Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #12

How to Care for an Act?

Lygia Clark’s Caminhando and Rosácea Toward Curating Inside/Out

by Jessica Gogan

January 10, 2023

The legacy of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s (1920–1988) emphasis on process, relationality, and hybrid artistic clinical practices continues to challenge institutional logics of care and curatorship. If, as she wrote, in relation to engaging with her participatory proposals, there is only “the act” and there “is nothing before and nothing after,” what are the implications for the archival and curatorial practices of her work?^[1] If we are not caring for objects, photographs, or other ephemera, what are we or should we be actually taking care of? How might we care for an act?

Critic and psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik’s in-depth archival interview project with former “clients”—how Clark referred to her experimental therapy patients/participants—as well as critics, artists, and friends, is one cogent and affective way of such caring. Deep listening to the multiple and varied voices engaged in and orbiting an artist’s practice and world is to acknowledge rather than separate the complex entanglements of art and life. It is also to embrace other modes of historiography, ones that might, as scholar Amelia Jones suggests, “Take account of the durational, and the circuits of desire it opens up, in order to produce more ethical and nuanced histories.”^[2]

Yet Clark’s insistence on the immanence of the acts she proposed, on others engaging in and multiplying her propositions, not only opens up the possibility for other modes of historiography, but also other forms of curatorship. Ones that interrelate rather than cordon off experiences of time, body, and space. Ways of working that embrace the sentient present, the contradictions of speculative (re)making and the ever-shifting boundaries of art and clinical practices. Taking care of an act means being attendant to its resonance, not as some mere echo of an original gesture, but as a vital pulsing gerund constantly being made and remade anew.

An act’s afterlife then might be akin to a diasporic open root, at once anchored in its original place, yet free to dislocate, recreate, and transform.^[3] If every diaspora dismantles sociocultural and geographic bonds, every diasporic culture in turn aggregates and reinvents. Nurturing an afterlife culture for Clark’s “acts”—and indeed other radical “acts” emerging from 1960s and ’70s art practices—shifts an understanding of custodianship from objects to an aggregative sense of caring for/with immanent acts and their speculative unfoldings. Walking, relating, elaborating, (re-)enacting—a constantly evolving archive of the future.

Drawing on Rolnik’s interviews and readings of two of Clark’s participatory works in particular, Caminhando (1963) and Rosácea (1974/75), the latter also via a series of re-enactments, this essay nurtures the possibilities of an afterlife culture inspired in Clark’s practices and rehearses an idea of curating inside/out.^[4] One that privileges acts over objects; mediations that, in turn, may fruitfully spawn a plurality of diasporic institutionalities grounded in praxis more than buildings, exhibitions, and collections.

Fig. 1. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira, Rio de Janeiro, October 5, 2017. Photo: Denise Adams.

Archival Futures and Wild Afterlives

I never saw anything more solitary than having a new and original idea.
Clarice Lispector^[5]

Somewhere around the tenth hour of my immersion in Suely Rolnik’s Arquivo para uma obra-acontecimento (Archive for a work-event)^[6]—a treasure trove of interviews on the art, life, and practice of Lygia Clark—I began to wonder whether Rolnik’s critical and loving gesture to archive the event of Clark’s work was not in fact a certain inevitable closure of the evental, or what might be called the work’s archival future.

Listening to the varied accounts of critics, artists, and clients, Clark emerges as a passionate, courageous, and complex woman. For Ivanilda Santos Leme, a former sex worker who hung out at the local Copacabana bar Beco de Fome that Clark frequented, occasionally recruiting clients, she could have been a mafia wife or a general’s mistress, but also a gypsy or macumbeira.^[7] Her makeup and salon coifs may have suggested a kept woman, but her vital sexual independence ruffled feathers. Rolnik comments that every woman she interviewed about Clark comments on the importance of their encounter with her as a woman and how she embraced her erotic feminism. A pioneer in art and life, her liberated role model was permission giving.

Caetano Veloso remembers apologizing for an erection he had during one of her one-on-one therapy sessions of Estruturação do Self (Structuring of the Self, 1978–1988). Laughing, he recalls the gravely timber of Clark’s voice saying, “Não faz mal” (Not to worry). She was, for Veloso, “calm vehemence.” For the poet/musician Jards Macalé, she was “the air.” For a generation of Rio de Janeiro’s artistic and cultural world, suffering from the restrictive fallout of the military regime, Clark offered a kind of unflappable motherliness. Yet one shot through with the erotic. Filmmaker Suzanna de Moraes connects that eroticism with a feminist radicality and liberated sensuality, one of going beyond a fear in relation to a desire. The artist David Medalla describes her as “três Copacabana, três sexy”. With obvious delight he remembers arriving at her Paris apartment at midnight with a friend and Clark donning a Carmen Miranda styled wig and taking them all by taxi to Bois de Bologne to talk with the Brazilian transvestites in the city’s famous redlight park district.

Such anecdotes and critical reflections are the rich core of Rolnik’s Arquivo para uma obra acontecimento. Refusing pristine aesthetic framing, they bring sensory experience to the center of the archive. For Rolnik, this was not only about more nuanced ethical-affective histories. She also hoped to move beyond “mere cataloguing,” and in so doing, that the archive would not only be “about” but also “for” an artistic experience.^[8] Yet, how to conciliate this desire to activate “sensible experiences in the present” with Rolnik’s observation and that of various of her interviewees of the “indispensable” presence of Clark “so that the experience of her work happens”?^[9] How might we care for an act or event when the artist is no longer present? How, as Erin Manning notes in the concept of “the anarchive,” might we struggle against ubiquitous models of documentation and find ways that carry “the eventing forward”?^[10] With these questions in mind, I began to imagine the fabulation of another archive; one that would explore Clark’s practice as a practice in the world as an artistic and therapeutic instrument, or immanent apparatus, less dependent on her presence. If, as Guy Brett notes, Clark’s practice maps a trajectory where we can see evolving (or perhaps more accurately devolving) relationships with the public—beginning with conventional spectatorship then moving to engaging viewers in manipulating work, followed by making them the center of her proposals, to finally reconfiguring the artist/public relation as a one-to-one relationship—then our making of manifestations of her work might similarly follow such a journey.

Immersed in the critical and poetic potential of Rolnik’s project, it was Brett’s musing on what might be a continuation of Clark’s work—its afterlife, as Walter Benjamin offered in relation to translatability^[11]—that I found most generative as a critical and affective inquiry. Such a provocation invites us to walk the line of Clark’s work as a creative proposal in the world. “Inhabiting,” as Irit Rogoff suggests, rather than “analyzing,” may offer us other ways of seeing, feeling, and working^[12] that, as Clark noted, are not “molded” by intentionality but rather by the “necessities” of the encounter, the other, the doing.^[13]

Such inhabiting could be said to be the modus operandi of artist and psychiatrist Lula Wanderley, another of Rolnik’s interviewees. Wanderley knew and worked with Clark, and has long deployed her experimental therapies at Espaço Aberto ao Tempo (EAT, Space Open to Time), a pioneering mental health clinic. Wanderley co-founded EAT with the occupational therapist Carmem Lúcia Bragança in the late 1980s at the psychiatric hospital Dom Pedro II (now Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira) in an outlying suburb of Rio de Janeiro.^[14] Literally a space open to time, a radical gesture within the measured controls of clinical settings, EAT offers an experimental escape valve or counterflow to established norms, what Wanderley describes as “an institution in search of a poetic psychiatry.”^[15] Rather than a reconstruction of memories, Wanderley prefers the potentialities of a diasporic institutionality. In dislocating Clark’s acts from the confines of museums or archives to a psychiatric hospital, Wanderley positions himself neither as artist nor therapist. He is rather the “and” in-between. By not affirming one position or the other, but rather the poetic encounter of the in-between, Wanderley engages with Clark’s work as immanence, as an always-in-formation archive of the future. Brett almost certainly had Wanderley in mind when he wondered about the continuation of Clark’s work. The critic and curator financially supported EAT’s practice for a number of years, and wrote a preface for one of Wanderley’s books.^[16] Brett’s reflection on Clark’s reconfiguration of the artist/public relation and Wanderley’s redeployment of her practices to other sociocultural contexts usefully point to ways in which the artist’s work might help us question (rework or even reinvent) institutional logics of care and curatorship.

Fig. 2. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira, Rio de Janeiro, October 5, 2017. Photo: Denise Adams.

As André Lepecki has written with respect to Clark’s Relational Objects—precarious objects used in the artist’s therapies such as stones, shells, or small plastic bags filled with air or water—in their “integrity and wild living,” what these objects do is offer “to art and curation decolonizing lines of flight.”^[17] So where might such “wild living” and “decolonizing” lead us? Artist and theorist Eleonora Fabião offers some guideposts in her characterization of Clark’s “deeply participatory propositions” of the 1970s as “somewhere between social sculpture, psychophysical assemblages, experimental pedagogies and collective therapies.”^[18] Rolnik’s affective historiography and Wanderley’s reterritorialization offer others. In their emphasis on the haptic rather than the visual, Clark’s relational objects challenge traditional paradigms. Instead of objects, endpoints, and visuality, the focus is on the encounter, relationality, care, working with contradictions, reconfiguring the artist/public relation, and foregrounding the listening sentient body. A body of practices I suggest might be called curating inside/out. While, arguably, curating may not be the best term for such work, I am interested in making a case for the centrality of such practices at the core of rethinking contemporary institutionalities. It is a provocation for another way of working. Literally inside/out. As curator Anthony Huberman suggests in his essay “Take Care,” instead of a curatorial practice that prepares explanations in advance, it is rather “about following the life of an idea, in public, with others.”^[19]

Notions of care have become prevalent in recent discourse on curating. Often drawing on the word’s etymological roots (curare, meaning care/cure), the literature both critiques and seeks to find a place for such care and its implications for art in the world.^[20] Perhaps, most importantly, as the field explores the potentialities of such work, it is worthwhile stressing that caring practices do not mean some kind of benign paternalism, obligation, or a therapeutic fantasy of egalitarianism. But rather a reciprocity that, while implying caring mutuality, does not mean there is no dissensus or questions of unequal power relations. As observed by scholar Nel Noddings, such reciprocity is marked by a decentering of the authorial “I”—here we can infer the traditional roles of curator, artist, educator, or institution—and an opening up to receptive availability, the partial (taking sides), and the ethical (individual, place, community).^[21] An “opening up to” that requires not only an ethical but also a geographic shift in positioning; it is a work in-between, with, and beside. An entanglement. A praxis embodied in the original meaning of complicity in Latin, complicare, meaning to fold together.

What might such “foldings” mean for how we care in institutions? Can we imagine an institution where process, acts, and relationality are foregrounded over exhibiting function? And what might we learn, or rather unlearn, by inhabiting practices unmoored from their anchor in individualized artistic production and even from artmaking? In our exhaustion, as Fred Moten notes, to “acquire,” and the inevitable “choir” this sets in motion, might we rebel against the “Kantian distaste for unchecked generativity” and embrace proliferation, generative non-exceptionality, and some wild living?^[22] As Lepecki writes:

[…] the system of objects within the aesthetic regime of the arts remains entrapped, encased, imprisoned by, and subjected to the general system of colonialist subjectivization, of course, neoliberal style, that is, filled with little freedoms and exciting pornopharmacological fluxes, surprising rearrangements around sense and sense, but still living in the generalized field of meaning and rationality conditioning the conditions of liberal, colonial monohumanism.^[23]

Clark’s work presents us with an opportunity to explore such generativity. Reading her “system of objects” through a diasporic framework offers us a way to imagine possible afterlives for their wildness, no longer tethered to institutional traditions but at the forefront of reworking them.

Walking: Diasporic Beginnings

To stress being as verb rather than noun is, at bottom, to say that being is only ever to be found in its taking-place; it is to say that being is an incessant emergence.
Yve Lomax^[24]

In her exploration of the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, Tania Rivera evokes the image of the Möbius strip. The topological figure subverts binary oppositions, pointing to their contiguous nature, as we discover, by traversing the strip that its two sides are, in fact, one. Inside becomes outside and vice versa, suggesting a constant play of “reversal[s] of the self and the world.”^[25]

Inaugurating her concept of the artist as proposer, Clark’s Caminhando (Walking, 1963), deployed the seemingly double- yet single-sided surface of the Möbius strip to create a “new concrete space time,” inviting participants to cut lengthways along a paper version of the strip from the center, making ever thinner strips via their own choices of direction and width until it was no longer possible to cut.^[26] A revolution in the artist’s practice and a key artwork of the Brazilian avant-garde, Caminhando shifted the emphasis from art as object to action and experience. No longer concrete form, but rather, momentum, choice, and duration are the distinguishing features—the space/process/time it takes to cut along the strip.^[27] Instead of opposites there are rather foldings, inseparable from one another and the process itself, enacting, as Clark writes, an “interior itinerary outside of myself.”^[28] Art as action enables us to see ourselves in the doing—walking, thinking, cutting, making, being.

Just as for Rivera’s dialogical reversals of art and psychoanalysis and Clark’s increasingly therapeutic proposals, the Möbius strip is a provocative image/metaphor for an ecosystemic institutional practice of art, ethics, and education in the public sphere—a mode of curating that walks, thinks, and cuts amidst the experiential tensions of subverting dichotomies: inside and outside; theory and practice; art and education. Fields of knowledge fold into and out of each other. Curating here explores art’s capacity to act as an apparatus of ways of knowing and modes of being. A practice that invites us, as philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart argues, to “fold otherwise the forces of the outside,” enabling a strategic and political function that may “trigger generative subjective mutations and a redistribution of affects.”^[29] It is in the “plenitude” of praxis, as Paulo Freire notes, of walking, that we have the ability to affect and be affected simultaneously.^[30]

Research and praxis begin with movement. A walking that Afro-Brazilian poet and activist Nêgo Bispo describes, in relation to quilombola life and counter colonial struggles, as “beginning, middle, beginning.”^[31] Clark’s proposition offers us a paper Möbius strip, a scissors, and a transversal act of cutting, a beginning and middle as a dynamic event that subverts the separation of subject and object, artwork and process, artist and public. Anna Dezeuze has suggested that the piece exists “in a field at the cross-roads of sculpture, instruction, performance and participation.”^[32] Yet none of these nomenclatures capture the radical nature of Caminhando’s immanence as method, or rather counter-method, its simultaneous wild abandonment and recursive questioning of art’s institutional structures and givens. A counter-method of working within and against, inside and outside that shares much with contemporary critical praxis.^[33] While Clark’s first cut to the Möbius strip was made over half a century ago, its invitation to be made and remade continues to challenge. It can be done anywhere, by anyone. No skills are required just paper, glue, and scissors. The only meaning resides in the act of making it.

Although defined by cutting, the proposition is one of fusion. Rather than heroic avant-garde rupture, Caminhando is about opening up new relational paths and reworking notions of radicality to emphasize rupture and connection. Distinct from the performative cutting that emerged parallel to Caminhando in the 1960s, where attention is drawn to the body of the artist, the piece is rather an act of mindful suspension, deliberately destabilizing object-subject relations by drawing attention away from the enactor artist—as Lepecki notes, as an “exceptional object of praise”^[34]—to the act itself. Yet, ironically, a series of photos of Caminhando, depicting a woman cutting a Möbius strip, shown from her shoulders down and focusing only on her hands and torso, widely attributed as being of the artist and circulated internationally in catalogues and monographs, are not actually of Clark. Nor were they shot in 1963/64, dates associated with Caminhando, but rather in 1980. The hands are rather of Brazilian designer Vera Bernardes, who was working at the time on the first monograph of Clark. Beto Felicio shot the photographs. Clark herself oriented the photographer to frame the images in this way.^[35] So, curiously, the supposed archive of the act is, in fact, already an afterlife.

While Clark’s 1968 statement “We are the Proposers” maintained her artist-proposer role as “mold” to the participant “breath,” suggesting that even in the abandonment of art’s inside to the world outside, we inevitably recursively return, our complicit willingness to emphasize the cutter rather than the cutting, the relator rather than the relating, curtails the act’s radicality.^[36] Perhaps we are still struggling with what Catherine de Zegher termed as the “precarious feminine” and “the radical relational.” Discussing critically overlooked dimensions of works by Clark and fellow Latin American women artists that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, De Zegher points to art history’s limited frame of reference as it attempts to grapple with the work of relationality in its “shift away from the utter absorption of the modern individual towards this fluent space of relation where the being does not precede the becoming.”^[37]

In her recent installation for the 34th São Paulo Biennial “Cut/Relation,” an imagined encounter of Antonin Artaud and Édouard Glissant, guest curator Ana Kiffer offers us a provocative juxtaposition to engage with that “becoming.” Drawing on comparisons of poetics and archives—texts, writing styles, notebooks, letters, drawings—she points to how Artaud’s “cut” and Glissant’s “Relation” gradually spiral and intertwine. This enables us “to see that it is only in making cuts—placing opacity in opposition to transparency of the other and the world […]—that the adventure of the Relation is founded.”^[38] Caminhando is a spiral of cuts and relations. Its radicality, similar to Kiffer’s juxtaposition of Artaud and Glissant and Rivera’s inside/out potential of psychoanalysis to open up cracks of repression and fabulate other narratives, is to “see in-between.”^[39] Its opacity, to use Glissant’s term, that is, countering the reducibility of the singularities of cultural differences with acts of transparency, or its “wildness,” as Lepecki might say, is Caminhando’s incessant gerund, refusal of categories, and insistence on the other.

Returning to Caminhando as an image/metaphor for an ecosystemic curatorial practice of art, ethics, and education in the public sphere, how might we work with incessant gerunds, refusal of categories, and an insistence on the other? On what grounds—literal and ethical—do we cut and relate? Clark saw Caminhando as a harbinger for her later “tentative architectures” and collective propositions where it was not just about creating an experience for herself “but for others.”^[40] Dispersed, disseminated, dislocated, Caminhando might be read as a diasporic artwork par excellence. A ritual act to be made and remade by others. Yet each cut, each relation, is inaugural, each act is (re)enacted anew. Caminhando offers us a way of understanding the diasporic as constituent of cuts and relations or new fusions, not as repetitions, but as generative afterlives. Perhaps in opening up acts of cutting to otherness—other protagonists, other imaginaries, other grounds, and other ways of doing—we might conceive of and be able to be conceived by other relationalities.

The Listening Body: Rosácea as Mold and Breath

Every art object is relational. The effort of artists like Lygia Clark, in the face of the stridency of the contemporary world, was to silence objects in order to create an art like a shell: just listening.
Lula Wanderley^[41]

Curiously it is in Paris, escaping Brazil’s military dictatorship and immersed in the city’s artistic diaspora, where the implications of Clark’s Caminhando and its radical gerund would find its collective and therapeutic ground. While material and sensorial experimentation had been vital to the artist’s proposals since the mid 1960s, it was in weekly seminars (1972–1976) at the newly established fine arts faculty of the Sorbonne’s Centre Saint Charles, where Clark found she was able to create a “living culture” where the body, its perceptions, and lived experiences, played a central role. To achieve this, Clark argued, required a “deinstitutionalization,” one that meant the dismantling of traditional artist/spectator and teacher/student hierarchies.^[42] At the Sorbonne, characteristics of an artistic pedagogic context could fruitfully be drawn upon—an in-built community of learners, regularity of encounters, and openness to experimentation—to foster collective participation and the elaboration of experiences over time. Clark would enthusiastically write to fellow artist Hélio Oiticica that she had “found for the first time the conditions” where she could “communicate [her] work.” The listening body and its phantasmagoric life became increasingly her core interest. In communal dialogues post her proposals, that Clark called “vécu,” students would attempt to put into words what they had experienced, an activity that she saw as “the most important.” Here the artist found she could “elaborate herself through the elaboration of others.”^[43] A collective listening Clark described as “like analysis, without being psychoanalysis.”^[44] The possibilities of such “elaboration in exchange,” as Tania Rivera notes, in its potential to “weave fictions between patient and therapist,” or in this case student and teacher, affirms principles dear to Clark’s analyst Pierre Fédida (1972–1974).^[45] It is this commitment to “elaboration” and its various meanings of support, listening, evolution, experimentation, and fabulation, as much collective as individual, that were central to Clark’s “art as shell,” as Wanderley characterizes. An “affective space,” as Clark advanced, mobilized by a practice of singular repetitions vested in otherness, duration, relationality, material sensual experience, and deep listening.^[46] A clinical focus that distinguishes her work from other Brazilian artists of her generation such as Oiticica or Lygia Pape, who were similarly engaged in the radical artistic paradigm shifts of the time from object to experience.^[47] But it is perhaps precisely her facilitation of and interest in this affective therapeutic space that makes her work so indelibly vital for contemporary practices of curating inside/out, notions of cultural mediation, and working otherwise.

A closer reading of one of Clark’s propositions of the time period might offer the possibility to more readily understand that affectivity. In 1974, Clark ended her psychoanalysis with Fédida and began treatment following therapeutic and psychoanalytic techniques developed by Michel Sapir known as relaxation.^[48] Deploying verbal and tactile inductions, these techniques aimed to prompt the subject to listen to their own bodies and sensations as a means to connect with their past and to access the unconscious. In conjunction with this treatment, over the course of 1974/75, Clark developed a number of collective Relaxação (Relaxation) propositions.^[49] One in particular, Relaxação em forma rosácea (Rosacea-shaped Relaxation) invited students to lie down in a circle blindfolded with their feet touching in the center and their hands held in the form of a rosacea, as various objects and experiences were introduced. Clark recounted the proposition to the Brazilian journalist Celine Luz in 1975:

I put a small stone in each hand. Under each head and inside each shirt, a plastic bag full of air. The center of the rosacea is filled with plastic bags, which gives bare feet all the possibility to feel the texture. I massage each one’s head […] I breathe next to each ear. I bring seashells to each ear so they can hear the sound of the sea. And at that moment I open four faucets. And they hear that water gushing like the great first fountain. Everything in the greatest silence. I blow hot air on the uncovered parts of the bodies. I pass string along their half-covered bellies, to eroticize. Still lying down, unable to see, I pass string higher than them and delimit spaces […] With their eyes blindfolded, they begin to burst the other plastics. They destroy all the material. As they stand, they find the strings. They start to walk, guided by them. The encounter takes place, the encounters.^[50]

Philosopher José Gil describes the conscience of the body as the “inside/out of intentionality” both in its capacity to transform the vigilant consciousness of intentionality—a letting come to the surface—and as a “captive organ of the world’s finest vibrations.” As such, it is a conscious body.^[51] It is this consciousness or listening that Clark’s propositions facilitate; the body as a kind of erotic shell for its own sensual awareness. A mobilization of affects, stimulating contact with ourselves, the other, both human and non-human, that Rolnik describes as the “vibrating body.”^[52] An eroticism of opening up to sensuality, as Audre Lorde poignantly argues, that is not to be confused by trivial plasticized or pornographic sensations but rather as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”^[53] Experienced communally, this awareness, a simultaneously internal and external listening/feeling/vibrating creates the collective body. In their interpretation of the Relaxação em forma de rosácea proposition, Wanderley and therapist Gina Ferreira attribute this collective resonance to the rosacea form.

Fig. 3. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira, Rio de Janeiro, October 5, 2017. Photo: Denise Adams.

In Rosácea, the hands and feet, Wanderley suggests, give a contour to the group, a mandala form that encircles and delimits a field of protection. A geometry that in its formal structuring might be best described as spinal in that it enables the articulation of movement; supporting from the inside and scaffolding from the outside the body’s live stillness and collective resonance. This also allows the relational sensations of the objects as they are introduced to become more fluid. Sensations that may lead to unknown territories or open up unexpressed or unrecognized feelings. Clark’s notion of “maternagem,” as Ferreira notes, is also a vital affective conduit, a “mothering” presence akin to how the pioneering psychiatrist Nise da Silveira stressed the importance of the therapists or mediators who worked alongside patients as affective catalysts.^[54] In Rosácea, affect, form, and sensation enable the collective cosmic body to emerge.

Following her return to Brazil in the late 1970s, Clark would comment to Wanderley on her frustration in not being able to reach beyond a particular kind of participant with her experimental proposals.^[55] Yet she would also speak of this work as enabling non-conforming gender fluidity where homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual identities shifted and intermixed.^[56] The objects and rituals Clark used in Rosácea would become harbingers for her later Relational Objects and the one-on-one therapies of Estruturação do Self. For example, plastic bags not only filled with air but also with water rolled along or placed on participant bodies or cotton bags filled with sand and tiny balls of Styrofoam. As a plastic language informed by sensorial opposites—light/heavy; empty/full; air/water; silence/sound; rough/smooth; stationery/mobile—these objects offer a tentative architecture to foster sensorial experiences. Their simplicity and precarity act as vectors to catalyze a conscience of the body in relation to others, to objects, to itself. As Brett notes:

If you are directing attention towards life, you are going to get more of a sense of that life if the means of doing it are as economical as possible because it’s not drawing attention to itself, it’s simply launching you into the life reality.^[57]

Wanderley continues to affectively draw on that economy of means to ensure Clark’s hybrid art and clinical practices find diasporic afterlife in his work at EAT, reaching beyond a certain insider participant to a distinctly outsider other. Ferreira continues Clark’s legacy via a clinical practice offering the experience of Estruturação do self as therapy. Entrusted by Clark to interpret and continue her work, both have been key in facilitating understanding of the artist’s experimental propositions. They have on occasions interpreted Rosácea incorporating elements that Clark’s later deployed in Estructuração do self and have contributed to exhibitions of Clark’s work, nationally and internationally including the first retrospective exhibition organized by Fundación Tàpies in the late 1990s and the more recent Abandonment of Art at MoMA in 2014. It is to their interpretation of Rosácea that I now turn.

Inhabiting and Caring for an Act: Affective Historiographies

The opportunity I see for the artist today […] is in the broader social field, in the field of psychology, psychoanalysis, in the elaboration of people to live. […] In this way, I think the artist still has an important social function.
Lygia Clark^[58]

Inhabiting as method, my first surrender —what I myself felt and most heard as participant and facilitator with respect to Rosácea—was as part of the international encounter Care as Method #2, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2017.^[59] Exploring care as a thread that relates clinical, aesthetic, and ethical practices, the encounter was part of a series of initiatives that from 2015 to 2017 brought together various Brazilian and Scottish organizations, artists, therapists, and researchers working at the interfaces of art, health, and other forms of institutionality.^[60] For the encounter, Ferreira proposed Rosácea as an immersive experience for the organizers and visiting artists, led by the choreographer Ana Vitória Freire—who had previously assisted Ferreira in facilitating the proposal—and therapist Marcia Proença.^[61] Held in the mirror room at Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira, the reflective presence of the wood floor, the patter of feet working around us, laying on gym mats positioned in a circle, as our small group held hands, our toes touching, our eyes covered, escaping the heat, we surrendered to waves of energized care. I remember alternately experiencing lightening-like electricity in my hands, a rapid circulating current to which we were all connected and could possibly levitate, followed by a sudden profound weightiness, as if my hands were bricks that the floor could not contain.

Fig. 4. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira, Rio de Janeiro, October 5, 2017. Photo: Denise Adams.

The second time experiencing Rosácea was as Ferreira’s assistant, together with a group of graduate students from the Postgraduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts at Federal Fluminense University in 2019.^[62] Again in a mirrored room with a wood floor, now at the dancer Angel Vianna’s school. Here, as giver rather than receiver, the experience was an altogether gymnastic one, massaging, bending, moving, holding, hovering, touching…

A third experience was with a group that included people with cognitive and physical disabilities at the contemporary art center Tramway in Glasgow in 2019, organized by the Scottish arts organization Artlink.^[63] Committed to artist-led research within communities of care, Artlink has pioneered forms of encounter aimed at constructing communicative bridges between those with profound developmental disabilities (or rather other abilities) to the wider world. Laura Spring and Claire Barclay, two Artlink artists who had traveled to Rio in 2017 for Care as Method #2 had been deeply impacted by their experience, particularly, as Barclay notes, with the emphasis on “touch within care contexts in Brazil.”^[64] This prompted Alison Stirling, Artlink artistic director, to explore the possibility of a version that might draw on the proposal’s non-verbal modes of communication to create a kind of commons across differences.

With Ferreira, Wanderley, and Freire being unable to travel for the proposed dates, I acted as a facilitator together with Dasha Lavrennikov, a Russian choreographer based in Barcelona who had also participated in the version of Rosácea led by Ferreira at Angel Vianna’s school.^[65] I went as a learner/researcher/enactor, vested in the possibilities of what Lepecki has called “re-enacting as an affective mode of historicity.”^[66] The challenge of engaging both a general public and those with special needs meant a significant amount of pre-preparation with regards to the Relational Objects, guided by Ferreira as to Clark’s specifications and her own and Artlink artists with respect to how the objects might be perceived by and adapted for those who require other ways of relating. How to facilitate, ready for, and ritualize many kinds of “surrender”? For artists, general public, or the neurodiverse? Would a collective experience be possible?

We first did a run through with Artlink artists and organizers James McLardy, Lauren Gault, Francesca Nobilucci, and Kevin McPhee, along with Alison Stirling and producer Samara Leibner. This was to ensure that the artists who work with people with cognitive disabilities might fully experience Rosácea for themselves as well as to think through adaptations/issues. How might people react? The Relational Objects offered a provisional architecture to be in solidarity with, to slow down, engage with uncertainty, and tentatively feel out relationality for others. Would the weight of the sandbags scare them? What about eye coverings and lying down? As we spoke, we found ourselves more and more drawn to a discussion of the very plastic nature of the objects as a language—the glob, glob, glob of the rolling bag of water or the crunching sound of tiny Styrofoam balls.

Fig. 5. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Jessica Gogan and Dasha Lavrennikov with Artlink, Scotland, Tramway, Glasgow, October 7, 2019. Photo: Trevor Cromie.

“I felt wrapped,” one participant shared in the first session with general public, caregivers, and artists. In a kind of Winnicottian holding^[67]—a form of conceiving clinical therapy as a space/time for experiencing and inhabiting the self, less immediately concerned with explanations or interpretations—we silently held, moved, touched, felt. The final session including four people with disabilities (two in wheelchairs) and their caregivers was more complex and demanding. Yet all the while there was a strangely beautiful silence of difference, aloneness, and togetherness. One caregiver trying to engage in the proposal while being mindful of her charge, laid down with her eyes half-closed, gently rubbing the feet of the person in her care. Alison lay down with her younger sister—who has complex developmental disabilities—holding her as the objects were introduced in a moving embrace.

Fig. 6. Rosácea proposition originally realized by Lygia Clark in 1974/75, interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Jessica Gogan and Dasha Lavrennikov with Artlink, Scotland, Tramway, Glasgow, October 7, 2019. Photo: Trevor Cromie.

Another poignant moment was with D. Positioned between her caregiver and Lauren (one of the Artlink artists), she held their hands but could not lie still; astounded, they simply lay there. Refusing the eye-covering, she needed to watch my every move. To reassure her, I hoped, I introduced each Relational Object first on her caregiver, then on Lauren and then on her, moving very gently. Her head moved to and fro, looking at me, anxiously, yet also curiously enjoying it all—it seemed—stroking the hands of her caregiver and Lauren affectionately each time some object was introduced. As James McLardy, one of the Artlink artists who also participated in and supported the workshops, noted in reflections on the experience: “People that are cared for need room to respond, to give back.”^[68]

Throughout, the presence of the objects as a sentient language was striking. They directed a kind of choreography of relational gerunds—rolling, placing, bending, hovering, positioning, caring, touching, caressing, sensing—where the work, as Clark observed, is larger than oneself, bestowing a phenomenological sensibility that solely pertains to the situation.^[69] Their very plastic magic is another kind of corporal language, inside/out of intentionality, as Gil suggested of the conscience of the body. This created a rare horizontality. From radically different vantage points of unknowing, whether participant or facilitator, we collectively “held” a conviction in, an openness to, and caring for the objects’ relational possibilities. We all tentatively embraced our listening bodies. A shared uncertainty. Collective resonance. A cosmic body, a commons; all the while a motley crew, as if thrown together by a shipwreck in a moment of respite on a makeshift raft, floating, perceiving, sensing together.

Diasporic Open Roots: Caring for the Unarchivable

Boring vitrines, made to be passed by without a glance, or smashed with a hammer.
André Lepecki[70]

“What’s the magic of the original, I don’t see any,” Lia Rodrigues comments to Rolnik.^[71] The choreographer re-enacted ten of Clark’s proposals mostly from the Sorbonne in 1970s for an exhibition at Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro in 1998. In refusing the market fetishes and institutional norms that tend to suffocate and control the afterlives of objects/artists/acts, Rodrigues suggests that in caring for an act we must prioritize other questions and sensibilities. As Nora Sternfeld argues, in the struggles of fugitivity and endurance, caring for an act means, “actualizing the potential of the unarchivable.”^[72] This suggests that to inhabit Clark’s legacy we must consider that “what was done—the know-what—coexists with its mode of doing, how it was done—the know-how.”^[73] From the perspective of thinking about lines of decolonial flight, to privilege the “how” is an aesthetical-political position.^[74]

Through EAT’s work, Wanderley dislocated the know-how of Clark’s artistic therapeutic practice, mostly experienced by a white middle-class generation dealing with their existential conflicts during the military dictatorship, to the realities of the public health system and the life of a psychiatric hospital that he calls “another Rio” in the city’s peripheries.^[75] Such a dislocation not only deploys the “how” of the Relational Objects but also gives them new life via a reterritorialization that incorporates one body of languages and practices into another. Similarly, Lepecki argues, with respect to re-enactment and what he calls the “will to archive”—meaning “a capacity to identify in a past work creative fields that are still not exhausted of impalpable possibilities”—to re-enact (and we may imply here also to care for an act) is to “find, bring to the surface, and produce difference.”^[76]

Yet there are connotations to shake off. Re-enactment as a term still resonates with dubious repetition or derivative creativity. That “Kantian distaste for unchecked generativity,” as Moten notes. What Lepecki and Rodrigues point toward, as do the cuts/relations of Caminhando and the re-enacted choreographies of Rosácea, is that it is in acts of cutting and relating, especially the inhabiting of their speculative unfoldings, that allow us a kind of seeing in-between, of affinities and difference. Revisiting and re-enacting our understanding of the transgressive agency of the object-event of Clark’s work offers a potent exchange between different epochs, contexts, possibilities, and failures. A kind of “inhabiting” that might produce other histories and genealogies. Could we imagine re-enactments and/or caring for acts as part of an institutionality otherwise? What new understandings of the common might they teach us, especially when we re-enact and care collectively? And how might we create bridges between radicalities of distinct moments and times? Especially when, in Brazil, for example, young artists are more likely to draw on references such as indigenous writer and activist Ailton Krenak or Afro-Brazilian philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva, pointing to an elite art world overly informed by European, white male and cis gender criticism as well as to a certain uncontested reverence that Clark and Oiticica hold in the Brazilian art historical canon.

Whether engaging with the potential of re-enactment or in assuming the inside/out of working otherwise—or Möbiusly, to recall Caminhando—our challenge is to lead with the complexities of gestures that in being immanent for one may be oppressive for another. Working with/through/against affinities and difference is an attempt to inhabit our paradoxes and crises without fleeing them. Curating inside/out is not so much a deconstruction in a clever exposure of the internal workings of language and systems but a movement that works through and with its contradictions. Clark’s example here is richly resonant; as Luis Pérez-Oramas suggests, the artist, “in abandoning art in her artwork, allowed art to exist as a negative space within itself—that her work consisted in engineering art’s absence within art.”^[77] An artistic clinical practice inspired in Clark’s work then might comprise singular repetitions that (re)abandon art; cut ties with the confines of the institutional inside, propose other forms of relationality with the world outside, and reconfigure the artist/public relation inside/out. It is a kind of holding: an entanglement of “difference without separability,” to use Ferreira da Silva’s coinage, that seeks to bring into play different logics of care.^[78] A diasporic framework may offer us a way to read, or rather simultaneously ground and unground such entanglements. Like diasporic open roots, both tied down and free, their struggles and possibilities operate somewhere in between monohumanism and unchecked generativity. Re-enactments of affinities and differences enable us to bring into play difference without separability. Care for acts in their unarchivability leave them both vulnerable and wild, easily lost to market fetish, critical disdain, or institutional hubris, but fully alive in their diasporic wildness as Clark’s “singular state of art without art.”^[79]

About the Author

Jessica Gogan is an art historian, curator and educator based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is director of the non-profit Instituto MESA and co-editor of the online bilingual platform Revista MESA. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh, USA and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and collaborating professor in the Postgraduate Program of Studies in Contemporary Arts at the Federal Fluminense University, Brazil. Her research interests focus on the intersections of artistic, pedagogic, and clinical practices and collaborative and collective modes of working and curating.

[1] Lygia Clark, “Caminhando” (1964), in Lygia Clark, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Mário Pedrosa (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, Arte, Brasileira Contemporânea,1980), 25–26, 26. The monograph in its entirety can be accessed via the Lygia Clark Association’s recently launched Lygia Clark portal.

[2] Amelia Jones, “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History,” in Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, eds. Gundhild Borggreen and Rune Gade (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 53–72, 54.

[3] In his text “Crelazer” (Creleisure), a neologism of the Portuguese creer (to believe), criar (to create) and lazer (leisure), Hélio Oiticica described his participartory Parangolés—capes, standards, and dancers from the Mangueira Samba school—as a discovery of “the raiz aberta” (open root), a “natural evolution” of what the artist called “the Brazil-root-project,” that is, “the universal fecundation of the Brazil-root: the untransferable cultural possibilities express themselves through purely universal structures.” Hélio Oiticica. “Crelazer,” in Hélio Oiticica, ed. Guy Brett et al. (Rio de Janeiro: Projeto Hélio Oiticica; 1996), 132–133/136–138, 137.

[4] The concept/practice of curating inside/out (curadoria ao avesso in Portuguese) is currently part of my postdoctoral research with psychoanalyst Tania Rivera on conceptions of care in contemporaneity in the Postgraduate Program of Studies in Contemporary Arts at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Avesso means “inside/out” and is a core concept/leitmotif in her writing and thought as well as that of philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart.

[5] Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life (Um sopra da vida) trans. Johnny Lorenz (London/New York: Penguin, 2014), 71.

[6] Suely Rolnik, Arquivo para um obra-acontecimento (São Paulo: SESC, 2011). The publication and box set of twenty video interviews organized by Suely Rolnik was selected from over fifty interviews she conducted between 2004 and 2006, aimed at activating the body memory of Lygia Clark and the cultural context of her art production. Recorded in Brazil, France, and the United States, the videos include statements by Caetano Veloso, Ferreira Gullar, Guy Brett, and Paulo Herkenhoff, among others. The project was supported by a partnership between SESC, São Paulo, and Cinemateca Brasileira. A selection of this material may be accessed on the Cinemateca Brasileira database, accessed June 2022.

[7] Macumbeira is a generic name for a practitioner of “macumba” (macumbeiro / male; macumbeira / female), comprising syncretic rituals informed by traditions of Afro-Brazilian religions, Catholicism, and Amerindian cults.

[8] Rolnik, Arquivo para um obra-acontecimento, 18.

[9] Ibid., 49.

[10] Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2020), 75.

[11] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[12] Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – an embodied criticality,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2008, accessed June 2022.

[13] Lygia Clark in Gina Ferreira, ed., “Lygia Clark: Memória do corpo: Glossário de casos clínicos” (unpublished manuscript), 121.

[14] The hospital was renamed after the psychiatrist Nise da Silveira (1905–1999), who pioneered art workshops with schizophrenic patients in the late 1940s together with the artist Almir Mavignier and in turn established the Museum of the Images of the Unconscious at the hospital in 1952.

[15] Lula Wanderley, “Sensibility as an Instrument of Work: Interview by Jessica Gogan,” Revista Mesa, no. 5, “Care as Method,” (2018), accessed June 2022.

[16] Lula Wanderley, O dragão pousou no espaço: Arte contemporânea, sofrimento psíquico e o Objeto Relacional de Lygia Clark (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002).

[17] André Lepecki, “Decolonizing the Curatorial,” Theater 47, no. 1 (2017): 100-115, 104.

[18] Eleonora Fabião, “The Making of a Body: Lygia Clark’s Anthropophagic Slobber,” in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988, eds. Cornelia H. Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas (New York: MoMA, 2014), 294–299, 296.

[19] Anthony Huberman, “Take Care,” in Circular Facts, eds. Mai Abu ElDahab, Binna Choi, Emily Pethick (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 11–17, 12.

[20] The growing literature might include such examples over the past decade as: Andrea Phillips and Markus Miessen, eds., Actors, Agents and Attendants. Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health (Amsterdam/Berlin: SKOR Foundation for Art and Public Domain/Sternberg Press, 2011); and Janna Graham, ed., Art+Care: A Future (London: Serpentine Gallery/Koenig, 2013). More recent critical projects and writing might include Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism (2021), organized by the Glasgow Women’s Library and curated by academics across Scotland: Kristen Lloyd, Caroline Gausden, Natália Raha, and Catherine Spence. Other examples might also include writing and initiatives that bring together questions and themes of public art, social practice, and institutional change such as Toward The Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, edited by Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes (Utrecht/Cambridge, MA/London: BAK and MIT, 2021).

[21] Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2013), 16.

[22] Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance,” Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance, talks and conversations curated and convened by Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, September 25–27, 2015, Crossing the Line festival, New York, accessed June 2022″.

[23] Lepecki, “Decolonizing the Curatorial,” 107.

[24] Yve Lomax, Passionate Being: Language, Singularity, Perseverance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 15.

[25] Tania Rivera, O Avesso do Imaginário: Arte Contemporânea e Psicanálise (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013), 9.

[26] Lygia Clark, “Caminhando” (1964), in Livro-obra (1983). Livro-obra (Book-work) is an artist book first organized by Clark in 1964 highlighting her key artistic discoveries. The book was revised and edited by Luciano Figueiredo and Ana Maria Silva de Araújo Duarte five years after the artist’s death in 1988 as a special edition of twenty-four. Accessed June 2022.

[27] Clark’s Caminhando is also significant in its radical reworking of the predetermined steel folds of Max Bill’s well-known sculpture of the Möbius strip, Tripartite Unity (1948/49), awarded at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951.

[28] Lygia Clark, “A propósito da magia do objeto” (1965), in Livro-obra (1983).

[29] Peter Pál Pelbart, Ao avesso do nilismo/Nihilsim Inside/Out (São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2013), 174.

[30] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th ed. (first published 1970), trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York/London: Continuum, 2007), 131.

[31] Quilombo settlements were first established by escaped slaves. As territories and communities of practice inheriting not only Afro-Brazilian but also indigenous traditions, they continue this spirit of resistance. Poet, teacher, and activist Nêgo Bispo is a key quilombola voice. Nêgo Bispo, “Das confluências, cosmologias e contra-colonizações: Uma entrevista com Nêgo Bispo,” Greice Martins et al., EntreRios. Revista do PPGCANT-UFPI, Teresina 2, no.1 (2019): 4.

[32]Anna Dezeuze, “How to Live Precariously: Lygia Clark’s Caminhando and Tropicalism in 1960s Brazil,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2013): 226–247, 230.

[33] Drawing on the lessons of institutional critique and anti/counter-colonial discourse, a new generation of practitioners seem to position themselves both within and outside of institutions, or rather adopt micro-modalities of countering within the larger institution of art in what scholar Gerald Raunig has described as “instituent practices.” See Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, eds., Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: MayFlyBooks, 2009).

[34] Lepecki, “Decolonizing the Curatorial,” 113.

[35] My recent research on Clark uncovered this history. The designer Vera Bernardes was working in the editorial division of Funarte (Brazil’s national foundation for the arts) on a series of publications known as the ABC (Brazilian Contemporary Art) collection published between 1978 and 1984, comprising ten monographs of Brazilian contemporary artists including Clark, Artur Barrio, Lygia Pape, and António Manuel, among others. For more information on this history, see my recently published essay (in Portuguese) “Ensaios por uma curadoria ao avesso: Caminhando com Lygia Clark,” in Revista Modos 6, no. 3 (2022). The monograph published by Funarte on Lygia Clark can be accessed via the recently launched Lygia Clark portal.

[36] Lygia Clark, “Nós somos os propositores…” (1968), Lygia Clark (Funarte), 31.

[37] Catherine de Zegher, “The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, issue 4, (2002), accessed October 2022, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-inside-is-the-outside-the-relational-as-the-feminine-space-of-the-radical/

[38] Ana Kiffer, “Cut/Relation: Antonin Artaud and Édouard Glissant,” in 34th Bienal de São Paulo: Though It’s Dark, I Still Sing, ed. Elvira Dyangani Ose (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2021), 252–257, 256, accessed June 2022, https://issuu.com/bienal/docs/34bsp_catalogo-en-web.

[39] Tania Rivera, “A Tela e a Outra Cena Ou como Piscar nas Sessões Virtuais de Análise,” Psicanalistas pela democracia, March 28, 2020, accessed June 2022.

[40] Clark, Lygia Clark (Funarte), 26.

[41] Lula Wanderley, No silêncio que as palavras guardam: O sofrimento psíquico, o Objeto Relacional de Lygia Clark e as paixões do corpo (São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2020), 36, free translation.

[42] Lygia Clark in Lygia Clark, Retrospective (Barcelona: Fundación Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 301, accessed June 2022.

[43] Letter to Hélio Oiticica in Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia Clark: Hélio Oiticica: Cartas 1964–1974 (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 1996), 223.

[44] Luciano Figueiredo and Matinas Suzuki Jr., interview with Lygia Clark in Lygia Clark: 100 Anos, ed. Max Perlingeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Pinakotheke, 2021), 63–81, 78.

[45] Tania Rivera, “Para expelir o outro (ou a contra-antropofagia sexual de Lygia Clark),” Psicanálise Antropofágica (identidade, gênero, arte) (Porto Alegre: Artes & Ecos, 2020), 131–156, 137, italics Rivera.

[46] Lygia Clark, letter of August 22, 1971, in Lygia Clark (Fundación Tàpies), 282.

[47] While Pape and Oiticica certainly shared Clark’s interest in the sensual present and participatory proposals, Clark’s work might be more fruitfully situated within critiques and experiments of improvisation in theater and dance and of art and psychiatry emerging in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and indeed compared and contrasted with similar experimental pedagogies of the time period. For example, Allan Kaprow’s use of happening scores as a framework for learning events with Berkley Public Schools in 1968/69 in collaboration with the educator Herbert Kohl, or later at Cal Arts and University of San Diego, or Anna Bella Geiger’s courses at Museum of Modern Art (MAM) Rio de Janeiro in 1969–1973 and her interest in creating experimental communities with her students. Felix Guattari’s provocative question of “How do you make a class operate like a work of art?” (Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis [Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995], 133) resonates here, as does its Möbius reversal offered by Henry A. Giroux in “How do you bring a work of art to life as if it were a classroom”? (The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism [Routledge, 2018], 248). The mixing, merging, and redeployment of practices across boundaries and disciplines, the experimental nature of these pedagogies, and the striving for collectivity make this time period so rich in revisiting retroprospectively to approach current challenges of working otherwise.

[48] Clark worked with Monique Karlicow, a proponent of the Sapir method, and comments that the induction methods became more useful than psychoanalysis. She also notes that Ines Besuches, who treated her and finally “pulled me out of the archaic,” inspired her to use relaxation methods in a therapeutic capacity. Gina Ferreira, ed., “Lygia Clark: Memória do corpo,” 8.

[49] Photos can be accessed on the Lygia Clark Association portal. The Relaxação propositions explore collective participatory experiences and are part of a phase of the artist’s work known as Corpo coletivo (Collective Body) or Fantasmática do corpo (Fantasmatics of the Body) 1972-1975. The phase is deeply informed by experimentations from the mid 1960s onwards centering on objects as catalysts for participatory propositions (Nostalgia do Corpo – Nostalgia of the Body) and subsequently on the poetic possibilities of the body itself as the object of participant/spectator sensations (O corpo é a casa – The Body is the House).

[50] Lygia Clark in Celine Luz, “Lygia Clark na Sorbonne: Corpo-à-corpo no desbloqueio para a vivência,” Vidas das artes 1, no. 3 (August 1975): 64, accessed June 2022.

[51] José Gil, “Abrir o corpo,” in Corpo, arte e clínica, eds. Tania Mara Galli Fonses and Selda Engleman (Porto Alegre: UGRGS, 2004), 13–28, 14.

[52] Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: the Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, eds. Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 55–108.

[53] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978, in Audre Lorde. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series/Apple Books, EPUB, 2012), 110.

[54] Author’s interview with Lula Wanderley and Gina Ferreira, Rio de Janeiro, June 18, 2022.

[55] Comment made by Lula Wanderley, cited in Cornelia H. Butler, “Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time,” The Abandonment of Art, 12–29, 26.

[56] Luciano Figueiredo and Matinas Suzuki Jr., Lygia Clark: 100 Anos, 63–81, 78.

[57] Guy Brett in Rolnik, Arquivo para uma obra-acontecimento.

[58] Lygia Clark, “A coragem e a magia de ser contemporânea,” Correio da Manhã, Rio de Janeiro, November 10, 1971, accessed June 2022.

[59] Organized by myself and researcher/curator Izabela Pucu together with Alison Stirling and Kate Grey, director/curators of Artlink and Collective, art organizations in Scotland, the encounter featured study groups, roundtables, lunches, institutional visits, and a final musical and poetic sarau held at Instituto Municipal Nise da Silvera in collaboration with EAT and Loucura Suburbana (Suburban Madness), a “bloco” festive parade held at Carnival, organized together with patients and health care staff.

[60] For more information on the Care as Method encounter and Art_Care Project, see Jessica Gogan, Kate Gray, Izabela Pucu, Alison Stirling, “Editorial,” Revista MESA, no. 5, “Care as Method” (2018), accessed June 2022.

[61] Gina Ferreira and Ana Vitória, “Rosácea in the Care as Method Encounter,” Revista MESA no. 5, “Care as Method” (2018), accessed June 2022. Participants included: artists Claire Barclay, James Bell, Wendy Jacob, Shona Macnaughton, Cristina Ribas, and Laura Spring, myself and Izabela Pucu as organizers, and student assistant Deborah Moraes. Artist and photographer Denise Adams registered the experience.

[62] This experience of Rosácea was part of the course “Clínica e cuidado na arte contemporânea” offered in the first semester of 2019, administered by myself and Tania Rivera. Researcher Beatriz Regueira Pons and myself assisted Ferreira. In addition to the students, participants included choreographer Dasha Lavrennikov and Rivera.

[63] Held as part of the program Altered States and Human Threads in conjunction with an exhibition of Nick Cave’s sensorial immersive installation Until (August 3–November 24, 2019) and as part of the planning for the large-scale multisensory exhibition Human Threads, curated by Artlink and presented at Tramway in the summer of 2022 (May 11–August 28, 2022), accessed June 2022.

[64] Claire Barclay, reflecting on Rosácea, email communication with the author, April 18, 2020.

[65] Dasha Lavrennikov completed her PhD in Rio de Janeiro, “Corpos sensíveis. Campos de presenças em movimento: Laboratórios de dança e práticas coletivas” (Sensible Bodies. Fields of Presence in Movement: Laboratories of Dance and Collective Practices), exploring sensibility, body, and collectivity where she drew extensively on Clark’s work. At the Rosácea session at Angel Vianna’s school led by Ferreira, she met Beatriz Regueira Pons, a Spanish researcher who had been interviewing Ferreira at the time and who, together with myself, helped facilitated the Rosácea experience. They subsequently developed and continue to explore proposals drawing their experience with Rosácea. A diasporic archive of the future in continuum.

[66] Andre Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 28–48, 35, accessed June 2022.

[67] Donald W. Winnicott, Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (New York: Grove Press, 1994).

[68] James McLardy, “A sweetness,” email communication, February 21, 2020.

[69] In her interview with Celina Luz in 1975 Clark reflects that “my work is much more intelligent than I am. When I work, I am much more than myself” (author translation). Lygia Clark in Celina Luz, Vidas das Artes, 63.

[70] Lepecki, “Decolonizing the curatorial,” 2017, 104.

[71] Lia Rodrigues in Rolnik, Arquivo para uma obra acontecimento.

[72] Adrian Heathfield and Nora Sternfeld, “Fugitivity and Endurance (What is the Time of Spectral Infrastructure?),” seminar, As for Protocols_ To Hold Things Together, May 20–21, 2021, Vera List Center, New York, accessed June 2022.

[73] Danichi Mizoguchi and Eduardo Passos, Transversais da Subjectividade: Arte, Clínica e Política (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2021), 39.

[74] In her rich analysis of Hélio Oiticica’s work, art historian Irene Small similarly grounds her reflections on “the work’s capacity to act as an epistemological device, that is, a material embodied model of emergent knowledge.” Irene V. Small, Hélio Oticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 7.

[75] Lula Wanderley, “Pelas amplas janelas do MAM,” Lygia Clark: 100 anos,181–201, 188.

[76] Lepecki, “The Body as Archive,” 30, 46.

[77] Luís Pérez-Oramas, “Lygia Clark: If You Hold A Stone,” Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 31–49, 31.

[78] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Sobre diferença sem separabilidade,” in 32º Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza viva, eds. Jochim Volz and Julia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57–65.

[79] Lygia Clark, “A próposito da magia do objeto” (1965), in Livro-Obra (1983).