WaterLINE: RIO
Linha Dágua ( <WaterLINE: RIO>). Photography series, drawing and poem. Variable dimensions. 2008.
"Each of Claudia Vieira’s drawings is a single, continuous line, a segment of the larger meta-line that extends throughout her life and her projects. Linha d’Água began when her pen first made contact with the wall in the gallery at FUNARTE. Or did it? This line traces the artist's trajectory from her home in Rio Grande do Sul following tributaries and rivers to the sea and then along the eastern coast of Brazil until it arrives at the site of the exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, the point of arrival is also a point of departure from which the line continuously spirals outward encompassing everything.
Although it has conceptual implications and is the formal kernel which will ultimately determine the shape of the subsequent drawing, the geographical reference is almost an excuse for Vieira to practice being in time and space.
Her process is one of spatial meditation wherein she continually affirms her own presence by allowing her line to extend, always equidistant from itself, not unlike a monk raking sand in a Zen garden. She becomes intimately familiar with every millimeter of the space - as if tattooing the skin of architecture, she uses her body to inscribe every surface with the real, the actual, the momentary.
Through this intentional being, Vieira opens a heterotopic (other) space for mutual occupation by herself and the audience. Her seemingly simple rule of equidistant lines vibrate, turning an ordinary space into a complex vertiginous space that surrounds and absorbs us, where the two dimensional, three dimensional and four dimensional intertwine. A simultaneous articulation and dis-articulation of space, the project superimposes extremes of scale from the real dimensions of our bodies in this space to the tectonic scale of geographic satellite imagery.
Although linear evidence of the artist’s concentrated lived experience has accumulated in the space in graphic extremes of black and white, Linha d’Água paradoxically complicates and overdetermines assumed boundaries between origin and destination, inside and outside, real and virtual, artist and audience, and ultimately, self and other.”
Grady Gerbracht
