Caroline Mesquita: Astray. Marble, earth, steel, plaster and wax. Installation view at Galeria Municipal do Porto and Kunsthalle Lissabon (2019). Photos: Dinis Santos and Bruno Lopes. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Municipal do Porto and Kunsthalle Lissabon.
Mesquita has previously staged situations in which oxidized brass figures coinhabit different scenes with visitors, such as a celebration or an aeroplane crash. In this project, the artist’s interest in the body focused inwards, in that which supports movement and articulation. For vertebrates this is the possibility of displacement offered by bone structures; in machines, it is the materiality of travel through spatial and timescales and the invention of History.
Although its mise-en-scene departed from the figurative forms that marked her early practice, for this two-part exhibition, Mesquita created an engine capable of moving through synchronic and diachronic timeframes questioning its fabrication, materially and symbolically. A prologue at Kunsthalle Lissabon completely transformed its underground exhibition space: a collapsed marble floor gave way to a large cavity. Somewhere between a hole and a cave, it revealed an ambiguous coiled form crafted from oxidised steel, which lay inert, half-unearthed and exposed to air and light.
At Galeria Municipal do Porto, surrounding this engine-like tubular machine, were bones sculpted from plaster and wax, each displayed within a plexiglass vitrine on slender pedestals. This mode of display recalls traditional museum conservation, which seals away delicate artworks or precious remains in an attempt to preserve them. Yet, in this case, the function of the vitrines seems to be to contain a latent, disruptive charge emanating from its contents. At once organic and industrial, both the “machines” and the bones were of uncertain origin: they seemed like they could hail from either the past or the future — or, in a bizarre kind of temporal collapse, somehow from both at once.
The end of each tubular machine simultaneously recalled a camera shutter, the propellers of a jet engine, or a bodily orifice. As if tumbling forth from an industrial birth canal, a collection of bones emerged from the depths of this enigmatic machine in a stop-motion video entitled Astray, which accompanies the sculptures and lent the title to the exhibition. It brought together human and nonhuman creatures, engines and machines, in a performative relation between them.