Transeuntis Mundi at MAC 2023

WE ALL ARE TRANSEUNTIS MUNDI

by Alexandre Milagres

We have been in continuous movement. From macro to micro, from planet to particle, we are a state of inconstancy and change. Our deepest concerns are always connected to the desire to move in space and transform ourselves as a spirit. Leave, or rather just go. After all, there is no way back home. The place we started from will never be as we left it.

Having human migrations as a starting point, the Transeuntis Mundi (TM) project, created in 2018, connects us to the very history of its creators. The Brazilian artist and musician Cândida Borges, a mixture of Bahia and Niterói (Rio de Janeiro/Brazil), crossed the Atlantic to develop her PhD in Arts at the University of Plymouth (UK). The artist Gabriel Mario Vélez, born in Medellín (Colombia), obtained his doctorate in Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and completed a post-doctorate in Córdoba (Argentina).

The set of works in the Transeuntis Mundi – Deriva 01 exhibition, which includes WebDerive 01, invites us to reflect on our ancestral nomadism, our presence and our movements around the world, through virtual reality technologies, augmented reality, generative compositions, presentations and performances. Immersed in these works, we traveled through Colombia, Brazil, England and the United States, jumping virtually and experiencing the daily life of many places.

From the whistle of the train near Zilker Metropolitan Park, in Austin, to the waves of a small beach in Rio de Janeiro, we are called to an outpouring of senses, to experience a latent corporeality that becomes strange in the most commonplace of everyday life: the couple buying potatoes at a fair, the child balancing on a scooter, the dog running in a square, the car going up a street, people running in a park or entering a river, everything around takes on symbolic relevance.

Moving around the world, observing, as the artists propose to us join in journey that connects peoples and cultures from such different places, some comparisons naturally take shape. From fairs in Rochester to those taking place in Niterói, would we be more alike than we thought we were? From Popayan to Plymouth, amidst the cultural variations and recombinations that each moment and location provide, can we say that we play, walk and talk as a single humanity? Would “humanity”, this totalizing notion of what we are, also be a concept in movement?

In Deriva 01, proposed by Transeuntis Mundi, we find a call and an opportunity to review ourselves and, who knows, experience other variations of our transhuman condition, “mutations” as proposed by the generative work that, based on data and collections from the DNArchive Project, recombines sound and visual landscapes from different parts of the world, generating sounds that may one day become one of the destinations of our restless human journey.

Incidentally, it is also necessary to ask ourselves how much this journey over the last few decades – or even throughout the last century – could have been done blindly, not just metaphorically. We live in the Anthropocene, an era in this world in which the impacts of our actions are visible on the horizon, but, despite being clearly sensitive, there are those who continue walking without noticing anything, moving only to keep moving forward, with the world and the people around being a mere familiar scenario, gray, blurred, common and uninteresting.

De-automatizing the senses becomes, then, more than an artistic process, a manifesto-act essential to each one of us, as proposed by the Poetic Score: “you are a transeuntis mundi. / start your journey by recognizing where you are, / what you hear, what you see and who you are.” Stop for a few minutes and listen around, wonder what is in this environment and, when leaving the exhibition, stay awake, look for your nomadic roots and give a new chance to those who walk with you. We are all ‘transeuntis mundi’. If we got here together, we also managed to change direction together.

This exhibition at MAC is developed by Criarte Casa de Arte e Cultura and Rapsódia Empreendimentos Culturais, with the support of the Municipal Law of Culture in the city of Niterói. The project has support for research and art from the University of Antioquia (Colombia), the Complexo Hospitalar de Niterói (CHN), which is part of Dasa, the largest integrated health network in Brazil, the Music Not Impossible project, and the company Zoom US. Special thanks to MAC, Niterói City Hall and Niterói Art Foundation.

Opening schedule on the 5th, Saturday:

Opening to the public at 2 pm.

Round table at 3:30 pm with artists and international guests on the theme “The aesthetics of walking – nomadic creative and artistic practices”.

Release of the Exhibition Book at 4pm.

Opening concert at 4:30 pm will present an immersive sound experience with audiovisual works by composers from 4 continents.

The exhibition runs until September 3, 2023 – MAC Niterói and online exhibition

Deriva 01  at Mac Niterói

Address: Mirante da Boa Viagem, s/nº – Boa Viagem, Niterói 

Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm

Web Derive 01

Online exhibition – access the link.

About the Concert

Guest Artists: Rodrigo Henao & Esteban Henao (Colombia)

About the Round Table: “The aesthetics of walking – nomadic creative and artistic practices”

Guest Artists:

Cândida Borges & Gabriel Mario Vélez – Transeuntis Mundi

Geert Veermeire (Belgica) & Fred Adam (França/Espanha) – Supercluster Locative Media

Persis Jade Maravala  &  Jorge Lopes Ramos – ZU-UK 

Follow Transeuntis Mundi at Facebook www.facebook.com/transeuntismundi  and Instagram www.instagram.com/transeuntismundi .