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Documents, 2012

                                                  
              
              
            Documents was produced in the first half of 2012 during the residency period at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris, as part of the FAAP Artistic Residency Program.
             The work consists of a “table”, whose top is made of wooden plywood – three sheets that are screwed to each other from below and with locks, in this case, planed –, measuring 6.30 linear meters in length, 82 cm in wide and 3 cm thick, supported on six easels made of the same wood. The easels are also open and stabilized by latches. Something close to a bench, a carpentry table, or even related to civil construction, the world of work. On it, perpendicular to the table and unprotected from domes or showcases, therefore “available”, a set of saws, daggers, machetes, hoes, saws, cleavers, sickles, spears, knives, swords, blades, letter openers, piercing and cutting instruments, from the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (45 instruments), which I acquired from a determined focus, and over the course of six months, in vide-greniers (garage sales) and brocantes (bric-a-brac and antiques fairs) and marché-aux-puces (flea markets) held on the streets of different neighborhoods in Paris, peripheral and central.
              Documents is presented without marking delimitation and security bands. The game between attraction and repulsion that can be established between the work and the spectator are crucial, as well as a certain tension in the act of the public possibly wanting to touch the piercing or cutting objects.
             The instruments are discreetly tensioned and tied to the table top by almost imperceptible steel cables, arranged in a non-hierarchical sequence. They were not organized, nor ordered, by a chronological or gradual succession (from the smallest to the largest object or vice versa), even less by similar types. Desejei que o desenho dessa sequência, por assim dizer, fosse mais próximo do  jazz, que ele evocasse quase o ziguezague da linha do desenho de um eletrocardiograma. I wished that the design of this sequence was closer to jazz, that it almost evoked the zigzag line of an electrocardiogram design. In Documents, the presentation and arrangement of these instruments are also configured as “documents”, “attestations”, as “proof of the crime” elsewhere.
            Another layer of work related to Documents concerns a sample leaflet – which must be reprinted for each presentation of the work –, available to the public and which presents a kind of diagram consisting of a schematic illustration (as generally seen in instruction manuals) of the sharp objects, related to boulevards, alleys, streets, avenues, squares, bridges, towns and neighborhoods of Paris, peripheral and central, in which they were found.

Thiago Honório, November 2012.