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The arrow of time About the exhibition A moment that is repeated over and over Águas Águas Gallery, 8 in Lisbon Manuel Valente Alves Time is not seen or heard. It is situated in a mysterious way below and beyond perceptions and sensations. It has no smell or taste, does not touch, is neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor humid. However, his passage almost always leaves marks on things and beings, in the tangible reality of the world. And there are signs of time that are constructed by the human being, such as artistic and technoscientific artefacts, architecture, streets and city squares, which evoke historical times. Also the days and nights and the seasons, natural phenomena that are repeated in an infinite circularity, are the origin of many of our ideas about time. The inner time, impossible to measure, reflects aspects of human subjectivity, such as thought, love, passion, hatred ... But time itself is also an object of thought. As in this exhibition by Carla Rebelo, “A moment that is repeated continuously”, a pause in time, a kind of still that is repeated endlessly. A stop of time to reflect on it, looking at the infinite that is before and ahead of us. During this interminable pause, time becomes an object, a body that Carla Rebelo gradually dissects. Reversibility and irreversibility, finitude and restlessness, sky and earth, water and fire seem to converge in the discovery of the anatomy and physiology of time, a universe of endless and visual, semantic and other relationships and webs. In spite of the passing time, the ever faster acceleration of all kinds of speeds, this genetic work is both frozen time and time in motion, “a moment that is repeated continuously”, an archeology of knowledge, experiences, experiences and feelings. Carla Rebelo creates a totality from fragments, a time out of time that inhabits the materiality of her sculptures, the beauty of her drawings and books. There are lines that intersect and interweave, fabrics, leaves, bark… The moment that Carla Rebelo's art calls for is both an interior time, lived and eternalized, and an exterior time, delimited by history, which looks to the past and protrudes into the future. No discontinuities. As in parallel mirrors in which the self-between-mirrors multiplies into reflected images that dissolve in an endless perspective. Carla Rebelo's art is a science of continuity. Everything connects to everything. It is a slowly woven web, through which we rediscover the infinite complexity of the world, the timelessness of art. Many of the ideas made about time, nature, life are dismantled here. Like the ideas of birth and death. Birth and death do not exist in the natural world. They are pre-concepts designed to make the world intelligible, to adapt the infinite complexity of the world to the limitations of human thought. There is an infinite before us and after us, generations that succeed and connect with each other. Without being able to reveal, even in the confines of time, any cell, molecule or atom that we can designate as matrix. And death, what we call death, will only be a mere transformation of matter, a change of state. In criticisms of the big bang theory, genetic theories are often compared with myths. Which is understandable. Both genetic theories and myths seek to go back, to go back through the flow of time. Some and others try to reach the zero degree of a knowledge process that aims to make the birth of the universe, of life and of the human being intelligible. In the absence of mathematical models, myths feed on intellectual speculation. Classical science, on the other hand, focuses attention on continuous variations. Genetic processes will only begin to be addressed with the birth of embryology. As embryological processes cannot be reduced to continuous variations, given their extreme complexity, science, unable to theorize them, will, for a long time, be confined to its description. Today, genetics and problems of complexity are at the forefront of scientists' concerns, and inspire research that goes very far in the knowledge of phenomena, often linking science to art, the finite to the infinite. Life is metamorphosis, eternal metamorphosis. Between mirrors, projections of space, leaves that slowly change in texture and shape, books and sculptures, Carla Rebelo's work evokes a subjective time that projects beyond the limits of the ruler and the compass, nature and the senses, and proposes a reflection on temporality. Yours, ours, the world. An arrow of time that flies both ways, without zigzagging. We are a family owned and operated business. Manuel Valente Alves

Projects Drawings in Shadow, 2011 Istanbul - The city and memory In the context of the project Travel to the interior of the lived cities I made an open residency in 2011 at Drawing Spaces in Lisbon. My project was to create a series of drawings based on my research experience in the city of Istanbul. Based on material collected on site, such as photographs, sounds or video images, a set of works were created that mirror the relationship established with this city. The Fort's Dream - (Fragment) , 2013 Video 13'00" Color/Sound Untitled, 2011 (small stories about Istanbul) Light table and set of two drawings Chinese ink on white paper 50X70cm (approximately) Untitled , 2011 Red elastics, nails, spotlight and sound installation Variable dimensions Drawing/Installation Drawings in Shadow, 2011 Overviews of the presentation of the work Open Residence - Drawing Spaces In memory, 2011 In memory, 2011 1/4 Untitled, 2011 Untitled, 2011 1/6 Untitled, 2011 Untitled, 2011 1/6 Exhibition overview - Drawing in Shadow Exhibition overview - Drawing in Shadow 1/11

Projects Where do my paths lead me , was a piece created in 2004 in the context of the exhibition Dressing Up Nature, a Site-specific project for the Monteiro Mor Park, Costume Museum in Lisbon. In this project, the aim was to create connections, from a contemporary perspective, between the Textile universe represented by the Museum and the environment of the Park where it is installed. This project was produced by the collective of artists participating in the exhibition from an idea of Carla Rebelo. Where do my paths lead me , 2004 Steel cables, artificial silk and cotton textile cables, red plastic coated copper wire and red aluminum ladder Site-specific installation of variable dimensions Where do my paths lead me Performance held on July 17, 2004 Dressing up Nature Exhibition Carla Rebelo dressed by Marisa Lourenço Where do my paths lead me, 2004 Where do my paths lead me, 2004 1/9 Where do my paths lead me, 2004 Where do my paths lead me, 2004 1/5

Installation Drawing I, 2009 Red elastics, wall nails and shadow Variable dimensions Drawing/Installation Drawing I and II are two drawings/installations created for the Drawing my numbers exhibition in 2009 Drawing I, 2009 drawing by numbers 044 Drawing I, 2009 1/4 Drawing II , 2009 Copper wire covered with plastic in various colors, graphite pencil drawing and shadow Approximately 120x200x15cm Drawing / Installation Drawing II, 2009 Drawing II, 2009 1/4

Installation We weave ourselves , 2002 Textile materials of natural and synthetic origin, wood, paper, lamps, mirrors, a wooden bench, bobbins with different textile materials, glass jars, water, a mirror with a frame and an instrument for weaving Variable dimensions Piece created specifically for the chapel of the Teatro Taborda Theater in Lisbon. This loom/installation represents 3 phases of a person's life: the past - the low horizontal web already woven the present - the vertical web that could be woven by the visitors of the exhibition; and the future - upper horizontal web still waiting to be woven.

The Fort´s Dream is a work about Fort Alexander I made on the context of the project Journey into the cities experienced, as a result of an artist residency in the city of Kronstadt, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Built on an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland, near the coast of Kotlin island, fort Alexander was part of a defense line of structures created to protect Saint Petersburg from the attack of enemy troops. Completed in 1846, this monumental architecture, however, never got to chance to shoot a single one of its 137 cannons. In the Crimean War the mere sight of this imposing structure blocked an attack from the British fleet, but in 1896 the Fort was excluded from the list of defensive structures of the army. In 1898, due to an outbreak of Plague that reached the steppes of the Caspian Sea, its destiny of defense and protection came to life again. This isolated architecture seemed to be the ideal place to install an anti-plague laboratory to search a cure for this disease. Connected to the world by a boat named "Microbe", Fort Alexander gained then a new life. As part of the research and testing in the production of a serum, the Fort became the final home to several animals. Ilya Moiseevich Eisen, an employee of the Academy of Sciences who visited the place in 1900, was impressed with the small and large scale animals he found there. This “small Zoo” in the middle of the Gulf was described by him as “ship of the desert”. Walking silently in the courtyard he found camels, cows, reindeer and the horses, the animals that played the most important role in the investigation done on site. The laboratory was closed in 1917. The Fort became then part of the Russian Navy and was used for storage and repair purposes. It was abandoned in 1983 and has been empty since then. “The Fort´s Dream” evokes a possible memory of this place. The video shows a voyage to the Fort and also the empty galleries inside. In the stillness of the umpty rooms, where the only sound is the water hitting the banks of the island, images seem to emerge from the past merging with the ones from the present. The galleries of the Fort are like the rooms of a forgotten Museum, the scenario where the animals that once lived there stand “still”.

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Growth Maps , 2010 Embroidered design on fabric Linen, red, yellow and black thread and wood Sculpture 165x100x10cm

Excerpt from the text of the exhibition I would prefer not to, from Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story of Wall Street, held at Plataforma R evolver in Lisbon. Maria João Gamito We are a family owned and operated business. "Silent Books titled the book / installation by Carla Rebelo. The numbered blue sheets, from two books, about 40 cm high, densely filled with handwritten records of houses and commercial establishments supposedly in the district of Lisbon, and without any indication of origin, date or functional framework, unfold like a folio, completely filling the floor of a place of passage. Book / installation or artist's book, this piece, like all of Carla Rebelo's pieces, is a response to the question of the place. But in this case, and according to the artist's words, it is also an answer to his need to create a place for Bartleby, after all not very different from the one that the clerk inhabited in the Melville tale: a corner behind the tall, green screen in the lawyer's workroom, where he stood for a long time watching a blind wall and where he remained after removing the screen. And finally, it is a device for objectifying writing in unexpected correspondences subtly defined in the commitment of the scales and the relations they establish between the real space and that of representation, and in the understanding of the object in its etymological truth, as an obstacle or barrier placed before the eyes. The pages of the property registration books, carefully torn from the books where they once had a function, are articulated as screens or walls that prevent passage in a passage place, making the place absurd and obtuse the object that inscribes its unreason. . This unreason is both that of the real impediment to crossing the passage and that of the objectification of the written record, which, already distant from the monotonous task that copied it and immersed in the absurdity of the copy whose meaning was lost, still remains, now as a screen or metaphor on the walls of the cities that belong to two places and two times and that in both refer, not to the labyrinth where men are lost by the action of a monumental exercise of reason, but to its inverse form, that of the spreading, irrational spot and entropic. The walls of Carla Rebelo, noisy and encrypted like the walls of contemporary cities, arise from the writing material that registers them and thus allows them to access a permanence that is that of the wall as the power of the image, of all images for all men who, like Bartleby, look for them in this elementary as well as essential act of turning to a wall in return to themselves and their cause. Three walls of a place of passage is the place that Carla Rebelo found for Bartleby. In it, as in the work that precedes it, the clerk stands, facing a wall, between the book that unfolds as the perspectives in a city and the book that opens to read the city and its perspectives. " Maria João Gamito

Installation Gone to Earth , 2013 Mirror, black pen drawing, charcoal powder and reflection variable dimensions Gone to Earth was a piece created together with the installation P rivate landscapes in 2013 in the context of the Parérgon exhibition. Text Exhibition Gone to Earth, 2013 Gone to Earth, 2013 1/6

Installation Private landscapes , 2013 Installation consisting of a set of 4 mirrors, 4 black pen drawings and its reflection Variable dimensions Private landscapes it was a piece created together with the installation Gone to Earth in 2013 in the context of the Parérgon exhibition. Text Exhibition