à sombra do futuro [shadowed by the future] is an exhibition of international contemporary art that resulted from a study on the prominence of orientation towards the future.
This website contains information about the exhibition, images and texts about the works on display, and also brings images of other related works, videos and texts of references, serving as source of documentation and research.
In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (1939), Jorge Luis Borges tells the fictional and unbelievable story of the title character who, by rewriting line by line, word for word, the famous book of Cervantes, wrote a version "almost infinitely more rich" than the old one. The operation undertaken by Menard takes place not by the creation of a proper object, but by symbolically rectifying something already existed previously. On the one hand, judges the object and its history, while on the other, gives it significance, current and future, different from the original. Under the pen of Menard, or rather, Borges, Cervantes' The Quixote — the Knight of the Woeful Countenance who, after reading romances of chivalry, decides to go around the world following fantasies that do not match to reality — transfigures without leaving traces. Tells us an invisible story in which object and meaning juxtapose, in a way that the first becomes, somehow, only the material correlate of the speculative process that has set up the second.
It is from the critical reconfiguration proposed by Borges, the notions of value and history subjacent to his narrative, that this exhibition aims to provide a reflection on how speculation, projects and expectations act influentially on both the future and the present and past in the economic, political, social and artistic/cultural fields.
The different artistic proposals of this exhibition articulate, each one in its way, various aspects of these issues. On the whole, delineating a complex scene in which are figured and analyzed procedures of symbolic and value rectification, project formulation, construction of identity, economic and conceptual speculation, formal appropriation and re-articulation, among others. Moreover, without losing sight of the context experienced by Brazil nowadays — considering, for example, its insertion and growth in the global political and economic scenario, the discovery and exploitation of the Pre-Salt and assignment to host the Olympic Games (2016) and the World Cup (2014) — the exhibition presents various documents, offering to the public a more understandable reference to the critical content, sometimes only tacit, of the works. Magazines, posters, newspapers and works establish, thus, a constant dialogue between themselves, outlining a poetic vision and critical overview of the current historical-political-social panorama.
