Sidival Fila: The dignity of matter

Sidival Fila: The dignity of matter

What memory resides in matter? What remains in it, remembered, from the time that traversed it? Sidival Fila is an artist who prompts us to ponder these questions. He works with fabric: old linen, ecclesiastical brocades, floral silk, Guatemalan textiles. In his work, we see spots of pinkish beige speckled with oxidations, infiltrations that have spread over the fibers by capillarity, the gray of accumulated dust, grease stains from continuous usage, perforations made by insects, structural wear and tear. All the slow action of time retained within them. There is no such thing as neutral matter.

Removed from the circuit of utility, these fabrics withdraw from their original functions. It is at this point of exhaustion that matter begins to speak. Fila does not restore the textiles. He does not endeavor to dominate them; he listens to them. And in that listening, what was once remainder becomes a numinous presence. It is not about giving matter back its lost function, but about allowing it to reveal what had always existed within it.

This ethics results from a particular trajectory rather than from an exclusively formal exploration. A little-known artist in Brazil, Fila was born in Arapongas, Paraná, in 1962. He had his first encounter with art through reproductions he discovered in books. Mediated and displaced images. He moved to São Paulo in his late teens and soon relocated to Rome, where he lives and works.  

In Rome, he worked in bars and restaurants until an existential crisis led him to join the Order of Friars Minor, eager to live a life of charity, an existence geared towards others. In this Franciscan experience, his exploration of matter found its shape. Franciscan spirituality acts as a silent key to his practice: a theology of littleness, monastic silence, persistent reflection on matter. Poverty as a choice, the textile as habit, the patch as language.

The decisive thing about Fila's textiles is that they do not create a unifying system. What they outline is the revelation of a latent order, a glimpse into which is allowed by the persistence of the fragment. However, these fragments hint at a coherence: they bear the marks of a past life, even though they are not doomed to it. This depends on action that neither subdues nor violates, but welcomes.

Fila's interventions as he works on his textiles are at times minimal. The simple stretching of a piece of fabric whose eloquence resides in the mesh itself, like in the Seda antiga (Old Silk) and Linho antigo (Old Linen) series. Other times, they are more incisive: he sews, stretches, cuts up, suspends. Yet they are never imposing. He creates the conditions for matter to manifest, recognizing in it its high authenticities. As such, matter no longer derives its worth from what it has served, but rather from what it has accumulated.

That such an oeuvre built upon an attention to the minimal should now find the place it started from is meaningful. In his first solo exhibition in Brazil, Fila presents a group of works that alternate between the intimate and the monumental. The small linens and silks demand closeness and care. Pieces such as Metáfora branca (White Metaphor), with its sutured fragments, bring about a different scale. And yet, despite the variety in sizes, each piece retains its integrity. Nothing is disguised.

This dimension of unveiling becomes clear in the Flores (Flowers) series. Painted floral silks from the 19^th century are mounted onto mirrors, interrupting frontal contemplation. The viewer emerges onto the surface, and their body is captured between the flowers. When facing these textiles laden with centuries, we witness our own choreography of time. The reflection is transfigured into an inscription of passage. As we walk amid these artworks, we realize that matter is not only past, it is duration unfolding.

As such, the exhibition features time-based surfaces that persist in their dignity. What once served now signifies. What once adorned now bears witness. As the mirror returns our image between the flowers, we realize that the dignity of matter is not a quality we grant it. It is something we recognize.

By returning visibility to what had been discarded, Sidival Fila makes an essential assertion: that which has lost its function has not lost its meaning.

In an age of rapid consumption and disposal, Fila's work imposes a different cadence upon us. His work affirms the silent humanism that is the recognition of the dignity of things.

— Giancarlo Hannud

Translated from Portuguese by Gabriel Pomerancblum