Image: Felipe raizer moreira

Concept:

The exhibition explores what it is to lose something, someone, some direction and some sense of self. But is it so bad to be a flaneur, flaneuse, in wanderlust, in terra incognita, a nomad, a shaman, a drifter?

A fantastic array of international artists come together in one space to find lucidity in that loss. Through various retrieval methodologies the artists explore navigational strategies, emotional celibacy, memories, reinvention, survival skills and escapism. Work exhibited include film, animation, photography, installations, drawings, paintings and sculpture to keep hold of old ties, retrace steps and to experience the joy of retrieval.

The exhibition asks the audience how we find clarity and closure when the subject has ceased. It allows the artists to answer how the unforeseen is evitable not calculated or measured because ultimately our possessions may have disappeared but we are still here.


Image courtesy of Ellen Jantzen

Publication-essay

Translated into English.

Lisbon, August 7, 2019 - Fabrica Braco de Prata devote the months of August and September "the tension between appearing and disappearing that characterizes contemporary art", in the words of curador art and "materializing" factory, Professor Nuno Nabais Philosophy. The starting point is an exhibition, curated by British Diana Ali, entitled Loss & Lucidity. The collective, which brings together 59 artists of different nationalities and belonging to distant aesthetic traditions, “questions on how to find clarity and closure. It allows the artists to then find answers on how the unexpected can be avoided instead of calculated or measured, because ultimately, our possessions may have disappeared, but we are still here," says Diana Ali.


The full list of artists is https://losslucidity.blogspot.co.uk . Visitation August 8 and September 18.

Curator of art and "materializing" Factory Arm Silver, Professor of Philosophy Nuno Nabais writes about Loss & Lucidity. Read below:

"Art is what appears just to show up. Before having a meaning, a form, a story, each new object - created according to the aesthetic regime - mainly responds to a need for appearance. It is created to be seen, heard, touched or read. And what defines your work of art is precisely this ontological status of autonomy, that is the fact that the art object, be it beautiful, sublime, ugly or sinister, just the act of appearing. There is another way of thinking that is common to all the works that we recognize as art. Art is what appears and is conserved in this simple show, with no other purpose than to stay in this appearance (a museum, a computer monitor, a public place or a private place). Since Plato that this autonomy appears in art experience was disqualified as appearance. The West is defined largely by this double equation art = false appearance = / = real what-not-appears = true. You traverse so the pursuit of knowledge for the ideal sphere to the sphere of what is captured only by concepts. Only what can be learned out of any vision, hearing, or reading tangibility, is respected as real and as true.

The whole art of the twentieth century is crossed by the ruin of this evidence. On the one hand, bringing functional objects with an inherent meaning and usefulness of the system for the interior of the appearance of artistic objects. It was the famous case of urinal Marcel Duchamp. By the simple act of making appear as pure pop up a urinal sink by placing it in the center of an art gallery, Duchamp showed that anything could be transformed into art since it is subordinate to pure devices appear. On the other hand, especially in the field of performing arts, contemporary art work experience, not so much the appearance of something, but rather, to his disappearance. Extreme event is perhaps the film of João César Monteiro Snow White. Nothing appears. It is a film is a work of art yes, but that brings up your own demise.

The Silver Arm Factory wants to devote the months of August and September thinking this tension between appearing and disappearing that characterizes contemporary art. Your starting point is a group exhibition curated by Diana Ali. With the title "Loss and Lucidity", 59 artists of different nationalities and belonging to very distant aesthetic traditions, erode our concepts of "appearance," “look ".

The bottom line is, as it appears in the art what is lost, what happens as disappearance? Will lucidity before the loss, acute awareness of a void left by what has disappeared, now defines the appearance regime of artistic creation? And this clarity (at the same time as perceptual awareness mode and how ethical experience of mourning for the missing), it will have the status of "revealing" of what is to be seen in the artwork? "

The whole art of the twentieth century is crossed by the ruin of this evidence. On the one hand, bringing functional objects with an inherent meaning and usefulness of the system for the interior of the appearance of artistic objects. It was the famous case of urinal Marcel Duchamp.

By the simple act of making appear as pure pop up a urinal sink by placing it in the center of an art gallery, Duchamp showed that anything could be transformed into art since it is subordinate to pure devices appear. On the other hand, especially in the field of performing arts, contemporary art work experience, not so much the appearance of something, but rather, to his disappearance. Extreme event is perhaps the film of João César Monteiro Snow White. Nothing appears. It is a film is a work of art yes, but that brings up your own demise.

Space Place Practice



Space Place Practice is an artists’ research collective which comes together to create dialogues and to develop projects informed by a shared interest in notions of space, place and creative practice. These are....


Anwyl Cooper-Willis
Bristol, UK

‘Untitled (Rudder)’

(Frottage, oil pastel on waxed calico. 310 x 98 cm)


What is a rudder without a ship? The boat is lost, the rudder willing but unable, functionless. It is 130 years old, a testament to the skill of the shipwrights, surviving beyond its time, it is now lost. The textile holds a shade of the object translating its fragility.


Victoria J E Jones

‘Harena: The Smell of Absence, The Smell of Pause, The Smell of Presence’

(Olfaction installation)


Sand is a finite resource, and demand for sand for use in construction is rapidly accelerating. The movement of sand from one site to another creates an absence in one place, a presence in another. A void and a form. Balance disrupted. What would happen if these processes were slowed, suspended or stopped? This series of olfactory works is intended to invite us to reconsider the materialities of contemporary urban futures and the geo-politics of sand.

The work was developed as part of a ‘Creating Earth Futures’ commission, a Leverhulme funded project through the Geo-Humanities department of Royal Holloway University.



Suze Adams
Bristol, UK

‘Creatures (animal, vegetable, mineral)’

(Sculpture/installation, plastic, paper, paint)


Creatures are my response to the sudden death of my partner – an instinctive reaction to the world as I now know it. They were inspired by a trip to Inle, Myanmar and a group of small, temporarily lost Buddhas. Much as the Buddhas have been re-found, I am re-finding myself and, in the process, a semblance of lucidity after the loss of P. 


 Sarah Rhys
Bristol, UK

‘Ghost Chair’
 Photograph on Somerset enhanced paper (60 x 70 cm  framed. Limited edition of 25)

Ghost Chair is part of a seriesof works that involved taking this old chair, an ancestral heirloom, to different places, both as a performative act and as an artwork.

Ghost Chair has a presence that also speaks of absence. There is a sense that many have belonged to this chair in the past, however this chair no longer offers any kind of ‘seat’. It holds an empty space like a chair in ‘Gestalt’. 



Dr Pippa Galpin
Malvern, Worcestershire

‘Floor Rubbings - Illuminating Secrets’

(Wax and pigments on paper)

Red quarry tiles line my kitchen floor. Largely unseen and unremarked, they nevertheless hold a secret history: the haptic impact of movement over time, of the opposing forces of wear and accretion. From their rubbings a network of capillaries and chasms emerges, evoking all that has been forgotten. 



Maureen Gamble
Malvern, England

‘Marking Time’

Digital photography(W235cm x H435cm)


Marking timewas a durational work made between 15.00 hrs and 16.00 hrs on 20/04/17. At set intervals throughout the hour, I recorded sunlight falling directly onto the same spot on the floor of an interior space. Marking Timewas an opportunity to engage with the present and the here and now.


 Lydia Halcrow
Bath, UK

‘Ground Texture Recordings’

(Drypoint print, handmade ink from earth on Hahnemühle (78 x 53cm)



‘All the Plastics’ 


(Photo etching on Hahnemühle (70 x 45cm)



This work responds to a series of walks along the Taw Estuary in North Devon, UK. Ground Texture Recordings uses a technique I have developed, wearing modified walking boots to record the contact between each foot-step and the surface of the ground onto metal. Each walk creates an etching that I print with using earth collected along the walk. All the Plastics is part of a wider grid series and acts as a visual archive of every piece of plastic that I collect that has been deposited by the sea at the high tide mark along the estuary. 



Victoria Walters
Bath, UK

‘On Longing’
(Willow charcoal drawing on paper, 500mm x 705mm)


When I first visited Lisbon, I was captivated by the Portuguese fado tradition and its powerful evocation of saudade, longing and loss, the hard realities of daily life and hope for their resolution. For the exhibition I have developed a charcoal sketchbook drawing made in response into a larger work.



Rob Irving
Frome, Somerset UK

(3 stills from a short film: Porlock Weir. Digital images)


Three stills for a short film, slowed down, recording 7 minutes of estuary tide at Porlock Weir, West Somerset, UK. This area has always been a liminal space between land and sea, and with rising tides it is being left for nature to take its course. 
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