The wreckage | fernandomoletta

The contract, The drawing and The wreckage

One Day, when Care crossed the river

curated by Valerie Rath, with Gabriel Junqueira and Georgina Pantazopoulou

at Duplex, Lisbon

"One day, when Care crossed the river, she saw some clay. She started shaping the clay, and once she was done, Jupiter came by and so Care (Cura) asked him to give spirit to her creation, which he gladly granted. But when Care wanted to name the creature after her, Jupiter prohibited this, and demanded that it should be given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were arguing, Earth (Tellus) arose and demanded the being be named after her, as she was formed from her body. Unable to end the dispute, Saturn finally joined in and pronounced the following judgement: ‘Jupiter, since you have given it spirit, take the soul after its death; Earth, since you provided the body, you shall receive the body. But since Care shaped this creature, she should possess it as long as it is alive. And because now there is a dispute over the name, let it be called homo, since it appears to have been made from humus (earth)." (Hyginus Fabulae 220, paraphrased)

[...] In his work, Fernando cares about the intangibility of time, about ghosts and hauntology, about a future that is no longer what it once was, about finding answers to unanswerable questions and by seeing his work right now, you are prompted to care about these matters too. Fernando presents us with fragments scattered around the room, some of them beautifully presented, others seemingly uncaringly thrown about; some of them are empty, others contain fortune-cookie-like slips of paper. What was written in the past on the notes melted into the fragments can impact your future, if you believe in it, if you trust in it, if you care about it; or it can evaporate into oblivion without leaving any trace within you. What will enter in our fragmented memory often lies beyond our control, so we can ask ourselves: do we only remember what we once cared about? Will what we don't care enough about in the present haunt us as ghosts in the future? If we really deal with the state of the earth and all its accumulated crises, a disenchantment with the future is easy to arise that makes us answer this question with 'yes'. Ghosts are creatures of repetition, we cannot control their coming as they begin by coming back. Is it therefore possible, that ghosts take care of us and help us to remember the past in order to avoid its repetition? Similarly to the notion of care that is omnipresent even by being absent, ghosts are non-beings, being present by being absent. But not all care is good, not all ghosts are evil, what can be said is that neither of them are neutral notions. [...]