Héctor Zamora | Inconstância Material
Héctor Zamora’s work visualizes the relationship between past and present; tensile connections are given tangible form. By re-contextualizing the physical properties of weight and balance, gravity and buoyancy, Zamora creates geometries from histories. Yet because his projects are ephemeral, these materialized connections are never fixed in space or time. Rather, their physical fluctuations mirror the caprices of history, illuminating and suggesting ways of reconstructing the past by reconsidering the present.
Zamora’s work creates suspended moments in time in order to re-assess the possibilities. In one particularly eloquent suspension entitled Errant (2010), Zamora stretched steel wires supporting saplings in planters above São Paulo’s derelict Tamanduateí River. Disused except as a dump, the Tamanduateí can hardly be considered a river today; the former 1920s canal is now a formidable manifestation of São Paulo’s urban squalor and a glaring example of the city’s rapid loss of public space. São Paulo’s past is being rapidly eclipsed by its present as it expands faster than its infrastructure can possibly support. In this context, Zamora’s act of suspension contains a double implication. First, as Guilherme Wisnik has written, “it replicates the operations of energetic artificiality and improvisation from a city that is constantly leaping over its difficulties instead of trying to solve them.” And secondly, the trees propose an alternate possibility for the future stretched tentatively above reality. Errant is a revisionist challenge: what if the trajectory of the city’s development could be altered, progress redefined and decelerated? Would its inhabitants envision a different past?
The net of potential futures Zamora casts can reveal the architectures of the present. Born in Mexico and based in Brazil, Zamora is a multicultural voice – yet the art world often obligates artists to define a singular position. To be a Latin American artist is to be trapped in a double bind of marginality: either confronting the predominating art historical tradition, or remaining confined within the Western canon. Zamora confronts this problem in a number of ways. One is to re-route the demand to embody a cultural heritage altogether by focusing on universals: geometric forms, mathematical truths, expressive colors, natural phenomena. Clear examples are Zamora’s mathematical cut-out shapes: Sesshas (Aichi Triennial, 2010), Synclastic/Anticlastic (Liverpool Biennial, 2010), α=360ºR/r (Mexico City, 2000); works manipulating or visualizing wind patterns: Credibility Crisis (Miami, 2010); N S E O NE NO SE SO (Mexico City, 2009), Sensitive Disturbance (São Paulo, 2008), Volatile Topography (Busan Biennial, 2006); works intervening in nature: Geometrias Daninhas, Praia Recanto das Crianças (São Vicente, 2006); monochrome installations: Blue (Cuernavaca, 2006), Yellow (Xalapa, 2003).
In his more overtly politicized works, Zamora repurposes and exploits heavily-laden culture symbols. Immediately prompting fantasies of leisure, the hammocks he installed in the Nagoya City Museum in Nagoya, Japan for the project Daring Leisure (2010) brought the unattainable tropical vacation nearly within reach. However, the hammocks were hung slightly too high for visitors to reach them and the museum guards prevented anyone from trying. By importing these foreign objects into the museum context yet denying them any use value, the promise of deserved relaxation is called into question. The hanging nets also emphasize the integral function of leisure time within economic cycles of progress and production – particularly when considered in conjunction with the presence of a group of homeless people living in the surrounding park.
For White Noise (2011), community members planted five hundred white flags on New Zealand’s Te Henga Beach that were later removed to an enclosed, private exhibition space. The flags’ transposition from an accessible beach to a restricted space entirely alters the way they are construed: all flags are essentially blank until they are planted somewhere. White Noise in particular does not trivialize national identity or human universality – on the contrary, it imports a heavily-laden symbol into a new context to communicate a specific cultural meaning. Zamora’s surprising use of multiplication or magnification objectifies the quintessential symbols of nationhood.
Continually stretching the physical limitations of real space, Zamora pushes against institutional, national, and ideological constraints. His unique sensitivity to subtle differences in weight and dimensionality allows him to form highly resonant and nuanced metaphors in varied worldwide contexts. Echoing his passion for movement and expansion, these sites are often transportation hubs and port cities. Among his most ambitious projects articulate classic icons of voyage: the ship and the flying contraption – mythical vehicles for the imagination as much as for cargo. Stuck Zeppelin, part of the work Zeppelin Swarm built for the 2010 Venice Biennale, was a gigantic zeppelin wedged in a corridor outside the Arsenale: a sly reference to a body of inflated hopes that never got off the ground.
Like the zeppelin, the ship Zamora constructed at the Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev, Ukraine was designed to fail. The ship’s beautiful architecture was oversized for the room, and thus the ship remained forever arrested in construction. The project was entitled BAM, the Construction of the Century! after the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway. The railway, originally planned at the end of the nineteenth century as an alternative to the Trans-Siberian line, and continually constructed through the 1970s, has become a potent symbol of Soviet history, ideology, and over-ambition.
Zamora’s second ship was not constructed but dismantled over a period of time.
In a public plaza built to honor naval heroes in Lima, Peru, a traditional Peruvian bolichera was deconstructed over several days. The historically-significant wooden boat conjures a long historical lineage – from Pacific naval battles to present-day conflicts between small-scale and industrial fishing. The title of the project, Order and Progress, is taken from the motto emblazoned on the Brazilian flag (the full version of the motto in translation reads: “Love for principle, order for base, and progress for goal”). Once again challenging the promises of self-perpetuating or forward-moving progress, and positing that rapid acceleration results in abrupt stagnation, Zamora’s exposing the boat’s skeleton became an exposure of the constitutive mechanisms of power in reference to Chile’s history of maritime conquest and class struggle. But dismantling the figure also lightens it, iconoclastically relieving a heavy historical burden. Zamora’s work leans away from disillusionment and towards liberation.
An object that continually recurs throughout Zamora’s work is the ceramic brick. In projects like 6, from the Potentialities Series (São Paulo, 2009) and H20 (São Paulo, 2010), the brick itself is materially deconstructed; in other projects, most notably Every Belgian is Born with a Brick in his Stomach (2008), the stratification of the laboring classes themselves is deconstructed. In his most recent use of the brick, Material Inconstancy at São Paulo’s Luciana Brito Gallery, Zamora arranged 20 bricklayers in the gallery space, who toss bricks to each other in a circuitous pattern extending from the interior gallery to the gangway to the parking lot – lifting, tossing, and chatting as if it’s a typical day at a construction site. Zamora brings the bricklayers inside to foreground the intimate processes by which our buildings and societies are constructed, and to suggest that (hierarchical) systems of construction and fabrication within the art world depend upon and reflect those of society. The service culture of art and its hidden mechanisms are called into question. Who is serving whom in the art world, and what, if anything, is being constructed?
In Material Inconstancy the endless but purposeless passing of bricks nullifies the act in terms of productivity. But the bricklayers are not just working – they’re passing rehearsed comments back and forth along with the bricks. Zamora has invited the Brazilian poet and artist Nuno Ramos to create a spoken piece, Giant, to accompany the physical one. Colloquial expressions have been gathered and organized for the workmen to shout in a sequence, in a site-specific geometry of speech that correlates with the shape of the movement. By momentarily formalizing bits of working-class language within the walls of the gallery, an uncategorizable moment between stasis and movement, work and leisure, art and life, arises. Typical of Zamora’s oeuvre as a whole, Material Inconstancy suggests the possibilities for creativity and play even in the most confining of circumstances.
Elvia Wilk, Berlin 2012
