To contemplate existence linked to a time-space to which we belong is a fundamental guiding principle of human thought itself. The human being has a desire for inscription and understanding. Our inherent need to translate our explorations and elaborations of the world into meaningful language, so that we can express and convey them, is also the greater work of our existence to carve out a place that identifies us and endures (ours, who share the Eurocentric notion that life is a progressive linearity from beginning to an end).

The act of creation encapsulates these two desires.

But what happens when we find ourselves displaced from this time-space that constitutes us? If, as the great Brazilian thinker Leda Maria Martins teaches, 'in everything we do, we express what we are, what drives us, what shapes us, what makes us part of a group, a set, a community, culture, and society,' what can poetic elaboration do in face of non-places that transition events impose on the individual?

In SIGNIFICÂNCIA, Brazilian visual artist Dan de Carvalho explores these premises. Starting from displacement, from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam (and all that it entails), the artist delves into our most primal organizational mechanism, language, to grapple with (himself) thinking of a new ensemble. In a game that uses the translating operation as a creative passage beyond language itself, as access and inscribing principle of new places—a reboot in palimpsest that simultaneously opens up new meaningful possibilities (and invites the viewer to propose them) and anchors its own origin by maintaining words in their vernacular.

Creating, in this logic, may ultimately be our search for permanence through constant redefinition. A way to deal with our finiteness through the communicative tradition that postulates that, in the fabric of existence, it is the other who completes us."

To contemplate existence linked to a time-space to which we belong is a fundamental guiding principle of human thought itself. The human being has a desire for inscription and understanding.

In SIGNIFICÂNCIA, Brazilian visual artist Dan de Carvalho explores these premises. Starting from displacement, from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam (and all that it entails), the artist delves into our most primal organizational mechanism, language, to grapple with (himself) thinking of a new ensemble.