2018
Encarnação is a project of post-global realism; to put it in Ottjörg A.C.’s own words. Knowing previous works by the artist, it would seem that such a statement resumes the processes of mapping and exploring that he has been constantly pursuing. His works cut across various continents and countries, as well as across giving a voice to anonymous, apparently insignificant and fragmented lives that bear great poetic impact. To get to the point: Ottjörg’s interest always lies in capturing and isolating the artistic potentials of aleatory, real-life occurrences. Through processes of transfiguration, these are bestowed with aesthetic value. His art is therefore based on the appropriation of previously imperceptible matter and the artistic upgrading of its properties.
The Deskxistence project is exemplary in this aspect. School desktops were collected in Ramallah, Beirut, São Paulo, New York, Sarajevo and other cities, and transferred to a cartography of scratchings left behind by the adolescent students. Through them, one can see a demonstration of the desires and mindsets of post-globalised youth. And now, that is what we can experience also in Encarnação.
Ottjörg’s work always consists in an unexpected incursion into the world of engraving. Indeed, engraving is the subject. But never of the conventional kind. The matrixes for the prints are horse and cattle testicles, branding irons, and bloodstained hands – stamping the whiteness of a clean sheet of paper with coagulated clots of ephemeral moments from an ancient and yet contemporary practice: the castration and branding of cattle and herd animals, still widely practiced in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost region.
The work gains a political dimension when it references a rather primitive transformation of life into a commodity, close to ground zero of capitalist accumulation. We are far from the sophistication and subtlety of the process of value creation on the financial market. Nevertheless, that is precisely why this work is emblematic. Within the silence of Ottjörg’s works, initiation rites of capital are pulsing and bleeding.
Laymert Garcia dos Santos is essayist and lecturer in sociology of technology at the University of Campinas, São Paulo. He holds a PhD in Information Technology from the University of Paris VII and was visiting professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford. The focus of his publications is art, culture, and technology.