Between spaces: where to?
by Ricardo José Batista Nogueira

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Márcio Almeida’s installation entitled “Para Onde” (Where To) is laden with meaning. The Portuguese word for laden, carregada, ends up being metaphorized precisely because the installation is composed of a forklift and a combine harvester. Both serve the purpose of loading (carregar), not beds, but other things. Yet, it is precisely about what they carry in the installation that we wish to point out a few questions, although we cannot speak of the bed in isolation. A forklift is a machine whose primordial function is to transfer, move, remove, and displace objects from one place to another, and ultimately, to stack them. It is essentially a machine of the cities, of large cities. They are used in various activities, in industries, warehouses, and in urban operation procedures for removing objects to accelerate human labor. It is a machine of the urban space. The combine harvester, in turn, is conceived for the rural space, aiming, in the same way as the forklift, to accelerate labor. They load and transfer the products of field labor from one place to another—sugar cane, hay, timber, and other products. To harvest (colher) means to withdraw, extract, remove. In this sense, a functional similarity is verified for the machines, despite it being difficult to find them together, as they belong to distinct spaces. Urban spaces and rural spaces have divided the human world for just over three centuries. The hegemony of urban space over rural space is a recent fact. This new geography of society, which agglomerates in urban labyrinths and disperses in the countryside, has buried our notions of time, altering the natural rhythms of life! There is no labor without rest, pause, or relaxation. Here lies the bed, an object that accompanies humanity and symbolizes the primordial moment of recovering the body for a new day of work. Unlike the machines exposed in streets, squares, construction sites, or fields, causing the noises typical of their operation, the bed is a hidden object within the domestic space, evoking shelter, rest, and silence. The bed is an object of the home, our first universe, constituted by reveries, dreams, feelings, and memory, as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard states. Our dwelling! But what makes the artist bring together a forklift and a bed, and a combine harvester and a bed? The creative intervention of the artist is the joining of things, leaving the viewer's free thought to wander over the work, provoking the imagination. A two-way imagination: those who create and those who observe!!!! The impact, the shock of seeing a bed suspended by a forklift or a combine harvester is visual, but it is not traditional visual art. A typical setting of contemporary art, there is no direct intervention by the artist on the objects, as there is in a painting or a sculpture giving shape to matter. Unlike the paintbrush, paint, or chisel and mallet as instruments at the artist's disposal to impose their thought upon matter, here it is only the artist’s thought about things, bringing together what seems improbable, to express movements and displacements. (Hence, Para onde?) Forklifts and combine harvesters do not cross paths because both objects are conceived for distinct spaces. There is no use for a forklift in the field, just as there is no space or use for a combine harvester in the city. The bed, however, is a presence in both spaces, urban and rural, and unlike the machines that propose movement, the bed proposes rest. Forklift, bed, and combine harvester, as the utensils they are, allow mediations between thought—the meaning the artist wants to convey as a work of art—and the questioning gaze of the viewer. It is not the objects themselves—forklift, combine harvester, and bed—together or separate, that possess meaning. The unrevealed meaning lies outside the objects, yet it is present in the urban or rural landscape! But the scene suggests the removal of the bed as an appearance; in essence, it is the removal of bodies, of people in the city through the various processes of renovation, redevelopment, financialization, speculation, and gentrification carried out by public authorities in agreement with real estate developers to give a new face, to produce a new urban setting with the exclusion of those who dwell there. It is not only in San Francisco (California) or Lisbon, but in Rio de Janeiro and Recife. Where do they go? They disperse into other places, only to be, subsequently, dispersed once more. It is here that Pedro pedreiro meets José and asks: what now, José? Where to? In the countryside, the removal of the bed by a combine harvester may suggest a spatial reordering of lands, of men upon the land, of labor upon the land. To harvest is, as we have said, to withdraw, to remove. Sugar cane, coffee, oranges, cattle, cotton, soy, with their writings upon the land, a geography, drawing perfect squares, rectangles, and circles through the technification of the center pivot for irrigation, as well as sophisticated machines for planting and harvesting, require fewer men, less human labor, pushing them into other spaces. Where do they go? The removal does not need to be conflictual!