CONVERGING PARALLEL UNIVERSES
We have everything here.
Big heads, big ears, busybodies, angry people, astounded people; mouths, plates, conversations, tables, workbenches, plinths, little creatures who stare, stare at each other, smell, masks and grimaces, half-humans, half-animals, half-vegetables, half-people.
This installation by Susanne Themlitz, in her gallery of little comical and, well, tragic beings, is a fragment of one of her worlds. In other installations she has created other worlds, made up of characters who come from a deep place, between the Black Forest, Trás-os-Montes, a lost attic, a deep basement, a hidden memory, a childhood story, a book one knows by heart, something seen somewhere that also might build a world, like a museum, or a gallery, or a film by Georges Méliès.
The inhabitants of these places are kindly or evil or contradictory elves. They are, as the title indicates, Solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados [Solitary, scowling and self-absorbed]. Themlitz wrote a text about them in which she dissects their characteristics, and narrates the fascinating, dramatic, unbearable and vaguely familiar personality of these beings that always correspond to a little of us, any one of us at any moment.
Therefore, to travel through them means carrying out an exercise of recognition. Ironically, always of someone else.
There is everything here; above all, it seems to us, of others.
Delfim Sardo
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