Un Esprit Méthodique
In 1850, Delacroix recorded in his Journal the success of some "photography experiments" conducted in Cambridge, where astronomers were photographing the sun and the moon and had managed to obtain an image of the star Vega the size of a pinhead. The artist added the following "curious" observation: Since the light from the star, whose daguerreotype was captured, had taken twenty years to cross the space separating it from Earth, the ray that was fixed on the plate had therefore left the celestial sphere long before Daguerre discovered the process by which we have just gained control over this light.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, p. 220.
The light, like a "pinhead" in the vast cosmos, which Delacroix speaks of, took twenty years to reach us. An image of a star, or the ruins of that body, which makes present an event that has already been completed. In contrast, within the body of the mother, there is a gestation, a still so unknown throbbing. It is from this type of conjunction of opposing forces and times that this book is made. Formed by enigmatic images that announce matters of the past in order to signal possibilities of other lives.
The mother is, in herself, a body in becoming, a reality in the process of becoming something else. A strange picture of one person inside another. Full of the potency of a future with everything it will be entitled to: cold, heat, a smell that confuses memory, wrinkled fingertips after a bath that lasted too long.
We will never know what stays in us, forever, from that time when we were Siamese twins with our mother: maybe some freckles on our forearm, or the way we sneeze. We won’t even know if what we inherited came from her body or her habits. For normally, it doesn’t seem like birth puts an end to gestation. Since even after being separated, there are so many cords that intertwine and multiply into a network.
Inside a woman's body, the perfect conditions are found for another body to meticulously form in the darkness. It is overwhelming, this secret life, detectable by an ultrasound or felt through kicks and arm movements from within.
This book maps that reality, blending the macro and the microcosmos, making us recognize, through photographs, a heartbeat within everything: from intrauterine life to the stars, from light within smoke to sand on a rock, or even the machines used to see far into the distance. Thus, a visual narration is formed in parts, following a method. Like the nature of a constellation, where points of light are connected by straight lines, the drawing is given a name, and the birth of stories and myths is awaited.
To bring to light a consistent work, with a methodical spirit (Un Esprit Méthodique), Matilde Travassos pursued what images hold in their absence. Paradoxically, we are offered photographs of traces of an uninhabited world where, for some reason, everyday presences have evaporated. What remains are samples, stuffed realities, preserving inert forms. Whether insects or planets, things and their places are frozen by the silence of immobility.
However, when captured in an image, our method of seeing is to give it the time necessary for its revelation, and the spirit of these images seems to be one of suspension. As if they suspend time in the dramatic ambivalence of a birth. What will appear here? is the question that emerges in each photograph. In this way, to intuit a gestating life in each thing, these images present themselves as ruins, past glows, drawings of the luminosity of other explosions. Enigmas about what to expect behind, or within, all of this.
Thus, the book forces us to press our ear to each reality – like placing it against a belly full of mystery. Accepting photography as a strange embryo of past and light.
João Sarmento S.J
