin America, distributing water from the Amazon along the entire Andes Mountains, to the southern tip of the continent. It does not recognize geographical borders in a logically way, it receives from the Sahara Desert through the winds that cross the Atlantic, particles of matter that nourish the forest and integrate the vitalizing force of the trees, which circulate through themselves, raising them from the ground to the sky in the form of steam.
Ironically, we precisely begin to understand the grandiose functioning of the nutritive chain that we call life when, through our ignorant and continuous intervention, it begins to present failures and ruptures, and we no longer have the distribution of rainfall, temperatures, seasons of the year as when in balance.
To lose the Flying Rivers will undoubtedly be the most painful way of realizing the integration between the most diverse elements of planet earth. It is part of the predatory project called capitalism, that we do not recognize life in the fullness of its power and interconnection. We, as disconnected humans, prefer to see and recognize the disconnection, in this way, going without thinking about the reality of the crooked paths we invented, is more possible.
Presenting the theme
Colab
Images
Ana Paula Caciano