Uma obra-jogo que solicita de quem a manuseia compactuar com regras abertas e não prescritas: assim a crítica e curadora brasileira Aracy Amaral descreveu os cadernos de Mira Schendel. Essas obras – feitas, em sua grande maioria, no ano de 1971 – são exercícios de composição em papéis encadernados, perfurados, grampeados ou colados, como brochuras ou simples aglomerados de páginas. A artista usufruiu de centenas de conjuntos de folhas, de muitas dimensões, que, compreendidas em sua sequencialidade, formam um percurso no tempo e no espaço. O espaço, nesse caso, é como o de um livro, e o tempo é o dos gestos: leitura/coreografia de manusear, tocar, girar. Letraset, adesivos circulares, setas, retas, furos, arranjos com signos gráficos e letras, labirintos feitos com a letra “o”, e desenhos com as letras “b”, “d”, “p” e “q” habitam esses ambientes e convidam a uma leitura tão vinculada a uma experiência estética quanto aos seus procedimentos de construção. Essas composições, ancoradas em minuciosa linguagem gráfica, apresentam comportamentos ambivalentes: ao mesmo tempo que funcionam no espaço condensado de apenas uma página, parecem também escapar para uma narrativa visual que acontece na sequencialidade gráfica, na navegação pelo caderno, ou seja, no fluxo de folhear uma página depois da outra. An artwork-play that asks those handling it to agree to open, non-prescriptive rules: this is how Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral described Mira Schendel’s notebooks. These pieces – mostly made in 1971 – are compositional exercises on bound, perforated, stapled, or glued paper, like booklets or simple bundles of pages. The artist made use of hundreds of sets of sheets, of various sizes, which, understood in their sequentiality, form a journey through time and space. The space, in this case, is that of a book, and the time is that of gestures: a reading/choreography of handling, touching, turning. Letraset, circular stickers, arrows, lines, holes, arrangements of graphic signs and letters, mazes made with the letter “o,” and drawings with the letters “b”, “d”, “p”, and “q” populate these environments, inviting a reading as tied to an aesthetic experience as to its construction processes. These compositions, anchored in meticulous graphic language, exhibit ambivalent behaviors: while they function within the condensed space of a single page, they also seem to escape into a visual narrative that unfolds through the graphic sequence, the navigation of the notebook, or the flow of turning one page after another.

An artwork-play that asks those handling it to agree to open, non-prescriptive rules: this is how Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral described Mira Schendel’s notebooks. These pieces – mostly made in 1971 – are compositional exercises on bound, perforated, stapled, or glued paper, like booklets or simple bundles of pages. The artist made use of hundreds of sets of sheets, of various sizes, which, understood in their sequentiality, form a journey through time and space. The space, in this case, is that of a book, and the time is that of gestures: a reading/choreography of handling, touching, turning. Letraset, circular stickers, arrows, lines, holes, arrangements of graphic signs and letters, mazes made with the letter “o,” and drawings with the letters “b”, “d”, “p”, and “q” populate these environments, inviting a reading as tied to an aesthetic experience as to its construction processes. These compositions, anchored in meticulous graphic language, exhibit ambivalent behaviors: while they function within the condensed space of a single page, they also seem to escape into a visual narrative that unfolds through the graphic sequence, the navigation of the notebook, or the flow of turning one page after another.