The  "starkness"  of  the  visual  elements  in  the  Beckettian  setting  might  appear,  at  first, little inspiring for a visual artist. Nothing can be taken away from or added to the arid, empty, sterile stage; the spatiality is absolutely mute. If it is therefore impossible to add anything to the space, it is necessary to add to the time; to extend the already extremely slow Beckettian time - totally contrary to the contemporary velocity - to the utter limit, that is, make the duration of the play the duration of the exhibition: make the one equal to the other.

This is the transposition of Endgame that Tatiana Blass proposes. In this more temporal than spatial event, time is the true protagonist. Everything takes place in a movement that  verges  on  immobility,  as  the  question  is  raised:  What  is  happening,  if  nothing happens?

Samuel Beckett wrote Endgame in 1954, still under the effects of the disaster of World War II. The cast consists of four characters (Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell); Beckett describes the stage as: Bare interior. Gray light (...) Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture (...) touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ashbins (...) in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, Hamm.

The characters are practically immobilized  and  remain  that  way,  the  speech  between  them is truncated, reticent, oblique: No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we, observes Clov. Time and space inexorably calcified.

In the exhibition, all of the action of the play, already sluggish, is decelerated, reduced to the nearly imperceptible melting and dissipation of the wax; the perfect material for personifying the slow desperation of the narrative, the exhaustion of any understanding between the characters. In this way, Tatiana gives rise to a kind of sculptural inversion: the regression of the sculpture to the material, the reversion to the formless state. The sculptures, which are the actors and characters, gradually dissolve under the heat of the lights, and the beginning becomes the end. From wax to wax, from dust to dust.

In a certain way, the exhibition proposes, on its terms, an end to Endgame - one in which everything is melted, dissipated, dissolved... but also there, as the character Hamm states, "the end is in the beginning and yet you go on".

 Text written for the exhibition "Endgame", project "Contemporary Room A", Brazil Bank Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro, January 2011. Translated by John Norman.