No Whirlpool Can Wash Away a Pestle
“Them that are strong might be shaken but aren’t destroyed by the storm.”
Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, commenting on the Yoruba proverb No whirlpool can wash away a pestle
“We, by walking along the cliffs, achieved the equilibrium of the plains
We, by swimming against the tides, achieved the strength of the seas.
We, by building on the mud, achieved the firmness of stone slabs.
We, inhabiting the fringes, achieved the nearness of vicinities.
We are the beginning, the middle, and the beginning.
We shall exist always, smiling through the grief to celebrate the forthcoming joys. Our trajectories move us. Our ancestry guides us.”
Antônio Bispo dos Santos, during a ceremony celebrating his legacy
“Sometimes, the word comes not from fullness, it comes from emptiness.”
Advânio Lessa, during a work conversation
The timing of crops carries with it many beginnings, middles, and beginnings, as we we’ve learned from the words of women and men like Laura Mariah dos Santos, Antônio Bispo dos Santos and countless other masters whose names we don’t know, who live in cities and forests throughout Brazil. They’re also here, in the mountainous landscapes of Lavras Novas, a district in Ouro Preto (MG), coexisting amid fertile valleys, waterfalls, and demanding roads. In the heart of one such place sits the agroforest where the artist farmer Advânio Lessa cultivates, in between centenary and newborn trees, a few rows brimming with manioc, pineapple, huge wild blackberries, bananas, pumpkins, coffees, and whatever else fits the imagination, the mouths, and stomachs of whoever’s alive and hungry. The food here is meant to be a community filled with intentions that comingle towards the strengthening of life, alongside the ants, butterflies, cats, birds, earthworms, wolves, bees, lizards, wasps, centipedes, bats, flies, monkeys, snakes, wolves, and folk… everything thrives and exudes exuberance.
At the foot of the school-tree from where one can hear the life of the oceans of hills and the power of the faraway waterfall, Advânio Lessa casts into a living flow his seeds, ideas, jobs, projects, and imaginaries. At the edge of the abyss is where one musters the courage to stand up to life with nothing but the bare necessities, in his own words: “with a full belly and a bit of madness.”
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Museum is the name he’s given this orchard, at once a studio, a research lab, a refuge, a sanctuary, a place of restoration and celebration where different energy fields converge and run through. Here, anyone who’s fully present can manage to let themselves become integrated with a system full of open and closed circuits, often interconnected by the different times and spaces that have informed them and continue to shape the place.
The installation Redemoinho não leva pilão (No whirlpool can wash away a pestle, 2024) is like a mirror for these myriad circuits that vibrate within the forest and mark the artist’s creative processes. A previously unseen piece created for his first solo show in São Paulo, it is named in celebration of the ancestral future foretold by Ailton Krenak and blessed by Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, in recognition of the life force that has brought us here and now and will carry us beyond, even once we are no longer the bodies we are today.
The circuit created by the artist ties together the agroforest-museum, the Gomide&Co gallery exhibition room, and the streets of the city of São Paulo in a flow of energy in motion that runs across the walls and the transparent façade.
Along the path we see six sculptures from the Nascimento (Birth, 2010-2015) series, connected by vines to two pestles and a cup from where vine flowers and dried coffee fruit trickle down. The paths that our eyes can’t see are in the bodies of those that decide to take them through the expansion of their consciences.
For the artist, the genesis of the piece came from the spark of life that bred the seeds of each of the Candeia trees and eucalyptuses that have sprouted and thrived, like the flame vine, the garlic vines, and the coffee that he grows in his orchard, well-tended to along sunlit benches for months, in the backyard of his studio. The creative process that saw him pull each of the elements and their variegated existences together over the years is part of a group of encounters he’s created, with luck and intent, in his walks and expeditions through the woods, followed by a rigorous schedule of tasks.
In order for the piece to exist as we see it, it has taken, throughout the years: picking and hauling in from the woods pieces of wood whose lives as trees were no longer possible, sticking to a schedule of sustainable handling of the vine, observing development cycles, preparing the wood and vine in drying-cleaning-hydrating-storage cycles, using tools to carry out the procedures of shaping and giving access to the multiple possible textures of each material, interconnecting the bits of each movement of the parts, modeling parts of their bodies with glue and sawdust, treating the material for increased durability, hydrating each part of the circuit with carnauba wax, seeking out the parts needed to accomplish the flow of the circuit that’s been created. And so it is that during a timespan that can be counted in many different ways, depending on the point along the narrative we choose to fixate on, the installation begins to interact with the surroundings it’s temporarily planted in, setting life and abundance flows in motion like a cornucopia of life diversity generation. The orchard planted on the exhibition floor reminds us that no adversity can overpower the strength of what’s alive and chooses to live.
The piece focuses on the growing of a highly intelligent plant whose presence is felt each day across the nation: coffee. Having deeply marked the history of Paulista Avenue, the plant is deemed magical by many religious traditions. It is found in thermoses at croplands, on dinner tables, bakeries, restaurants, offices, and workrooms, and on the city’s sidewalks, setting economic energies in motion and interfering with attention cycles for centuries, going through the hands of those that grow it, haul it, make it, and drink it, generating energy, attention, vast resources, and power relations that are fertile, complex, full of risk and contradiction.
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Just like in the quilombos and villages across this country, Redemoinho não leva pilão is an invitation from Advânio Lessa to strengthen the pro-life foundations that must be implemented into the webs of human work systems surrounding food-giving agriculture. To the artist, the pestle can be a metaphor for education processes and the transformative power of intentional human gesture and thinking that can repair, transform, and restore that which has been – and continues to be – terribly oppressed, battered, exploited, threatened, and challenged in its life potencies. Lessa often says that in his art- and earth-based education processes, “he likes to speak with and learn from the histories of the minerals, insects and animals that have temporarily coexisted with the materials he employs in his works in layers underneath the earth, above it, and underneath the stars and planets that are alongside us, in this life.”
A testimony to the possibilities of plentifulness and abundance available to anyone wishing to join, Redemoinho não leva pilão is also a manifesto to the fact that we are, here and now: no amount of violence in this life can completely trim down the love that constitutes our essence, this transformative power that runs through our present, living bodies. Through restorative gestures of care, like educational communities, we have the power to repair lives, relationships, circuits, and systems. The path is made within us. We are the pestle, the coffee, the vine, the tree, art, and food.
Valquíria Prates, March 2024.
Valquíria Prates is a curator, researcher and educator. She has a master’s degree in Public Accessibility Policies (USP) and a doctorate in Arts and Cultural Mediation (UNESP). She is currently a curator at the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea de Ouro Preto (IA), an Art and Cultural Mediation consultant at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM SP) and a collaborator on projects at the Pólo Sociocultural Sesc Paraty, the Centro Cultural do Cariri (CE), the Instituto Moreira Salles (SP), and the Fundação Roberto Marinho (RJ).
