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Souls & Zeitgeist
Pilar Parcerisas (2013)
Photography as record of a human experience.
Perhaps, that is the reason that moves Emanuel Pimenta's camera,
even today, since his fifteen years of age when he intentionally
made his first portrait. Collecting souls, spirits; the concentrated
energy on a face is almost a deed of moments of life.
Emanuel Pimenta tells that, in the origins of SOULS, there is
a photo he made of an old Japanese man, whose face gave off suffering
and vicissitudes of a life spent in poverty. Pimenta's grandfather
had a small farm not far from the city of São Paulo, it
was near where a Japanese family lived; as neighbor he often
helped them, taking him out of some trouble and a friendship
emerged between them. Emanuel wondered about what could had happened
in the life of that elderly Japanese man to have his face furrowed
by the vicissitudes of time and by the struggle for life. One
day he proposed to make a photo of his face - it was the first
and the only portrait the old Japanese man had in his life. When
Pimenta's grandfather died, his grandmother continued supporting
that old Japanese man and his family, and her strong and determined
personality also took part in that beginning of SOULS.
From there, Emanuel Pimenta imagined a photographic project that
would connect people from different cultures in different places
of the world: artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers,
architects, lawyers, musicians, anthropologists... all them forming
a constellation sharing a common axis: the Zeitgeist, the spirit
of the time. SOULS simultaneously is an album illustrating Pimenta's
multiple encounters with persons with world, who have left their
mark on their environment as well as in art and cultural parameters,
and that have looked at the world with creative and generously
human soul.
But we would be mistaken to interpret this album of SOULS, which
has already become an endless work in progress, as an attempt
to make artistic portraits. His intention is linked to the course
of life and experience. What gave continuity to those beginnings
were the concerts Emanuel went, especially those of Hermeto Pascoal,
a musician who exerted an important influence in his life. Hermeto
Pascoal played with Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, and
his concerts lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Emanuel
performed photos of the concerts, many times on the stage, and
arriving at dawn, they shared breakfast together with all who
had resisted until the end.
The complicity with the musicians, with the actors of those concerts,
formed part of these portraits, that have the face soaked in
the footprint of the time. Like a mirror, Emanuel Pimenta has
made these portraits, which are also a mirror of their time.
Photography has something of mysterious, which despite being
inside the photography we are seeing, one cannot see, we can
just intuit. At its inception, it was rejected because, in the
Catholic conception, man was made according the image and likeness
of God, and the image of God could not be fixed by any human
machine. Perhaps Walter Benjamin, in his Brief History of Photography,
had rescued this mystery with the concept of "optical unconscious",
so present in the portraits of SOULS, a photographic essay that
doesn't intend to carry out a gallery of famous portraits of
Western culture, but rather a record of humanities: capturing
the "aura" of the character in those faces who have
crossed the life of Emanuel Pimenta and that share a sense of
the time. That is also the "aura", the here and now
of a present of life, also carried out by means of photography,
which is a instrument destructive of "aura", according
to Benjamin, because it brings art to the masses through reproduction,
with the usual loss of "aura" that entails.
However, at the same time, the project includes not only "souls"
of famous people, but also of anonymous beings, as did David
Octavius Hill to have models to paint the fresco of the first
synod of the Scottish Church in 1843. We would just say that
there is no separation in the treatment that Emanuel Pimenta
makes on the known faces from the anonymous beings that are part
of SOULS.
Zen philosophy that accompanies the life journey of Pimenta leads
that work in progress, so that the images are transformed into
time. Sum of moments that refer to characters, but also to moments
of life lived in art and culture. Men and women of the twentieth
century from different places and cultures that bear on their
face the mark of the century, of the time, of a culture and way
of life of the West. It is, rather, a constellation of "auras"
that have built history, named or unnamed.
Inside this constellation, known for her passion and incombustible
dedication to art and culture, Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, whom
the author pays tribute in the forty years of experience collecting
SOULS and to whom this book is dedicated. Lucrezia de Domizio
Durini, rara avis of the cultural world and tireless diffuser
of Joseph Beuys' thought, has been a lighthouse in the artistic
life of Emanuel Pimenta, from 1990, the date of their first meeting
in Milan. The time of progress, the speed of the present, the
accuracy in the organization of events and the passion for hard
work and no rest or delay, represents part of the soul of the
West. For Emanuel Pimenta, Lucrezia is part of his cultural family
in front line, because her sense of freedom and independence
approaches her to characters of the artistic culture like Harald
Szeemann or Pierre Restany, accomplices in many of her cultural
adventures, side by side with Durini Buby, disappeared in 1994
and whose vicinity to the scientific world acted in counterpoint
with the scientism of Joseph Beuys. Lucrezia and Buby undertook
an adventure through art and culture that even today bears fruits.
Many "souls" went through these cultural initiatives,
today mirror of recent history, that Lucrezia De Domizio Durini
has collected in her memoirs and book with the essay Perché.
Le sfide di una donna oltre l'arte.
The history of humankind is collective and our time is no exception.
In the creative world of Emanuel Pimenta those faces converted
into images have become traces of time, memory of a present still
in force, yet not exhausted by a progress that seems endless.
The collector, says Benjamin, is a "physiognomist of the
world of the things"; in the same way, Emanuel Pimenta collects
these physiognomies looking at the world from "his world",
like the old Japanese man, whose face was the mirror of life
he had lived, constructing, from the poverty and the anonymity,
the history of humankind.
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