Blog

For the last few weeks Narcisa has been miraculously converting all of her destructive ways into a mind boggling constructive process that seems to grow and flourish with the passage of time.

She’s also begun talking like a child or some sort of primative being, as if shape-shifting into another person in word as well as deed. Shes been simplifying her language to the point where she doesn’t even bother conjugating verbs or personal pronouns anymore, coming up with childlike phrases like “look what make” and “belly button only ashtray now,” “no like eat fat” - which all sound even weirder when spoken in a complex tongue like Portuguese. Especially coming from somebody with an almost supernatural command of the language who said her first words at one and had read the bulk of Nietzche and the secrets of the Rosa Cruz by the age of eleven.

Today I woke op early after a late light brainstorm session with Alessandra who’s visiting from LA. I had extracted a promise from Narcisa not to wake me before sunup. For once she didn’t. Finally I went down to check on her, certain that she must have passed out or maybe died, fearing that was the reason for her silence.
Alessandra was still out cold, so I walked in the little room that’s become Narcisa’s atelier. Her “laboratorio” where she conducts bizarre experiments, using her own body and mind as the supreme guinea pig.
She was wide awake of course, and grinning like a dog with two tails, sitting on the floor, surrounded by her thousands of tiny bits and scraps of plastic, shiny metal, paper… Pieces of tin cans and plastic objects, things she’s been salvaging from trash cans and sidewalks and gutters, methodically snipping into pieces for months, all cut and torn and deconstructed and reconstructed now into all sorts of different sizes and shapes, divided and sorted and catalogued into piles of diverse order, waiting to be recycled and converted into art projects, sculptures, expressions, “multidimensional portals…”
Amazing.
I sat down beside her and watched in awe as she serenely shaped a few scraps of broken plastic parts and pieces of broken junk into a face vaguely resembling some totemic figure from Easter Island, using her fingernails as screwdrivers and her crooked nicotine-patinaed teeth as pliers.
But this was better than the statues on easter island.
More… “moderna.”
“Look these one, Cigano. Have crazy eye that move, an’ the tongue like reptile. Tongue move too. Is very moderno, hein?” she squealed in delight smiling to rival the sunny day blazing outside her long-shuddered window.
And indeed it was a 3-D sculpture with actual moving parts, spinning eyes and flicking tongue. Everything fitted together perfectly without the benifit of any glue or screws or tape. Simply fitted, like perfect parts of some surrealist jigsaw puzzle..
I remember having bought her a hot glue gun. Within days it was dismantled, sitting in her “art supplies” drawer in ten little pieces, destined to be juxtaposed, converted into parts of another inter-dimentional salvage sculpture.

Narcisa absolutely insists on not using any prefabricated devices like glue or tape for her sculptures, preferring that every part, even the tools she uses to make them and the bonding agents that hold them together must be made of the same recycled trash ingredients.
So now she’s taken to saving all the bubble gum she’s chewed to use in place of traditional “prefabricated” glue. And she keeps it all in plastic bags and containers that she finds in the trash, all seperated by color, filed and meticulously color-coded as part of her endless palette of found materials..
I stood in the doorway watching her. Finally I asked her about the objects she was making.
“Playing,” she said. “Never have it the childhood. Now play… These how the poor childrens got for the toy. Make thing… Make anything from the garbage. These the childhood now. Now is only play…”
I have never loved Narcisa so much, nor have I ever felt so grateful for the opportunity to witness someone who spent her entire life being raped, neglected, abused and abandoned being able to simply play in a safe and friendly space.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos, foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.