Presentation

Conceived as a continuation of the previous segment of the SPHERA project – now revealed as an acronym for SPiritual HEritage Research Area – the new cycle of originals (works of art and reflections) that is being organised, aims to project the gaze, capture the vision and gather sensitive and intelligible impressions about the sphere of the natural world.

Problematics

When we say nature, body or matter, we are also necessarily saying culture. This is because nature, the body or matter, even if only mentioned, are already culture. They are not only things that are thought about, but are also, from the outset, conceptual entities and, at the same time, perspectives and lenses, from a given angle of vision, which is nothing more than a point of view among all other possible ones.

If the body is animate and matter is inert, the nature that integrates them integrates them both into life. Also with a capital letter – LIFE – or even as a noun – the living. This is because minerals nourish plants and plants feed animals. Just as flowers bloom and fruits ripen in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom the psyche flourishes and consciousness blossoms within it, which is the awakening to the understanding of the world as a world. As a testimony to spatial extension and temporal succession, intrinsic to the common condition of being and existing.

There is no world, therefore, without this gaze. The grey, empty and inert Moon, even after its hidden face has been revealed, even after being visited by intruders, even after being converted into a repository of technology and symbolism of power, retains its charm and poetry unscathed. And all this because there is a gaze. Enchanted, and therefore enchanting. Because there is a feeling and a meaning, a being to be, in which the margins of that feeling overflow the things felt. They surpass them. They surpass them because they establish them as more than things. And if they do so, they do so because, in truth, for things to be only things is an impossibility. If there are things, it is because there is a gaze upon things that establishes them as things, which gives them a status and an identity, which is already something more than their mere existence.

In truth, however, there is not only the gaze that recognises presence. There is also a second, ontological gaze that observes the presence and the role of that first, formative gaze. Formative because it gives shape, which is the first degree of meaning. Beyond this formative gaze, there is this ontological gaze that is projected onto the first and primary one. It is this ontological gaze that captures and distils the great enigma: the miracle of being. The miracle of what is. And the miracle of being is the prodigy of creation. A gift of the spirit. A gift that is pure emanation. Pure emanation or, if you prefer, pure spiritual donation. Which enriches, abundantly, endlessly, and paradoxically timeless, even if surprising, in the instant.

The Portuguese language is one of the few that establishes the difference between ser and estar. If ser means to endure and evolve, facing wear and tear, and estar means to remain and fall, surrendering to wear and tear, the Portuguese language, by removing ser from all fixity, spells life as an emanation of being and overcoming of estar, that is, as spiritually assisted creation. In a word, as genesis. And gestation.

We believe it is necessary to (re)launch this ontological view of the natural sphera. A redemptive view – to the maximum extent possible. How do we see the natural sphera? Do we see it as the place of things? Do we see it as an extension of ourselves? Do we see it as a frame surrounding events? Do we see it as a backdrop that supports our intervention? Do we see it, finally, as a partner in a common project? Do we see it as a Voice? And as a voice that challenges us, can we hear it?

It is important to ask ourselves whether the natural sphera can override our ontological view, for example, in the name of science. Can science assimilate the knowledge that exists in being knowledge? A transcendentally telluric, animal, mystical and cosmic intuition tells us, in a low voice, that being a tree, a leaf, a river, a stream or a breeze is more than just being there, if seen through this ontological gaze, which instead of identifying things, decants being into them. Can the formative gaze, informed by the form it has formed, impose itself on this ontological gaze, which complicates but completes the former? And if it cannot annul it, can this formative gaze, adhering to things, distort the ontological gaze that inspects it, accuse it of being a mere subjective, dreamlike or fictitious instance, and define it as a clumsy metaphysical aberration? By connoting it with the intangible or the arbitrary, is not this same formative gaze usurping the place and role of this ontological gaze, to ultimately expel it, banishing it to the abyssal depths of the unconscious, in order to keep it exiled, confined to the darkness of the Hades of drives?

The formative gaze that remains attached to things may well become a repressive and punitive gaze, especially in relation to the ontological gaze that inspects and questions it, to the point of becoming uncomfortable and provoking the adversity of the former, which, as we can see, seeks to occupy the entirely field of vision and reduce it to what is there to be seen and what the visible spectrum is.

But this formative gaze is not limited to punishing the audacity of the ontological gaze that sees things as more than just things. This formative gaze, by objectifying it, immediately depreciates the natural sphera itself. If the dreamlike vision personifies nature, projecting human, if not divine, qualities and capacities onto it, deliriously magnifying its attributes, the objective vision, in turn, diminishes it, when it does not reduce it to a mere collection or string of data. To the Ahrimanic number.

This ontological gaze, however, is not isolated and defenceless. Not only is it inherently a sovereign gaze, but the vision that animates and illuminates it is the vision of art itself. This is the genetic gaze, the gaze open to creation, available only to it.

It is with this gaze that we intend to travel through the Sphera: the sphera of creation. We have long said that it is important to open the eyes that are closed within open eyes. And there are only open eyes when they open to creation. In time, nothing is definitive! Nothing repeats itself. No other repetition is conceivable except the repetition of the creative instance that denies all repetition. We are this undulation, serpent, spiral, cornucopia, snail.

It is this absence of repetition that allows us to formulate, as an affirmation, the question with which we ended the presentation of the previous project:

The idea of a spiritual Sphera governed by the Abellian principle of universal interdependence, and inspired by the demand to live artistically, is the utopian but precise direction that instigates the most sublime of the arts: that of imagining society as a work of art, spiritually generated in common!

In this world, trees sing. And rivers flutter. Only art can hear and see them.

Through the Theatre of Apparitions (!)

José Guilherme Abreu (CITAR)

Mário Caeiro (LIDA)

Theatre of Apparitions

THE PRACTICES OF ASTONISHMENT IN THE SPATIAL CONFIGURATION OF THE COMMON

Looking at the present time implies recognising a disturbing symptom: a society driven by techno-scientific utopianism seeks to obliterate and forget forms of vulnerability and finitude. Dealing with this condition, which is denied and relegated to the margins, calls us to open up new dimensions of inclusivity, if we listen to the call to integrate the new and the different. Art has always known how to open up space for this to be seen – our common exposure to the fragility of existence.

The Theatre of Apparitions is a research project informed by contemporary artistic creation. Its aim is to reveal some configurations of this shared space opened up by the creation of the place of the totally other as an apparition, i.e., as a destabilising event and insurrection – a term to which Georges Didi-Huberman gave renewed meaning – creating the human (being). The aim will be to create and recreate the conditions for welcoming manifestations of wonder – recovering the broad meaning of the Greek thaumazein – and their relational intensities, shedding light on the emerging cartographies of the common, in a series of multidisciplinary cultural initiatives capable of revealing this shifting horizon where uncertainty and confidence, discovery and recognition are mixed.

The aim will be to reveal the constellation of the encounter between the now and the past, which brought out the critical energy of the dialectical images that Walter Benjamin spoke of. By summoning the being and knowledge of the different agents of the imagination, we will seek to undertake innovative readings of the multiple bridges and connections that can be established between the arts, sciences and humanities. For we must make wonder the first – and most original – relational technology.

Spherical Journeys 

On the earth, as within the light