Estudo para a diversāo: Flávia Junqueira

There is a paradox in the appropriation of elements that represent childhood because there is always something unrepresentable about it. As the origin of the term suggests, infantia is the inability to speak; an infant is one who has not yet mastered language.

It is the stage of existence in which everything exists as virtuality and in which all the potentialities of this forming subject seem achievable. Time is the condition for these potentialities to be fulfilled, but it is also the course along which some of them are abandoned.

To reconstruct the promise of childhood’s fullness, we turn to images closely associated with it: the family outing, the park, the toy. But we can only rediscover such a moment in a model-like, emblematic, abstract way—distant from what we wish to relive as an actual experience. What remains is the artificial exploration of variations on this model, through study, typology, or cartography—strategies that systematically approach what we would like to retrieve as lived experience, as emotion.

In family photographs where we see an outing or the moment leading up to it, there is an attempt to preserve that instant when all desires seemed about to be fulfilled. Looking now at those faces and gestures, it is inevitable to sense a certain distrust, signs that such a promise would never be fully realized. The images we use to shape a fantasy of happiness now signify an absence; they become ghosts—something we desire as much as it haunts us—because we no longer fully recognize them as part of our world.

The decoration of amusement parks, with its archaic aesthetic, creates the illusion of permanence, of time’s immobility. The carousel horse, paradoxically in motion yet frozen in its pose, resembles the chronophotography of Muybridge’s galloping horse—images that attempt to reclaim through technique what the passage of time does not allow to be retained. In the end, this archaic aesthetic operates as a simulacrum that merely conceals what amusement itself consumes. As Agamben says: “Amidst continuous pastimes and various entertainments, the hours, days, and weeks pass in a flash.”When one realizes that time has passed too quickly, that something has been lost within it, and that amusement itself has driven this passage, the attempt to reverse time is sought—albeit in vain—through the very mechanisms of amusement, now operating in reverse.

What childhood marks is the process of acquiring language—that is, the ability to symbolically articulate form. This is both a gain and a loss: in attempting to appropriate the world by exercising the capacity to represent it, the subject finds themselves condemned to a relationship that is always mediated by things, preventing them from touching them directly.

We recognize certain strategies of compensation: cartography carries the promise that representation (the map) will ensure access to real space (the territory). But what is mapped is already a representation, a toy, a symbolic form constituted by language. In this case, bringing the toy into the scene at full scale (“real” here being a figure of speech) might be an effort to compensate for the failure of the map by making it coincide with the territory—just as the cartographers of Borges’ imagined empire did (“On Exactitude in Science”). Inevitably, this effort points only to a utopia: an inoperative map made for an unreachable territory.

“To make sense” of things is to place them within a certain flow, but also to give them a meaning. It is simultaneously the experience of time and language. To “invert meaning” suggests the desire to return to the starting point, to an origin, to the zero degree of meaning, to the time when all potentialities seemed realizable. But it results in absurdity, in discordant music, in the dysfunctional movement of the toy; in other words, in the awareness that memory will never recover the past intact.

What remains is a certain melancholy. But the response we see is not entirely nihilistic because it does not result in inertia, in the mere acknowledgment of failure. Art is the field where language itself reveals its greatest vitality, where it is possible to play more intensely and freely with its own potentialities. Through art, the goal is not merely to recount these irretrievable moments but also to excavate memory toward a future. This is possible because the origin is not a dead space, a lost paradise. It is still a source of tensions that fuel a search. As Agamben claims, “such an origin can never be completely resolved into ‘facts’ that we may suppose to have historically happened, but it is something that has not yet ceased to happen.” Just as time makes evident what seems irretrievable, it also opens before us the territory where all things remain to be built.

It is not about extracting pure laughter from amusement, like the one we believe existed in childhood. Amusement now pertains to what can be diverse, divergent—to the possibility of producing disturbances in the course of a time that often appears linear and homogeneous.

Ronaldo Entler