DISEMBODIED — Filipa Loureiro, 2022

Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) has pursued a unique and reflective career, in which she had explored the politics of the body, promoting and considering the body’s participation as a generative methodology and an axis for conceptual formulations. Her artistic practice involves a strong material component. Primarily working in the fields of sculpture, drawing and performance, she takes advantage of the breadth and permeability offered by these disciplines.

Her use of performance becomes a vital means of production, composition or even staging – in a process in which the body asserts itself as an agent that is almost always indispensable – imprinting its gestures and transits upon itself. Placing special attention on the economy of presence, effort and action, Vera Mota proposes successive exercises to reposition the body within her work, sometimes subjecting it to processes of almost complete erosion of its characteristics, in which she foregoes its material evidence, but nonetheless implicates it. Assuming sculptural animism and claiming other perspectives of the body and materiality, Vera Mota re-evaluates different modes of representation, proposing strategies and procedures for disqualification, the transfer or transfiguration of forms, status or functions, between bodies, or their constituent parts.

Over recent years, her strategies of scrutiny and politicisation of the body have undergone a gradual transformation within her artistic practice. The body has progressively assumed different roles and reconfigured itself. It has evolved from the participating, working body, invested in the programmed actions of her performances, to the dismemberment and synthesis of its constituent parts. The body now appears as something that is crystallised in anthropomorphic, mineralised and metallized representations, in sculptures that foster exchanges between biological and geological, organic and inorganic bodies. The exhibitions Levar a cabeça aos pés (2018) and Ventriloquism (2021) invoke these processes of inversion or transference, which the artist continues herein.

DISEMBODIED – the artist’s first exhibition in a museum context – proposes a permanent and tense dialogue between drawing and sculpture, in which she presents a set of new works conceived specifically to this moment. In this context, drawing is an indication of a clear and restrained exercise of the body. The same gesture is repeated at regular intervals with an assumed cadence and rhythm, in an almost ritual or choreographic rehearsal that we can foresee, and from which organic, almost corporeal configurations are born, that expand to the entire surface of the page, from front to back. Various organisms and unstable forms are revealed, reminiscent of the spine or throat, as beings in permanent mutation. These large-scale drawings appear as musical scores that record a specific interval in time and the physical participation of a now absent body. The drawings reveal the artist’s sequence of gestures on the sheet of paper. Each drawing is a recurrence of the previous drawing and enunciates a transgressive similarity with the other drawings, transporting us to what Deleuze describes as a repetition of difference: “To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent."¹

These works by Vera Mota often place the spectator in a position similar to that which she herself occupies when she is composing her works – a position of confrontation and resistance of the body in relation to materials, and their scale and weight. This is a position of simultaneous proximity and remoteness, which enables the spectator to rigorously edit that which he or she observes. Following a movement from hands to the head, the exhibition continues from the drawing to another medium, the sculpture.

The head is the “organ of exchanges”, to cite Deleuze. It is the receptacle of the brain and an area that houses most of the sense organs, the place where everything we do is transferred, thereby registering and articulating an endless tension between various signals and answers. The head has occupied a privileged place in the hierarchies of the body since the dawn of time. It appears in a wide array of different representations, from the symbolic to the scientific, from ex-voto offerings, to portraits, or anatomical studies. It appears in reproductions of pagan traditions and also in Christian ideas, whether in biblical passages — the head of the giant Goliath or the head of St. John the Baptist — or in mythological references — the head of Medusa. From modernism to the present day, various artists have challenged the traditional limits of representation of the head, transgressing formal conventions, inventing faces that have yet to be seen. From Brancusi to Camile Henrot, from Gerhard Richter to Cindy Sherman, we witness different processes of erasure and disfiguration. We observe a similar operation when we observe the sculpture that Vera Mota presents to us. The opposition between the head and the feet, between the head and the hands, is a recurring theme throughout the artist work, fostering an inversion of their positions, corrupting their qualities, or functions, deforming and decomposing them, in an exercise that is close to the informe (formless) described by Bataille² . In the place of the big toe ("Le gros orteil", Documents nº 6, November, 1929) there's a big head, elevated high but crushed by its weight against the ground.

This disembodied head, like a monolith that depersonifies the figure, with erased features, is a head that has become an entire body. Cast in bronze and with dimensions that distance it from a familiar scale, this almost monumental object, dispenses the need for a plinth and is presented on the floor. Vera Mota remarks: “to say that it has no body is more than a literal description of what this object is, it is precisely to deny part of what qualifies it as a head.” This sculpture simultaneously conveys a sensation of familiarity and strangeness. We can recognise the head, even though we know that it is incomplete. Made of bronze, its weight is as important as its shape.

While Vera Mota was making this sculpture, the enigmatic Moai monolithic human figures on Easter Island, Chile, built in around 1300, suffered a devastating fire. The news of this event immediately transported us – in time and space – to these prominent heads, with their solemn faces. Given that many researchers consider that the Moai are religious vessels, that store the spirits of the ancient leaders of the Rapa Nui civilisation, what can this head of Vera Mota reveal to us? Could it also become a receptacle? What is the status attributed by the artist to the figure when it constantly oscillates between new protocols and meanings, fostering its emptying, with each reproduction?

DISEMBODIED suggests the confrontation between a body that is no longer there, and whose wandering is engraved in the impressions that impregnate the fragility of the paper, and the solid form of a head without a body. Both now confront the body of the spectator, who is invited to be part of this place of transience between different materialities and permanences.

¹ Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

² Georges Bataille, "Informe”, in Documents, no. 7, December 1929.