article
Alô?, by Yuli Yamagata
At the School of Arts, Catholic University of Portugal, the gallery is occupied by an exhibition by Yuli Yamagata, entitled ‘Alô?’ and curated by João Mourão, Luís Silva and Nuno Crespo.
The exhibition's interrogative title denotes—revolving around that typical interjection of someone on a cell phone, for example, questioning the presence of another—a central point that doesn't evoke an affirmation, but a questioning. This questioning boils down to a simple colloquial expression of someone questioning a presence. Organized around a film of the same name, the exhibition combines it with other elements, sculptural or wall-mounted, that dialogue with the central film through the translation of elements between the filmic narrative and the exhibition space. In this sense, the exhibition seems to evoke a universe that materializes the questions that guide the central piece.
Thus, we find a space inhabited by mutations, where the figure appears among the objects in a somewhat inconspicuous way, in fragments combined with other elements, through the conjugation of disparate materials. The film, centered on an apparent human being who questions the possibility of their existence being merely the dream of a snail, unleashes a fantastic mythology where elements such as the snail or corn become recurring motifs in the pieces that expand this universe. If the narrative launches itself through a question, it branches out into these figures and material interweavings that summon the absence of clear logic and identity in favor of a free exploration of hybrid bodies where seduction and discomfort mingle. This game seems to refer to the aforementioned attempt to interrogate, rather than affirm, possibilities, where each body seems to go to several places at the same time and coagulate like different creatures at different points. Deleuze and Guattari point to the process of becoming, a movement, in opposition to the stability of essence: “What is real is becoming itself, the block of becoming, and not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. (...) If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is it? It is a phenomenon, but a border phenomenon. (...) Thus, there is a dividing line for each multiplicity; it is by no means a center, but rather the enveloping line or the most distant dimension, in terms of which it is possible to count the others...”1 Now, it is precisely this movement that the artist seems interested in. If, on the one hand, the figures refuse defined identities, they resemble processes of explosion, of differentiation of parts that suffer divergent forces, which compete for the conquest of representation. Even in the appearance of identifiable figures, and the titles of the pieces all refer to concrete terms, these always appear in a process of mutation of the materials that configure them, as stages of the worked matter.
Hence, the process of continuous restructuring occurs at the ‘molecular’ level, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, where the mutation of the visible and collective occurs as a conglomerate of the individual parts that constitute it: “all becomings are already molecular. (...) Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one possesses or the functions one performs, becoming is extracting particles between which the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness closest to what one is becoming are established and through which one becomes.”2 In this way, each piece constitutes an assemblage of materials and forms, of objects and textures, reliefs and surfaces. These conjugations also explore the combinations between figures of diverse natures. Following the fantastic narrative that guides the film and the exhibition, this unfolds into philosophical questions with supernatural tendencies, as a constant unfolding of the hybridization between the natural and the machinic. The corn crosses with an antenna as a molecular unfolding of differentiated organs in the sense of Donna Haraway's cyborg: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, simultaneously a creature with social reality and a creature of fiction.”3 The cyborg is the figure that constantly reiterates the process of coupling and uncoupling its parts, where the essential figure is replaced by a process of experimentation. Each experience promotes new transformations, before which the subject, facing itself, only questions: alô? (hello?)
The exhibition can be visited until December 13th at the School of Arts.
1 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023). A Thousand Plateaus, p. 278, 286.
2 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2023). A Thousand Plateaus, p. 318.
3 Haraway, D. (2022). Um Manifesto Ciborgue / O Manifesto das Espécies de Companhia, p. 25. Free Translation.
BIOGRAPHY
Mariana Machado (2000) was born in Porto and studied Cinema at Escola das Artes - Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She is currently studying for a Master's Degree in Digital and Sound Arts, also at Escola das Artes. She is an artist and researcher, interested above all in manifestations that articulate the moving image in a context between cinema and contemporary art, as well as the artistic potential of new technologies and their articulations with other materialities.
ADVERTISING
Previous
article
-054-xns5g.jpg)
03 Dec 2025
Earth Gods / Velar Sculpture, at the Museu do Oriente
By Margarida Alves
Next
agenda
04 Dec 2025
4th Edition of Passeio da Estrela – 13 December
By Umbigo
