dialogue #13

Catarina Osório de Castro

Pó de Estrelas (Interstellar Dust)

01.10 - 22.11.25

Text by Joerg Bader

Everyone agrees that photographs are silent by nature. Those that speak and sing are the photographs of cinema, thanks to the magnetic band on the film. A photograph is projected onto paper, as a film is projected onto canvas. In this process, the image is fixed a second time, one could say that it is definitively consigned to silence. And yet, we sometimes speak of a “piercing” or even a “screaming” image, in an imagined sense. The photographs of Catarina Osório de Castro are not only mute, but they are also silent — without wanting to fall into tautology. This is to underline the discretion in the work of the artist, who titled her first series of photographs in 2012, like a program to come: SILÊNCIO.

Her discretion does not prevent her from transgressing the proper rules of photography. The “mistakes” she deliberately commits while shooting were already present in SILÊNCIO where, for example, a rope runs right in front of the face of a man standing, covering his naked body with a beach towel and rendering his face invisible. In the DEVAGAR series, the artist records lights that do not illuminate everything, leaving the contents of a basket (fruits? vegetables? objects?) in shadow. In her new series PÓ DE ESTRELAS, the framing is tighter than ever. She cuts into the face. One woman’s face, painted in silver makeup, is cropped at the very edge of the lower lip — sensual, painted — and the focus falls only on the tip of the nose. This extreme cropping was already foreshadowed in the ECLIPSE series, with the head of a white horse reduced to just muzzle and neck.

In the first part ADN of his final video SCÉNARIO, completed just days before his death, Jean-Luc Godard shows in still image the head-on view of a hoofed animal. One might think it a white horse. With his old, raspy voice, the filmmaker speaks off-screen:

“Take a white horse, to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses... the universe is a finger, everything is a horse.” At the end of the second part, in IMR, Godard returns to his Taoist-inspired formula, sitting in pajamas on the edge of a bed: “Take fingers, to illustrate the fact that fingers are not fingers... take non-horses to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses.” His final public word follows: “OK.”

Yet the animal shown in the ADN video is not a horse, but a donkey! Just hours before voluntarily leaving this world, the filmmaker, through Jean-Paul Sartre, referred back to the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, whose work the sinologist Jean-François Billeter describes as “polyphonic ... [where] reflection comes along with it [polyphony].”1 Catarina Osório de Castro develops a Taoist2 approach to the world. Perhaps her interest in greenhouses and other “gardens of acclimatization” stems from the thought of Zhuangzi.3

With her new series PÓ DE ESTRELAS, the artist takes us into botanical gardens — from Lisbon to Paris, to Glasgow and beyond. In one greenhouse already in decay, Cleistocactus winteri spill from hanging baskets, like endless, colorless lemur tails. In the same image, a branch of Euphorbia polyacantha, native to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia, extends outwards, trailing along a glass barrier like a handrail that has lost its grip. A macro shot shows the tip of a “hairy” cactus, likely an Espostoa melanostele, its extremities forming a halo of sanctity, its prickly stems traced in orange through the fuzzy cloud. In another image, we see a fragmented plant — or rather part of its trunk, as thick as an aged bamboo, entwined with a few leaves.

The ever-present humidity, perceptible also in two shots of fern leaves (probably Woodwardia or Cibotium), suggests hidden processes of rot. Another greenhouse, photographed lengthwise with its rounded end, dominates two-thirds of the image. The foreground shows a moss landscape, its green fading into straw-yellow. Stems with monochrome flowers seem to wither from lack of water. In the same greenhouse, this time photographed from the side and slightly askew, the artist observes a man seen from behind, contemplating the moss landscape. One might suspect him of being an intruder, so much do the other figures in Catarina Osório de Castro’s photographs seem complicit with the photographer.

Is a greenhouse in a botanical garden the abolition of space — even of time?4 If the West saw its first greenhouse at the dawn of the Christian era, after the Egyptians and especially after the Chinese, the inventors, it was thanks to Roman Emperor Tiberius, who wanted cucumbers in the middle of winter. The 16th century witnessed a flourishing of botanical gardens across Europe. But the greenhouses as we know them today are mainly an inheritance of industrial colonialism. Here grew plants from the colonies. The largest greenhouse of the British Empire outside the island was built in 1784 in Calcutta. There, they cultivated tea and opium — not at all local — to test their resilience in new climates. Since the roots took hold, the English launched opium production in Bengal, occupied since 1690, and in 1839 began the First Opium War against China.Joerg Bader

In Taoism, even death must be understood as a natural movement of the Dao, one of its countless transformations. Thus, Zhuangzi was said to have sung joyfully during his mourning period, after the death of his wife. From the Dao’s perspective, everything is ceaseless transformation. The quest for immortality, a central Taoist theme, probably stems from very ancient beliefs, for in the Zhuangzi, the most important figures among the Immortals are the Yellow Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West — a key reference for our artist. She is known for her “golden energy,”a color that reappears on three female faces in PÓ DE ESTRELAS.

As a photographer, Catarina Osório de Castro undertakes one of the most paradoxical tasks5: to reveal the essence of things and of people. To make visible the aspects we hide, those that slip from our perception. She pays close attention to surfaces and to the lights they reflect. She lavishes extreme care on execution, so that we are tempted to caress these surfaces: here, a milky sea with a small ripple; there, an eyelid aged over decades, nearly transparent. In earlier series she often directed her sensitivity toward stone and rock surfaces.

This profound fascination with stones and the temporal dimensions they imply—catapulting us hundreds of millions of years back in time—is something she shares with the artist Uriel Orlow. On the same date, and in parallel in the gallery’s mezzanine, he presents his video WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED THROUGH OUR FUTURE—WE JUST DON’T REMEMBER IT, accompanied by his FOREST MANIFESTO.

For PÓ DE ESTRELAS she includes only one — but what a stone! A stone profoundly black. The expanse of its surface suggests a large rock. A rock that, in one of its hollows, collects rainwater, scattered with tiny white specks — minerals? Impossible to determine the materiality of the glittering dots, but the visual effect is unmistakable: we see a starry sky reflected in the water contained by the rock. As though reversing the direction of our gaze. We lean downward, and perceive the stars of a clear sky free of clouds. A Taoist dust?

The title PÓ DE ESTRELAS refers to a discovery made by astrophysicists in 1957, signed B2FH, after Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. Eric Lagadec, astronomer at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, explains: In the article “Synthesis of Elements in Stars”, the four authors state that ... the Big Bang primarily produced hydrogen and helium. Most of the other atoms were formed in stars, which release them when they die. These new atoms are then injected into the interstellar medium and serve to form new stars. It turns out that our bodies, and those of all living beings, are made of these very same atoms! We can therefore say that we are stardust.

Joerg Bader

1  Jean-François Billeter, Leçons sur le Tchouang-Tseu, p. 126, Allia, Paris 2023

2  “The Dao is a mysterious thing about which it is almost impossible to speak. [...] The Dao cannot be heard: what can be heard is not it. The Dao cannot be seen: what can
be seen is not it. The Dao cannot be spoken: what can be spoken is not it. That which gives form to forms is without form. The Dao has no name.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 22, pp. 182-186,
trans. Jean Levi, Les œuvres de Maître Tchouang, Les éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).

3  It is a relation to the world unfixed by any certainty — not even that of reality itself, as shown by the famous dream of Zhuangzi, who once awoke after dreaming he was a butterfly, and after reflection no longer knew whether it was he who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or the butterfly who had dreamed of being Zhuangzi, and had just awoken. https://www.imaginairedelachine.fr/2020/06/ zhuangzi-365-285-av.j.c.html

4  “To attune oneself to the Dao demands perceiving things no longer as fixed or bounded, but as a flow that carries every being and every thing through ceaseless transformation, abolishing the limits of time and space.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 13, p. 113, trans. Jean Levi, The Works of Master Zhuang, Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).

5  “Forms and colors are apprehended through sight; sounds and words are apprehended through hearing. Alas, all my contemporaries remain convinced that forms and colors, sounds and words are enough to account for external reality. But how could they? That is why he who knows does not speak, and he who speaks does not know. How could the common people ever grasp this truth?” (Zhuangzi, ch. 13, p. 113, trans. Jean Levi, The Works of Master Zhuang, Seditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).