Daniel Steegmann Mangrané: A Leaf Shapes the Eye
Tropicarctic
Helsinki, 30th March 2023
A snowstorm had blanketed the city just the day before my arrival in Helsinki. From the airport, I hopped on a train to KIASMA, where Daniel Steegmann Mangrané was putting the finishing touches on his solo show: A leaf shapes the eye. A sort of retrospective exhibition, it spans at least 25 years, for most of which the Spanish-born artist was in Brazil, where he crafted a body of work distinctly inspired in and derived from the abundant tropical nature found not only in Rio de Janeiro, his adopted city, but in the Atlantic Forest as a whole, as well as the Amazon and beyond.
Needless to say, the glacial landscape unfolding outside—a sort of tracking shot through the train windows—contrasted with any mental images I might have formed or expected of the artist's new exhibition at KIASMA. Yet what a surprise awaited me as I stepped into one of the two floors occupied by Mangrané (guided by the hand of chief curator João Laia, with my eyes closed), where I was met with a topography as unusual as it was familiar.
It felt so familiar, indeed, since I havehave been collaborating with the artist for many years, but it was also unusual owing to the overlapping of such incongruent yet complementary ecosystems: the tropics and the Arctic. However, this hitherto seemingly unimaginable encounter of such landscapes eventually gave way to the undeniable realisation that nature is one and many, simultaneously identical and diverse. it then became apparent that regardless of where we find ourselves geographically, be it in sunny climates or in the Earth’s icy regions, patterns repeat and correlate.
Although this unremarkable reflection may not be entirely ground-breaking, what especially struck me throughout this experience was a transformative shift of my perception of Mangrané's work. Whilst I was aware that the artist's research revolved around organic forms and purposefully constructed geometry, I would largely approach his formalisation and rationalisation of the natural or even artificial world from a tropical perspective. In my view, this perspective provided the ingredients to interpret his work through specific philosophical nuances, such as the notion of Amerindian perspectivism in anthropology, or even a conceivably totemic idea of material culture. Let us note that within his body of work objects take on a quasi-mystical essence, imbued with a power that not only transcends the boundaries between the immediately cultural and natural but also, as such, challenges the purported division of such realms in Western epistemology.
Within this framework, it has always made sense to me to consider the artist's work in light of anthropological research conducted in the tropics, perhaps beginning with Claude Levi-Strauss' ideas and then moving on to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's work, where the concepts of animism and perspectivism reshape the relationships between animate and inanimate beings. According to the readings of the Brazilian anthropologist, some cultures among the native peoples of the Americas believe that not only humans but also animals, plants, and sometimes even objects possess a common soul, the only varying element being the perspective of those who see themselves as humans and others as non-human.
In Helsinki, however, seeing Mangrané's work through the lens of Finnish aesthetic rationalisation made it imperative to reassess certain views I had previously projected onto his art, thereby redefining the semantic economy of his work. Whilst it is indeed valid to situate the artist within the South American context, it is equally true that his artistic propositions extend far beyond any exoticising desire to confine his work within the boundaries of some manner of tropical thinking. What becomes evident is the universal nature of his art, just as nature proves universal beyond any essentially cultural aspects.
On Travelling in Time and Space
On the top floor of the museum, where skylights allow sunlight to pour in and windows reveal the snowy landscape outside, we find ourselves surrounded by a cold, blue light, as if navigating an unknown topography—at once glacial and artificial, otherworldly. On the artist-designed uneven floor, we encounter the building blocks of the metaphysical and aesthetic lexicon Mangrané has crafted over time: leaves, branches, insects, stones, both biotic and abiotic beings, all deconstructed to their primal, seminal, ancestral nature, preceding even their conformity with recognisable images within the realm of language. On the other hand, rather than simply taking the world back to its ontological roots, it appears to me that the artist is precisely exploring the boundaries of language itself, or the capacity for redefining the tangible and even intangible world through the simultaneous adoption of new perspectives—each promoting novel phenomenological arrangements, repositioning the subject (or even the self) in relation to what we call reality.
In devising a space without a central point, allowing us to navigate through countless perceptual pathways, Mangrané has crafted an “exhibition-ecosystem” that possesses its own agency, which imbues the museum's atmosphere with a simultaneously physical and immaterial, even (dare I say) phenomenological performativity. But perhaps I am mistaken, and there is indeed a centre in this bluish space: the tent with transparent orange walls (Orange Oranges). Inside it, visitors can handle not only oranges (the fruit) but also ordinary technologies that enable them to extract juice from those organic spheres, deploying their hands and physical force (and consequently a bodily choreography) to then savour the juice, nourishing the body and repositioning the human factor in relation to all other things in the space. From the tent's particular perspective, not only do the colours of the entire external landscape change—no longer appearing blue but green, due to the overlapping of the primary colours of the blue of the external surroundings with the yellow of the cellophane—and not only do we gain a view of the verdant green of the tropics, but we also find ourselves at the heart of a world where human agency is predominant. More than observing the landscape in an almost Cartesian fashion, the humans therein also transform it, both rationally and fictionally.
As we move away from this artificial epistemological axis (as artificial as the anthropocentric perspective often is), that is, as we move away from the subject-object perspective under the shelter of the artist's architecture, we are led to perceive an endless array of other possible sensory ranges. We pass through a wire mesh curtain, and upon overcoming this barrier (both physically and mentally, insofar as it stimulates our visual, tactile, and auditory senses) we find ourselves facing a glass wall—actually, two of them. The first, created by the artist, is a sheet of glass suspended by one of the exhibition easels designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi. Its transparency is mottled by a fractal pattern, preventing us from seeing perfectly through the glass. Everything becomes blurred, Cubistic, as though we were seeing the world submerged in a lake whose frozen surface obstructs our vision. But as soon as we cross this fractal threshold, we reach another glass wall: the museum's giant window looking over the city of Helsinki, once again glacial, covered in snow. The concept of inside and outside loses its meaning; reality bends or folds in on itself. Rather than a mise en abyme, the experience is an exercise in synecdoche: from the local to the universal, the part for the whole, or vice versa.
Then, upon returning to Mangrané's “perspectivist” vortex, we are urged to enter worlds within worlds through holographic portals (Hologram), through the looking glass (Rotating Table/Speculative Device), and through a black curtain that leads us into the heart of the jungle—finally, a tropical topography! Accompanying us on this cinematographic journey is a stylised virtual jaguar, its synthetic, erratic movements akin to a ghostly entity, a wandering soul in its microcosm (A dream dreaming a dream). We hear its steps, so distant and yet so close, producing the same sound as our human feet walking on the synthetic grass that covers the landscape the artist has constructed inside the museum.
In this show, we are constantly encouraged to interact with a plethora of sculptural and imagistic bodies scattered along the way, wandering through ontological, mystical, and metaphysical paths. These bodies are also compelled to interact, to perform a choreography that both summons and dispenses with the human. This is where the artist's true magic comes into play, as he establishes nexuses of continuity and discontinuity, a semantic play that weaves meaning whilst unravelling the linear perception of space-time. It is as if a ghostly dimension imposed itself upon reality, transforming and destabilising the foundations of reason and metaphysical skies.
Minimalistic in its formal nature yet maximalistic in its sensory aspect, this existential grove is punctuated by intermittent rays of light that connect the heavens to the earth: a “lightning rod” that brings the forces of nature into the plane of the senses (and form)—a technological artefact that brings together the outside world and the interior of the museum (the bursts of light respond to changes in weather and the outside atmosphere). Here, Karen Barad and her investigation into the nature of lightning come to mind. She tells us that this phenomenon is not confined to the present time alone, simultaneously encompassing both the past and the future as well. Lightning results from the intra-activity of seemingly isolated elements coming into contact, as if summoned by a higher agency, materialising within the cosmos and obliterating the very notion of linear temporality: “The point is that the past was never simply there to begin with, and the future is not simply what will unfold.”[1]
The Museum and the Museum's Abstraction
The first floor of the museum dedicated to the exhibition takes on a different nature. We are no longer immersed in an atmosphere bordering on fiction; instead, we find ourselves in a museum comme il faut, with white rooms and walls that place us in a truly analytical realm, distinct from the phenomenological one on the icy blue floor above. Here, we are encouraged to delve not only into the ontology of the cosmos but into that of the artist—to explore the construction of his work, imbued with the spirit of deconstructing the world, matter, and the senses alike.
From this feedback relationship between the ethereal and the mundane emerge the artist's seminal experiments, displayed on white furniture (Árvore Multiplicada). Here, we witness the genesis of his work: the first branches collected, the first oranges, the packs of Camel cigarettes the artist reconstructs in his classic diamond patterns—a tapestry that unravels the original form while embracing visual hybridism (the image of the camel in the desert rendered into abstraction). There, we discover the potential origin of those ubiquitous diamonds in Mangrané's work: the scales of pine cones placed on the table (or perhaps they could be the light poles of his native Barcelona, carved to resemble palm trees?—a personal note from the author).
On this plane I refer to as analytical-sensory, we also encounter the artist's forays into cinema, a medium recurring throughout his body of work. Take for example the remarkable straight-line tracking shot through a winding forest, captured and screened on celluloid (16 mm); the film Teque-teque, which places the viewer in the “perspective” of a rare, erratic bird that spasmodically shifts its field of vision (or perhaps we are the rare bird, the humans?); and lastly the film bicho-pau (Phasmides) [stick insect], a recurring creature in the artist's work (an insect resembling a twig), which in this film crosses over from the realm of “nature” to meet that of “culture,” in an artist-designed fractal architecture made of cardboard. As Beatriz Colomina would say, “The designed world redesigns the designing animal.”[2]
If transformation is a secret of nature (unique, yet the same in myriad ways), the minute becomes colossal in a metonymic process; the universe becomes integrated into the tiniest of fractals and into every other existing pattern: symmetries, spirals, meanders, waves, webs, crystals, foams, and nebulae. In this dynamic process of reinvention, one thing takes on the form of another in a virtual, chameleonic dance amongst species. Disappearance thus becomes a survival strategy: the stick insect camouflages as a twig, concealed within its own virtuality.
In Mangrané's work, however, nothing is as it seems. The “museological” walls on this first floor are displaced from their axes and adorned with textures and formally deconstructed texts—take for instance the beautiful poems of Stella do Patrocínio printed in geometric patterns. Similar to the stick insect, though operating in a realm far removed from that of primordial nature, the poet and lifelong psychiatric patient deploys her own survival strategy through disappearance, but this time under the enchantment of language:
I was pure gas, air, empty space, time
I was air, space, emptiness, time
and pure gas, like that, oh, empty space, oh
I had no structure
had no form
had nowhere to build a head,
to build arms, to build a body
to build ears, to build a nose
to build the roof of the mouth, to engage in chatter
to build muscles, to build teeth
I had nowhere to build any of these things
to build a head, to think about anything
to be useful, intelligent, to be reasoning
nowhere to draw any of that from
I was pure empty space]
“I have transformed into pure form and emerge from nothing into creation.”
Suprematism Manifesto
Patrocínio's poetry, with its echoes of Suprematism, aligns perfectly with the synergic abstraction that permeates Mangrané's entire body of work, where nature, technology, phenomenology, and geometry are ever-unfolding.
The forms we all study through geometry (or even through Pythagorean mysticism) are in fact the formative structures of biotic and abiotic beings at scales not immediately visible to the human eye—spirals, spheres, fractals, hexagons, and so on. Nonetheless, in the recent history of art, these geometric patterns, though constituent elements of flowers, leaves, and branches—motifs popularised in the West from Art Nouveau (in the 1900s) onwards, and among other names through Catalan architects like Gaudi and Jujol, Mangrané's countrymen—would only attain major prominence in Western artistic practice from the first quarter of the 20th century. This came with the rationalisation of pictorial and sculptural forms that led to movements like Concrete Art, along with numerous concurrent or subsequent variations, such as Neo-Concretism in Brazil. On the other hand, if we momentarily set aside the Western canon and look into the ancestral expressions of Amerindian cultures, we will find that geometry has long been present in a myriad of organic-pictorial patterns adhering to bodies (human or otherwise). This reveals an exercise in formal exploration which is vastly distinct from that propagated by scientific thought, or even by Eurocentric visual arts. All of this to say that Mangrané's work, whilst inheriting formal propositions from the West, ultimately ventures into and upon the unstable terrain of plastic-philosophical speculations that seek to explore the limits of the sensory while blurring the boundaries between the (supposedly autonomous) spheres of culture and nature.
In its pursuit of existential universality by erasing the division between so-called natural and artificial forms, Mangrané's work takes on a holistic, quasi-mystical character (even reminiscent of Malevich's Suprematism in some respects). It perceives the world as a dynamic interplay of relationships amongst organic, inorganic, and technological entities which, through their intra-activity, challenge the notion that the structures surrounding us are mere objects of human will. By deconstructing language or transposing it from the so-called cultural or natural realms to the sphere of the sensory/virtual, the artist unveils nature undivided, at once ancestral, present, and future. Again, drawing on Karen Barad's words, “The world holds the memory of all traces; or rather, the world is its memory (enfolded materialization).”[3]
This exhibition will take on a new form and time of its own at MACBA in Barcelona in the near future. I, for one, am eager to see what new semantic and sensory interactions will be produced in this museum. Evoé!
Kiasma—Museum of Contemporary Art
Bernardo José de Souza is a curator, writer and researcher of contemporary art. He is currently working as an independent curator from Madrid. He was Artistic Director of the Iberê Camargo Foundation (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2017/2019), He was a member of the curatorial teams of the 19th Biennial of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2015) and the 9th Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre, 2013) and was Coordinator of Cinema, Video and Photography of the Secretariat of Culture of Porto Alegre between the years 2005 and 2013.
Translation PT-EN: Diogo Montenegro.
Images:
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané: A Leaf Shapes the Eye. Exhibition views at Kiasma—Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2023. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen. Courtesy of the artist and Kiasma.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, A Dream Dreaming a Dream, 2020. MACBA Collection. Video projection (real-time procedural computer-generated animation, black and white), 4 channel sound. Photo: Roberto Ruiz.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Phasmides, 2008–2012. Pinault Collection. 16 mm film transferred to HD video, color, mute.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, La Pensée Ferale, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Cibachrome prints and serigraphed texts by Juliana Fausto.
Notes:
[1] Karen Barad, “Nature's Queer Performativity,” Legacies of the Enlightenment https://enlightenmentlegacies.org/items/show/166
[2] Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley, are we human? Zurich, Lars Muller Publishers, 2016/2021.
[3] Karen Barad, “Nature's Queer Performativity,” Legacies of the Enlightenment https://enlightenmentlegacies.org/items/show/166