Auerbach, Tauba | This is a Lie | 2007

One of the most central guiding axes in the development of the Teixeira de Freitas Collection was the idea of Architecture. Thus, many pieces in the collection are related to projects, techniques, and materials used in the process of raising buildings, as well as works conceptually linked to ideas of construction and deconstruction.

The title of this third section, gathers the words “ruin” and “construction” in the same expression. Here, we gather artworks that, dealing with fragments of the world, become doubly dialogical images, by offering powerful intercessions between what ‘has been’ and the ‘not yet’. This interposition defies the very linear idea of time and the concepts of progress and success, by making living traces of the past and unfinished promises of the future coincide in the same body.

Facing the artworks in ruinconstruction, we are confronted with the essentially disharmonic coexistence of multiple temporalities: personal, historical, material (organic/inorganic), and even geological and cosmological.

In various genealogies of critical theory and of colonialism or decolonial studies, the idea of ruin is fundamental. For some, ruin can be an allegory of thought itself. Others, look beyond symbolic and conceptual processes, and reinforce the sensual essence of ruins by offering us a material co-presence, with the experiences of ephemerality and immortality. Ruins could symbolize the persistence of what is understood as a “thing”, as matter without human life. But, as ruins refuse death, they are alive to affect and be. Here, the transforming potential of the encounter with ruins is explored, in the direction of opening paths to build new ways of living that could overcome historical traumas.

Vieira, Ana | Sem título | 1973