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Present, 2015-2021

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                 Present consists of 58 gloves that I found, photographed and collected in 10 days in the harsh winter of the USA, in New York and New Jersey, between January 6th and 15th, 2015, and which I posted on the social network Instagram at the time, conditions and places in which they were found.

                 The scenario that led me to produce this work – which was taken as a simpler exercise – was that I noticed a person walking on the sidewalk of a large New York avenue, at minus 13ºC, losing one of his gloves when removing it from one of his hands, trying to put it in his coat pocket, to use his smartphone. I tried to warn the person on the other side of the avenue, but he didn’t listen and soon turned the corner. That object stayed there, lost in the crowd.

                 In the days following that incident, I began to find gloves on the sidewalks, streets and in the New York subway, which could have been lost or discarded. The moment I found them I photographed them, posted them on the social network Instagram, and collected them. I put the gloves in a plastic bag inside my purse (to do so, from that moment on, I always had to carry a plastic bag in my purse). The cell phone tracker I had wasn’t accurate, some smartphones did not have accurate locators in January 2015, so some posts were accompanied by location, others were not.

                 At one point, I was impressed by the number of gloves found in a single day, for example, eight of them, while I continued carrying out my activities. In other words, it wasn’t that I was hunting, so to speak, for gloves. These encounters with such an objet trouvé occurred only in the comings and goings between appointments, the visit between one museum or cultural institution and another, or the return to the place where I was staying.

                 In the 10-day time frame I came across 61 gloves, photographing them, posting them and collecting them as they were: dirty, stepped on, crushed, wet, petrified or frozen on the avenues, streets , sidewalks, squares, parks, subway stations, train stations, bus stops, inside train cars, subways and buses from different places in New York and one found in Beacon, New Jersey, on a day I was there, and not infrequently, in adverse conditions: minus 13ºC, under snow, rain, in the middle of an avenue, faced with surprised and at times “repressing” looks from passers-by.

                 As mentioned, my attention was drawn to the absurd amount of individual gloves found that I came across in such a short period of time. Clearly, the reasons for such “loss”, or even discarding, may be related to the constant “taking off and putting on” this and other winter accessories on very cold days in the USA. In my opinion, it is also related to the advent of the touch screen.

                 In a circular movement, it made sense for me to post the photos of that moment on the social media Instagram, allowing hands to slide their fingers over the image of this wrapping of hands – gloves, in times of touch screen in which the hand seems more libidinized.

Thiago Honório, February 2015.

                 

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