I would like company to talk while I have my hair cut.

(to my love)

“Hello, O Globo Journal small ads. Who do I talk to?”
“You talk to Anna, I’d like to make an announcement.”
“What kind of ad?”
“I offer company.”
“Company? But company for what?”
“For anything, there are some examples here, moral support, bureaucracies, projects, boredom, not prostitution, no, and it does not involve money.”
“But what is the purpose of your ad? If it does not involve money, your ad has no purpose. We can not make an ad without purpose.”
“The purpose is to offer a company.”
“That’s not within the newspaper’s standards, I can not make that announcement. In this case you need to come face to face to the office.”

—

This was the way that the artist Anna Costa e Silva began the process of “Ofereço companhia” work for which she would spread advertisements in newspapers and on the internet declaring herself available to accompany anyone in any activity. After intense scheduling dynamics, 33 meetings were held in a period of 21 days. The effort to spread the call in different communication channels meant that a large part of the participants were unknown people who asked Anna’s company for a variety of actions, such as ripping old letters and bills, caring for a newborn baby, helping organize the rooms of a house after the end of a relationship and talk about life and impermanence in a graveyard.

The present exhibition is formed by a set of traces and derivations of an immaterial work defined exclusively by the sequence of encounters: a video that shows the first attempt to publish the advertisement in the newspaper; The same handwritten, published as a printed ad and on different internet sites; Pages taken from a notebook with markings and clearances on the activity schedule during the 21 days; A set of 33 photos related to each of the meetings; 3 artist books composed of interlocutions with the curious and interested public at work through messages in whatsapp, facebook and e-mail; And 40 monocles in which we can read small and intense fragments of the conversations that occurred during the action.

Recently, Anna Costa e Silva has been developing works that are carried out as disruptive dynamics of communication, relationship and socialization that stress the processes of formation of subjects, ties and identities. They are therefore works that take place in the dimension of ethics, through operations that lead us to question the basal values ​​of our ways of being and of relating. It is important to notice that the announcement made by Anna made it clear that this was not a remunerated action, but did not make it explicit as an art work. Many of the participants requested her company without questioning her intentions. Others, after questioning, were informed about the nature of the action and still remained suspicious. But why, in the end, did this work generate so much estrangement? Why do we bother with the idea of ​​someone abdicating the image of “independent human being” to assume that we want or need the companionship of others? Why does it cause distrust when someone offer their own time and strength to the other without financial gain?

We are currently experiencing a critical time for Western culture, when we look at the vacuum left by the inadequacy and bankruptcy of some of the major foundations of modernity. We daily experience the urgency of developing what will be in place, for example, of individualism, rationality, identity, utilitarianism, the predominance of the economic dimension and the notion of the future with progress. If we perceive humanist principles in check and cruelty threatening to become hegemonic conduct, it is crucial that we are actively creative in filling the value gap. The initiatives are as fertile and generous as in Anna’s works, which create extraordinary situations that stimulate us to create new ways to act, with new values, in the present time. It is when we understand that the creative (non-perverse) ethical transgression of the artist has an important social function of expanding or undoing limitations.

If the works in this exhibition refer to the previous action with the 33 participants, they also bring to us the remembrance that it is the nature of “accompanying” to be unapprehensible, unrepresentable. Regardless of which actions Anna’s company was solicited for (and the exhibition does not reveal them in their entirety), they were performed between Anna and the participant (not by Anna and the participant), and only there, in the dimension of affection, of subjective content streams, the initial work existed. To us, traces, referential indices, the original statement and the notion that the human is really an animal that sometimes needs to go hand in hand.

Bernardo Mosqueira
February, 2017