At some point before me - the misty inscription of the transmission

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I want you to take care of what's mine,

what is mine and not me,

because I don't love myself (personally),

I love what is mine

(and therefore it can also be the other person's).

Marina Tsetáieva) 

 

​To go through Del Pílar Sallum's work is to revisit the question of memory and invention, based on an artistic construction that seeks to present itself beyond mere representation. “At some point before me” is the focal point of his journey.

 

In the book, as a poetic and dreamlike language, memory appears through interventions in family photos, in the manner proposed by psychoanalysis: as a set of traces that constitute the unconscious. Both the photography and the written interventions are ways of dealing with what marks us, a way of putting on stage - through silence and noise, absence and presence - the traces left on us. His work is summarized as a path from the self to the other. In the contagion with images from the past, family photographs and inherited objects, the artist dismantles, remakes and, in recreating, redesigns something like a present addressed to the world.

 

According to Jacques Lacan, by being inserted into the symbolic order that exists even before birth, the subject occupies a place in the system of relationships. Del Pílar strains this affective place with short poems filled with a mysterious pulsation that runs through the book, and also with blank pages that announce a suspension and an invention that is always in the process of being born, pointing to a fine relationship between the subject and the unconscious. In this area, an invention pulses in which, by revisiting photographs of ancestors and her history, the artist comes into contact with her marks and emerges divided and desirous. The blank spaces evoke moments when we return our gaze to what happened, in a reflective vacuum or silent suspension. Thus, the book does not end with her personal story.

 

Between photographs, synthetic and acute writing and pages to fill, the artist reveals herself. In the midst of veils and enigmas, blurs and mists, dislodged and homeless from ideas of fixed and watertight identity, affected by things to the point of also touching them and keeping an intimate vibration from them, Del Pílar writes and creates. From a limit-experience, she radically questions the tremor of a territory in which the hidden and the unspeakable must emerge with the image and burst it from the inside, providing an apparition, in a flow that wanders freely and tries to find an anchor point in indeterminacy. Here the personal story is also that of all humanity.

 

In blank pages and voids interspersed with presences, in photographs with interventions and exact words, the artist's gaze looks at the reverse side of things and calls us to give stories other meanings. From a biographical act, an intimacy is constructed and revealed that does not open up what is singular and non-transferable, nor is it reduced to “oneself”, opening up to pure difference and the presence of otherness.

 

Del Pílar is the daughter of Italians who, after the Second World War, passed through Spain and immigrated to Brazil. Conceived in Europe and born Brazilian - an artist among many worlds - she tells the story of her parents and reveals to us a zone of opacity beyond mere reporting or representation. Her work sustains the territory of the intimate as an ethic, which does not obliterate what is outside the field. In narrating herself and presenting herself through her story, what emerges is the “I” as an absence and also a kind of erosion of the self. That's why she stains and tarnishes ready-made images, inserting into them - through blurring, erasing, veiling, overlapping, collaging - tremors and vacillations that, from a new point, retell narratives.

 

The “I” is shattered right from the title of the book, from “some moment before me”, an instant that is located in an opaque zone of memory, in photographs that present something hazy: her mother at the stove, her father's blurred face, part of her grandmother's face, a parachute flight, a shoe. The logic of detail, amazement and perplexity cross temporal and spatial dimensions, through interventions that cause the official narrative of the photographs to falter.

 

The artist's maternal grandmother, Linda Togna Berardi, was a painter. Much of her ink strokes converse with her grandmother's canvases in a subterranean and poetic dialog. The artist has always used procedures such as veiling and has never fully revealed herself, and her words touch on the mystery she has always groped for - “fate changes the colors of the past” or “music runs through the guarded space” - phrase-poems that cradle her dreams and are, at the same time, wound and suture, perforation and healing.

 

From the drama of lace - through wefts, warps, weaves, veils and words - a world is revealed in the subversion of the gesture of an artist who transfigures images, maps and cartographies, recreating in the hubbub of time the dimension of an inheritance that occurs through sensitive transmission, as in Goethe's quote, recalled by Freud: “What was your parents', inherit it, but make it your own”.

 

Everything is in place, including the mystery: cloud, encounter, silence, blank page, space for the impossible. If “the mother's house welcomes torn memories” - and here we invoke Wally Salomão, for whom memory is an island of editing - we can feel the enigma of a life between guarded words and intimate secrets, in the reverberation of presences and absences.

 

In the image of the grandmother with her mother's smile, the boundaries are blurred: memory and oblivion, singular appearance as a mark of a constitutive unfinishedness or that which exceeds signification and, precisely for this reason, can be a power to rethink worlds. The artist's gesture of intervening in their own history creates textures and thicknesses, gaps and cracks that reveal other stories and possibilities, so that subjects can take ownership of the meaning of their own existences.

 

From the strangeness that art sustains, we can create a moving place of experience: a way of writing extimacy - a Lacanian idea, which says the point from which the most unique appears outside - an experience that takes place first in the survival of images and words, and then in the gesture of artistic invention, complicity between testimony and fiction of the self: subtle vibration, oscillation of life by a thread, inscription of an existence in the world.

 

“At some point before me” enunciates an afterward that seems to affirm that memoryhas a structure in which past, present and future, amalgamated, extend one over the other, forming aeach other, forming a fabric that definitively breaks with the idea of the linearity of time. Aweave between image and word that is revealed here is made up of traces and memorial marks, and also thalso by the transmission that borders on the unspeakable and yet generously gives itself as theand beauty of a life, with the dimension of inner experience thus revealed by Georges Bataille: “Unfinishedness, woundedness, misery that invokes the unknown that we are to ourselves: infinitely fragile. infinitely fragile, trembling and aware of this fragility.”

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Bianca Coutinho Dias 

2023