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Oração, from May 1st, 2018, to April 30, 2023

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                Oração* was presented for the first time in the solo exhibition of the same name, at Galeria Luisa Strina, in 2023. In the room that comes after the work Texto, we saw Oração, which hangs in the middle of it. This  work began on May 1, 2018, and, initially, it was to be concluded on May 1, 2019: Labor Day, May Day or International Workers’ Day. 

                 It consists of burning one incense stick a day and keeping the burnt sticks grouped by month. The incense sticks were mostly burnt in my studio, but there were occasions in which the burning took place in a hotel bathroom, an airport’s smoking area, outdoors or in the different houses where I lived during art residencies or travels, maintaining this small but ritualistic daily practice. After doing this for a year, I was not able to “conclude” it, so kept going without worrying about how it would eventually presented. The practice turned into a work in process, a work in progress ad aeternum. 

                  In this exhibition, a 5 year period is set for its presentation. The burnt sticks, grouped by month, are fixed to a thin and flat wood and metal ruler, so as to be presented in a horizontal line supported by steel wire. Each month of the work’s temporal arch has been laser printed and burnt on the backside of each fraction. It is a type of writing that burns, burnt writing. The drawing made from the residues of this aromatic resin-like substance – the juxtaposed, lined up incense sticks – suggests both a skyline, a landscape, and the lines of an electrocardiogram. Oração, in Portuguese, means both a syntactic component, a coordinate or subordinate clause, typically made of a main verb, that is, a sentence, which in this case is visual and symbolic, and a prayer, a litany, an incantation, a meditation.

Thiago Honório, May 2023.


* Translator’s note: In Portuguese, the word “oração" means both prayer and clause/sentence.

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