The harbinger of ‘contamination’ is the loss of purity, of the original. It is the arrival that destabilizes the current agreements, creating a new flow of agency between the elements that, upon starting a relationship with a new presence, establish distinct connections.

The Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relationship, addresses the concept of ‘Relationship’, proposing a posture of joint transformation, based on exchange and accompaniment of the Other, without this implying a loss of identity. The writer Sobonfu Somé, in Spirit of Intimacy, reflects on her people, the Dagara, present in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. She discusses the intimacy generated between two people, which gives rise to a third dimension, guided by the Spirit and supported by the entire community. Here, we can see a relational contamination, although centered on human relationships, just as Glissant also proposes in his concept, operating with the distinction between nature and culture.

With this intention, the concept of ‘Relationship’ or ‘Intimacy’ is contaminated here, in such a way as to destabilize the already uneven and fragile rhythm of the boundaries of separation. This state of vulnerability is absorbed, which operates in zones of contagion now thrown into the angularity of the exhibition room itself at GDA. An action of gain in order to be able to lose — as occurs in oxidation systems —, whose traces of the disappearance of a sowing breath that no longer blows remain in an operation of erasure and revelation.

It is the relations between natural and artificial elements — if there is, in fact, a separation between these ideas that is not mobilized by interests of reproduction and maintenance of the hegemonic order — that are sown, expanding beyond a third thing created in the relationship between two. They radiate in the angles of contact, mobilizing a frequency of events, where the pursuit of the image that is undone bursts forth new arrangements, pioneered in the materialities — an interaction of impregnation — and, even so, in the Middle. Middle. Middle.

It is in this flow that we bet on the feat of “half-doing” — this movement with no way out, which operates in loco and without the possibility of maintenance — in the exhibition Incidência Relacional, with the artists Elisa Ortega, Iagor Peres, Juliana dos Santos, Silvio de Camillis, Siwaju and Tau Luna Acosta.

Thais De Menezes

March, 2025.