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Augusta, 2003-2017

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                 In 2002 I moved to an apartment with a view to Rua Augusta, a bustling street with commercial establishments offering saunas, striptease and other shows, along with nightclubs, bars, small tenements, shops, and the countless diversity of businesses that taught me something about flows and times which possess their own internal logic. I naturally arrived at the idea that proper names could exist as a self-erasure. “I write in order to erase my name” : that same year, I became immersed in readings of Bataille’s novels Story of the Eye, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man. Bataille, who in his writing brought his desire to erase his name to the ultimate consequences.

                 It was in the following year and in the context of the course Drawing and Drawings given by artist Carmela Gross, which I took while earning my master’s degree,  that I began my work entitled Augusta. I developed this work under the orientation and advice of Carmela, who suggested that we students engage in a process of dissecting the layers making up our respective work projects. At that moment Carmela was not interested in any work that was emancipated, so to speak. Rather, she was interested in taking a project, in this case, and scrutinizing it “analytically disoccupying it” (as she would say), revising it thoroughly and deconstructing it through a painstaking effort, full of probings, with comings and goings.

                 Augusta was first glimpsed from the window of my kitchen and the empty service area of my apartment, half open to the outside. At that point, it seemed that there were not many possibilities left for choosing how much its vibration “entered” my residence; it imposed itself as an inside paradoxically marked as an outside, a transiting between the private and public spheres.

                 The project, at that moment, consisted in noting down, drawing, mapmaking, registering, sketching, mapping, writing down the names and numbers of the establishments of that strip that was daily before my eyes, on loose sheets of manila paper. Also in 2003, at the end of the semester and in the context of that course, I gathered what had been developed and passionately discussed in the classes, creating a sort of book that concerned the name-to-number relation along that strip of Rua Augusta. I initially entitled this “book” Augusta, later changing this to Augusta Express, presenting it to Carmela and to my classmates in that course. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly why, I never showed that work outside the course, perhaps because I had strong intuitions about it, or because I still considered it a project.

                 Fourteen years later, I return to Augusta – street, project, work, book, name, character – in an exercise of creating a synthesis of this experience. It is clear that the idea of a name as an erasure can now also be problematized in light of other questions, such as gentrification, real-estate speculation, the “Clean City” signage restriction ordinance (Law n. 14.223), the new looks and denominations the place has been submitted to. In 2017, the strip that I had seen outside the window of my apartment was newly mapped amidst erased names and new names. A book of package-paper constructed and constituted by printed names and numbers, with the title-name Augusta.

Thiago Honório, February 2017.

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