Tremor
Welcome to this map
though it doesn’t offer access to
anything real
— Marília Garcia, from “de cima”, in Câmera lenta)

Using a sewing machine to create movement in lines that skate over felt surfaces, Guga Szabzon hand traces maps of palpable impressions, dreams and recollections. Her practice is driven by the desire to map the course of different actions that constitute lived experience: from the sensation of an atmospheric phenomenon (Ventania, 2022) to imagined landscapes (Dois mundos, 2019).

In her first works in felt, from 2016, she explored the representation of lined notebook pages in which the poetic use of the words and the lines merged to construct meaning. In more recent works, selected for her first individual exhibition at Millan, these lines become autonomous, broken and inconstant; the surfaces take on greater dimensions; the word leans towards the suggestive titles, which in turn allude to the situations that the artist desires to map (Tremor, 2022). Guga Szabzon’s poetics – both then and now – arise from dealing with the boundaries between writing, sewing and drawing.

Positioned at the corner of the table in the artist’s studio, the sewing machine turns the tremor into a physical state. The controllable and careful gesture of the hands disputes with the speed and automatism of the machine in an act that is as contingent as it is reflexive. The operation imposes a test of strength on the body, in the extent to which the dimensions of the sheets of felt broaden, and, as such, have to be folded, stretched and cropped in order to fit into the limited space between needle and feed.

The tremor also references the accidental and intentional gaps that continually erupt between the coexisting lines in these works. In none of them does the sensitive impression affirm itself through stability: the forms, the words and the actions, vibrate. They are like maps that allow uncertainty around the experience to linger as something of it always remains beyond the field of semantics. They seek, as such, to unstitch the illusory unambiguity that fascinates in labels, in definitions and in delimitations. Yet, while the movements and actions of the lines – at times convulsed, at others imbued with orientation – frustrate hopes of conventional and prosaic order, the apparent disorder found in its place does not imply a world of anarchy in which phenomena occur at random. Rather, there is a shifting between supposedly contradictory forms of order: from tension to extension, from form to formless, from necessity to freedom.

These exercises in cartography accommodate all manner of false steps. “You continue ahead. Fall into a hole. Get up. A fork. You choose the left, go back and that path no longer exists”, writes the artist in her notebooks. It is within this cosmos-chaos that the game is established between sense and nonsense – a common subject, for example, in the literature of Lewis Carroll. Thus, it is through inversions and shifts between oneiric (Or Something About Dreams, 2022) and reflexive states (Empena, 2022), or in the lines of a notebook that transform into geographical coordinates of the worldly globe (Mergulho, 2022), that the works leave open the possibility of wandering between various orders.

The lines are elusive, festive and wobbly; however they manage to form skeins, wefts, spirals and recognisable shapes. The movements, the figures, and the chromatic distinctions add and demarcate relationships. The traces, at times almost calligraphic, only arrive at an oblique meaning in the extent to which they contrast and coexist among others. In this sense, Guga Szabzon’s work is expressed as much in the movement of the lines and dashes, as in what lies between them. This procedure reflects the relationships between sewing and writing, notably in the artist’s notebooks presented here to the public for the first time. In them we encounter accounts of dreams, poetic writing, drawings, collages and the documentation of everyday events - all of which go on to inform the work in textile, either in form, or by rescuing the words that will yield the titles of the works, or be inscribed within them.

The proximity of these two practices is noted by Merleau-Ponty in Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, when the philosopher affirms that, “Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning.” In sewing, just as in writing, working from the inside out points towards a procedure for feeling out the signs constituted - lines and words, in order to find in them a new meaning and, in so doing, give them new life in language. The meaning arrived at is always indirect as it results from arrangement and combination. In the case of Guga Szabzon, writing and sewing might also be thought of as geographical terms: the lines forming curves, mountains, paths. And the surfaces are rugged, porous and full of loose threads: the felt, a material that allows the stitching to penetrate deeply without interference from warps and wefts as in conventional fabrics.

These maps are not commensurable with a real space, but nor do they lie in the indistinct. The palm tree evocative of a landscape (Neblina, 2022) or the pennant flag, indicating wind speed and direction (Âncora, 2022) offer support at this crossroads, only to surrender, and, thus, the scene fragments once again. Cliffs are shattered in dashes, mountains collapse, and paths sway. All of the points of support give in, in the hope that, by way of the doubts, the fractures, and the minutiae of experience, these maps may suggest a new way of seeing the whole.