Bala, 2015-2017
Bala* consists of a life-size sweet-dispensing statue, which’s body takes as a reference a doll-tray from children's birthday tables during the so-called “years of lead”, 1964-85. It is made up of elliptical wooden and metal trays filled with coconut candies, wrapped in rococo candy paper in assorted colors.
The doll's hands were sculpted to a natural human scale. It’s clothing are made from tulle and ribbons – the ruffles on the collar and sleeves – and the rococo papers that wrap the candies that cover it. It is a pathetic and immobile pantomime, which can be seen and eaten by the public.
I mention a passage by Fábio de Souza Andrade about the play Endgame, by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), which inspired the creation of this work: “There is also the lineage of clowns who bring the tightrope to the ground and are concerned with displaying human limits, projecting light on flaw and failure.”**; and also the memory of what Denise Stoklos taught me, in 2003: “The clown is the one who laughs at human insufficiency”, to which I added: starting with it’s self-insufficiency.
Bala was conceived in 2014 and produced between 2016 and 2017, amid the apocalyptic scenario of the post-coup against the Dilma Rousseff government (2011-2016), and presented as part of the Trienal Frestas: Entre acontecimentos e pós-verdades exhibition (Between events and post-truths), at SESC Sorocaba, in Sorocaba, SP, in 2017.
In Bala, I was also interested in seeing the work happening in the body of another, being introduced into the body of the spontaneous public, into their mouths, devoured in an anthropophagical way, unpacked, bitten, chewed, tasted, savored, eaten***; the visible ribs of the 1.80 m tall doll-clown, the trays that make up his body, turned over, moved, with candies remaining only in the “calf” and “shoulders”; and, also see the rococo wrapping paper for sweets in the trash baskets or around SESC Sorocaba.
I see the clown as someone who laughs at human insufficiency – as Denise Stoklos has taught me –, starting with it’s own. I think about the religious images, the party doll-tray from the 1970s in Brazil that I took as a matrix for the construction of Bala, now reconstructed on a 1:1 scale, and how much it attests to its incompleteness based on the physical decrepitude, the physically mutilated body of trays of the doll. Its showing skeleton shows empty elliptical trays that constitute an inanimate, immobile, discontinuous being, in a constant state of denial as it encounters the bodies of others, continually merging with them and finding itself, therefore, in a constant process of transformation. In a work that also talks about lacking, gap, absence, how good it was – and is – to be able to witness this.
Thiago Honório, August 2017.
* Translator’s note: In Portuguese, the word “bala" means both candy and bullet.
** ANDRADE, Fábio de Souza. “Matando o tempo: O impasse e a espera”. In: BECKETT, Samuel. Fim de partida. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002.
*** I had the privilege of seeing the coconut candies being stripped of their rococo paper by the public. I could see them eating the work and, somehow, feel the vibration of the work in someone else's body.
Work Details
Bala, 2014-2017
Life-size sweet-dispensing statue 1:1; coconut candies wrapped in rococo candy paper wrap
1,80 x 1,25 x 0,90 m
5,90 x 4,10 x 2,95 ft
photo: Edouard Fraipont
Exhibitions
E o palhaço, quem é?, Paço das Artes, 2024
Alegria, uma invenção, Central Galeria, 2022
Frestas Trienal 2017, Sesc Sorocaba, 2017