Gesto das Pedras: da fenomenologia flusseriana às coisas de Wanda Pimentel
This essay explores the enigma of gestures through the works of Vilém Flusser and the Brazilian painter Wanda Pimentel by starting from the paradoxical assumption that a rock can perform a gesture. Some paintings from Pimentel’s series Envolvimentos (Entanglements) and Montanhas do Rio (Mountains of Rio) reveal a sort of ambiguous expressiveness of legs, rocks, windows, clothes, and other objects. They seem to be endowed with that which Flusser called the “artificiality” of gestures.
Naturalmente artificiale. Natura e cultura a volo d’uccello
What can still be defined as ‘authentic’ in our world today? Is it true that we are interested only in the ‘authentic’ nature (or what we think it is)? What does ‘authentic’ mean in relation to nature? In the essays of Vogelflüge, published for the first time in São Paulo in 1979 under the title Natural: mente, Vilém Flusser investigates the paradoxical connection between the concepts of authenticity and artificiality, proposing the cultural form of nature as a model of the natural form of culture. As occasional philosophy from a bird’s-eye perspective, the volume is the expression of an experimental method of thought and writing, which corresponds to the essentially utopian nature of the human being. The full postmodern consciousness of the difference between the need for authenticity and the impossibility of satisfying it, explains Flusser’s phenomenologically distanced, yet poetic approach to the natural simulacra of his own culture.