VACA DEITADA_ ode to meteorite Bendegó_
by Rodrigo Andreolli 2019

the time of stones cannot fit to the time of human desire. It is much wider, the time of stones. It’s a time that hosts and swallows the desiring impulses of the human, so full of defined plans. Rocks are a form-chaos, not possible to be constrained to a word. Charged with impressions in its structure, specificities revealed on its surface, composed by a complex of tiny little indentations.

Raw Stone, untamed, by us, human, domesticated by the rocks, choreographed by the stones, in durations we cannot realize. In relation to the time of the earth, time of the universe, a cosmic curve that we can barely comprehend but through sets of made up numbers, lines of abstraction in an attempt to imagine the unconceivable, distinct character of rational beings such as we are, limited perspective of the unmeasurable.

The time of stones is a different time, it holds the matters of human frustrations. We cannot escape from our own point of view, we always talk from the human perspective, even now, through this eternal attempt to reach something that slides away from this form of thinking, human form, we cannot help but be in contradiction, contradiction beings, only having human forms to express the intents to evade the contingencies of humanity.

The stone escribes time fossilizing desires and decomposing them in erosion. It accumulates the sediments of human gesture and their impulses to control, manipulate, transform, reproduce, gestures that believe in truth and in the life of the instant solutions. Especially now, in times when the notions of space and time are shortened and curved _now that we are getting closer to some sort of primitive ancient knowledge, still trusting ourselves on scientific understandings to explain the non-linearity of reality – perhaps we could stand to craw in towards this realization - that stones are our ancestors, on this sense, they know stuff. Mineral perspective. Mineral organization.

Time of Stone, human I am, impatient, it’s a long wait.
I turn into stone, as a laying cow, in the form of.
There I stay, one, two, three millions of years. How many? Inexact…. Years
Waiting, under sun, under moon, on the dry ground
This dry ground reminds me of the dry sky, the sky above the sky
The sky beyond the blue, the one that is dry, where the air is rarefied into void,
And the rays of light travel on nothingness
Nothingness all around,
Beautiful, very beautiful, but nothing – at least there is horizon
Many horizons
It is a nothing that is all horizon, the outer space



Through memory the stones transport human
Through us the stones transport memory
Through stones the memory transports us

Volcanic explosions under and over the crust, make emerge, in the extended time of the earth, the layers of land, the tectonic plates which push each other, magma joy, multiple internal orgasms, external squirts of smoke, pumice rocks, burning ashes, gas that turns day into night, the earth grows, alive and in heat.

A dense heavy smoky cloud, uncommonly huge shape and size, floats over our heads, in ascendant movements and then pushed by its own wait, advances towards the ground, transforming the day, that everywhere is, into night of deep darkness. Toxic gases, burn our throats with the taste of sulfur and lead, or oil and flesh, among electrical flashes and a dark heat, the mass travels above us, inside us, and precipitates in layers of stone, that attack as unmerciful projectiles/bullets, everything they meet on their way from the sky to the ground, eager hurry to return to the soil, love to fall, unstoppable run towards gravity.

Pomice, burning in eager to touch the ground again. Stones on the way. No. they are the way, the rest of bodies are the obstacles for them. As the water that comes along with a hazels tempest, with them stones come the burning ashes that by touching the human skin, or animal skin, or any other organic surface, embraces them as a mantel of fire, liquid becomes solid and whatever is left is the gas sublimated from life.

Organic becomes inorganic in the speed of fire. The wild passion of a mineral that has been held back for millions of years, when liberated, is faster than the fastest of the organic beings.
The time of stones which is other, which is long, which is wide, here proves itself to be the opposite and swallows human time by transforming it into a stone-eternity.

Where there’s smoke there must be fire.
Who has ever burned oneself? who has ever been burned? Who has ever felt the pain of the fire transforming the living matter? Who has ever smelled the burning flesh?

The human being, like me here now trying to think as stone, despite knowing the impossibility of having this perspective, I, human being here as a laying cow, I have the feeling that something is burning. Anybody else? Maybe it is just an electrical equipment with a maintenance problem, or some unprotected wires, perhaps it is a barbecue being prepared outside, a barbecue with good meat, cattle grown in a nice landscape, green grass, a good barbecue, a nice cut of meat, bloody still, a piece of meat, kind of brown kind of red, kind of salty kind of sweet, tasting like iron, a death almost alive still, a death as so many others forgotten, alienated or simply normal. But this smell… maybe it is something on the oven, or maybe it is a car on the street outside, a smell of burnt grass or trees, of burnt rubber, burnt plastic, smells of hair burning, clothes burning, of bones burning. Bones burnt alive, or dead for a long time, and again dying on the uncontrollable fires, which burn the paint on the walls, the long dresses, the colonial furniture, among the flames the ghosts start to ball room dancing, or perhaps they eat their fancy meals, the flame’s eat the colonial chambers, build in high quality wood, made out of that wood that is red as a burning log, braseiro, brazier, that’s the word, braseiro of a country burning, and with it burns the sun the salt and everything that allow the trees to grow, and it burns also the long work of that hand of that person who cut the wood into a chair, that chair with a cushion wrapped in red velvet, not as the other red, the red of the log of the wood of the tree is more red, more in-flamed, pau-brasil, a red that finds in the fire that destroys it, its own carbonized liberation, its transformation into ashes, its return to dust, its disintegration into the air into the floor, the wood mixes back with the rest that burns, with the velvet, the paint, the roof, the thousands of wings of the butterflies, all colors and sizes, that for a long time were there without being able to fly, the wings are free in the fire, their wing-spirits return to air. And the big staircases and the rooms falling apart, the fall of a tiny sky of so many who had built under them their realities, their habits, their, houses, they fall and reveal the skeleton-architecture of an imperial house, they fall and reveal the force with which matter transforms itself into ashes and dust, a big embrace of all creatures, living or dead, inorganics or not, in the middle of such a tragedy, too-human tragedy.

How many languages in extinction? Hoe many species? How many dreams? How many memories, how much sweat? How many extinguishers are necessary to put out the fire of passion or the eruption of a volcano? How many water cars? How much water? How many birds? How many dams have to collapse? How many hydrographic basins are necessary to put out the fire of speculation?

Progress
Progress

Day turns into night. The smoke of the volcano that explodes and covers the civilization in ashes, covers the ones who live at the foot one mountain, in fertile ground, by the water

The smoke that covers the concrete city. Encounter of the winds, warm and cold, blows of air in planetary scale. The sands from Sahara fertilizing the Amazon, the smoke of fires covering our heads, the carbon on your lungs when you light up a cigarrete or takes a deep breath outside the window of your car, carrying all the effects of the burning fuel, cane fuel, or fossil fuel of rock black rock oil petrol. Unburied substance, extracted and processed to burn and carbonize our bodies out and inside, to make us live and walk, from here to there, it burns fast quick busy life, busy days, busy lives, busyness, all busy mess

In this vertigo of one-stant that human existence is. Soon it passes, stones remain.

“Atiraste uma pedra no peito de quem só te fez tanto bem”

“If you hold a stone, hold it in your hands, if you feel the weight, you’ll never be late to understand”

The extractivist being in relation to the ground:
gathers, perforates, excavates, unmakes, breaks, piles, unmounts, disintegrates, reintegrates, reunites, does, remakes, remounts, remembers, glues, attaches, unfolds, amounts, injects, rejects, abjects substances to reform, reprogram, requalify, revive, revitalize, reanimate, retake extractions of land, results of the work of forces through time, thousands, millions, billions, in activity, generating thousands, millions, billions, in human scale, global scale, of other substances, products
reformulations of matter, so called raw matter, but worked through eons by nonhuman and human agents, all intertwined in this process of trans-formation
metamorphosis
constant movement we call
life

or land
called Earth
these certain conditions of temperature, humidity and pressure
the matters
raw or manufactured
manifest in some humanly predictable ways
according to the sciences
of men
and unpredictable or fantastic
by the sciences of the nonhuman
manifesting as such
things swing in waves and strings

I am as such, a laying cow, nonetheless I am a stone
Stone in the general sense of the word stone, mineral,
I am iron in a much% and nickel in another much%
Defined properties of the matter, structures and electrical charges
Free electrons on its outer atomic layer, capacity to exchange and re-structure

Alien-rocks, sex with earth, love for the gravity
In the sun, in Sertão, where the hot stone on the soil, resets the sun with reflecting back its own heat, anal vertigo, light of craziness, the strange and its impetus to break, to tear, to perforate, to cut, to sacrifice
The sun invites the sacrifice
But me, a stone as a mineral as a laying a cow in the dry soil of the sertão, I am an alien-rock, stone I am stone I am not, I don’t mind, I don’t overwhelm, I stay cool, I know the time, this time of human, of despair, of the greedy, it tell me very little.

Stone I am, Stone I am not, iron mineral that travelled the void, I landed here and I know of another time, another despair, that never waits because it is an endless wait, no hopes, so that I can stay here laying down for an almost forever, a “forever” of your time, human time, finite time, as my existence is much more a slow flow, it makes a huge curve in time, an enormous orbit in the time of the possible curves of spacetime.
Therefore, your existence as people, organic beings, tells me very little, you become a tiny little, almost inexistent, part of my histories. Despite of that… sorry I overreacted … we do have an intense relationship, which will define us, it has already defined us, result of an attraction, morbid curiosity, coming from both of us, I mean not so much from me, because my desires are not the same as yours, my desire here is simply a human projection, but perhaps, who knows, I might have some sort of stone-desire, and such a stone-desire, you human, can only dream of. So, dream of it! But try to dream a dream of stone, because to continue dreaming these human dreams of yours is not enough…. It is precarious, limited, it is nothing, not even it gets to be nothing, it is a piece of nothing, a small hole. Dream your dreams through a bigger hole, a hole with no edges, a hole of infinite fall, a black hole, make a dream without any lights, a dream that implodes itself and generates anti-matter,… dream through your holes, through your ass, dreaming another cosmic hole, something that lets you feel the smell of shit, universal excrements, abjected smell, excluded and forgotten, may yourself be that as well, expelled by a cosmic ass, swallowed by the black holes… but seduced in pleasure…may it be pleasant, relax your cosmic holes and enter the dream of stones, which is also yours…. As for me, I stay cool, stone I am, stone I am not, the days go and I am still here, just waiting as a cow laying in the ground.

Bendegó_
a meteorite officially reported in 1784 in Bahia in-lands (sertão), Northeast Brazil
The huge thing, the enormous thing_this is what means “Bendegó”
A stone that doesn’t heat in the sun

German scientists Von Martius and Von Sphix, part of Princess Leopoldina, study for meteorite and take pieces of it away to Europe

1785 the county governor organizes an expedition to remove the stone to the capital, Salvador. It fails. The meteorite weights 5 tons and it cannot be taken through the dry and rocky ground of the land, it falls on the riverbed, Bendegó river
There it stays for another 100 years

In 1887 a second expedition is organized
And a cattle-car pulls Bendegó to the railroad recently inaugurated in the region
From there to Recife, then Salvador, and finally Rio de Janeiro

The meteorite becomes one of the main pieces of the imperial collection
Kept in the Nacional Museum of Rio de Janeiro, the imperial house.

Bendegó was one of the only objects that survived the burning which completely destroyed the Museum and its collection, in 2018
The meteorite was seen as a magical object and when it was removed from
the region where it was “found”, Sertão da Bahia
An extended draught took place. The locals attribute the cause of the draught to the removal of Bendegó. A curse from the stone, which had chosen to fall at that place.

The surface of the meteorite used to offer a refreshing resting spot at the river side
From the distance, it looked like a laying cow on the ground.

This text was part of the Sculpture-Performance

Matter Mythologies

[8 November 6:30 - 9:30 pm]
at Yellow Brick ,Athens

Words, as stones, are the result of very long processes of sedimentation. The fluidity of language becomes material when we think of it through different temporalities. A sentence, observed in a long curve of time, is the synthesis of the transformations of time and displacement, and when looked at from very close, it is a solid rock that has accumulated the weight of established narratives of history, of habits and culture, traumas, memories and dreams. Inverting this arrow, minerals can be seen as the syntagms of a land that hold on their combinations, compositions and dissolutions, the multiplicity of the untold and unseen stories of a place.

Reconnecting to practices in performance and video, the body in displacement, articulates the materiality of words and minerality, reflecting upon language and geology as long-duration-choreographies.

This exhibition is thought as a durational sculpture-performance developed in collaboration with the artists Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki and Petros Lolis, composed by videos, sculptures and a dance.

For the production of these pieces, we allowed ourselves to experiment with a series of different practices, guided by the interest of thinking minerals not only as the material to work ON but as a material to work WITH. This way, stones became collaborators in the choreography of our gestures. As we kept company with each other, the minerals made themselves more and more visible on the structure of our everyday life. Fundamental for the construction of our way of living and dying, for the development of our ideas of progress and technology, the minerals are also populating our imagination and help us build our subjectivity through narratives they incite, carry or announce. A stone, as a piece of a bigger rock, the planet, as a trace of a very distant past or a recent souvenir you keep on your shelf. Minerals as protagonists of a series of myths and as the moving fuel of the global economy, extracted from the ground, triggering historical movements of exploitation, colonization and violence.

.:.

Rodrigo Andreolli is a Brazilian artist who transits through the performing arts, interested in researching the body as an element for sensitive activation of the visible and invisible layers of the public matter. He acts elaborating production structures in multidisciplinary art projects.
Structural artist for the research project Terreyro Coreográfico (2014- São Paulo), with a group of choreographers, architects and urbanists, framing actions on public spaces to study the crossings of choreography, architecture and urban programming. In 2017, Rodrigo was part of Capacete Residency in Athens, Greece, during the period of Documenta 14, associated with Athens School of Fine Arts. Andreolli is currently part of the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies, JLU, Gießen, Germany.

Petros Lolis is a visual artist , based in Athens Greece. His practice reflects his attempt towards a better understanding of the condition of living, through the movement of time, the relation between habit and intention as a state of being and the study of the material as a means of communicating the immaterial . His work varies between figurative painting, sculptural compositions and video animation. He is currently attending the Athens School of Fine Arts. He has participated in various group exhibitions in Athens, Greece in the past three years.

Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki is the founder of Yellow Brick – research a project space/residency devoted to artist's research and playground/testing ground for exhibition making.
Her personal work entangles materiality through methodologies of exploring, collecting and archiving, resulting in the creation of sculptural manifestations around the ideas of topos. For Sifostratoudaki, materiality stands as a broader term for framing geography, object, humans,language and gestures and sculpture as a moving organism.

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