Todo o tempo do mundo/All the time in the world

I enter your exhibition.

I pass under the chandelier (I remember: you say “it’s like a stroll in three parts”).

It starts with a big book of memories, a golden book but definitely not made of gold, and on it is written: Thundercage*, the artist-run NO space that “taught you so much about (public) space”. I should have known: first the collective. The book announces and contains the “others”, those who come and go depending on the occasion. I turn the pages and the images of these hollow teeth inhabited/hacked by the artists you know so well how to bring together. You say that it’s easier to work in a group, that there’s strength in numbers, that here too people have stopped by to help/talk/watch/or just be there. There are too many names to mention.

As I walk along, I feel as if I’m entering someone’s home – I’d like it to be my own. I think I know what to do with all these sculptures that seem to refer to a domestic space: set the clock, pour water, light the candles, sit down, draw the curtains, but I don’t know why, the meaning of the gestures has been lost. Ghostly rituals. I think I recognize them as the objects of some bizarre celebration (what are we celebrating? Who are we waiting for?). The garden colonizes them, they let themselves be colonized. I’m not sure whether these shapes tell us about the past or show us the future, perhaps because you prefer the “ecstasy of the present”. You say you don’t like “celebration”.

As I enter the room with its dark blue walls, I can feel the traces, in recomposed fragments, of a multitude of things, people and stories. My brain doesn’t analyze everything, but my body does. It’s a familiar place where you can feel the presence of all the others. You say: a big body made of samples of memories.

Your gestures are precise. You have to slow down to grasp its richness. Every detail seems to be exactly in its place, always and forever. Yet I know that it’s ephemeral, that the assembly is temporary and that the materials will “return” to where you took them: the “dirty street”, the scrap dealer, I don’t know who’s apartment, the remains of your studio, the stock of memories of your joys and sorrows. Space, too, is a tool of appropriation, its architecture another material that can be welded, plastered, cut up like the fragments of memory that fall apart and have to be recomposed in another way. You say “remnants of childhood past, pieces of childhood present” (Andrea🥰). You even say “archaeology of childhood” with your polypocket casts, comfortable mini-worlds (but yours already look like ruins) embedded in adult chaos.

At the end or the beginning of the tour (it’s a loop), we enter a room; it’s like the reconstruction of a “sunset-colored” piece of garage, where we can hear your voice. It flows, it purges, it overflows the space (inside and outside, you can’t really tell the difference). The sculptures are augmented by sound, image and smell (MERde). We hang out here with you, waiting for the night or the coming storm. “La tempête qui arrive est de la couleur de tes yeux” (in Portuguese, ‘à tempestade que chega é da cor dos teus olhos’) is your title, taken from a song by Legiao Urbana, Tempo Perdido (memory of your Brazil).

Is it sad? Yeah, it’s… Really sad. But then you stop me: “I’m not going down the road of tragedy, you know my smile is precise”. The end. I’m going for another ride.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

*Thundercage is a program of wild and collective exhibitions in the public space of the Paris suburbs where Romain Vicari lives and works. The sites are occupied more or less officially, for the duration of the exhibition. Great care is taken to encourage encounters between artists and local residents.

— Stephanie Cherpin