1. The exhibition I have come to bury Caesar by Gustavo Sumpta is composed of two intertwined groups of works, distributed through the two venues of CAPC, and to which correspond two typologies of concerns: there is, at the Sereia venue, a group of works which summons death and its representation, war, and discipline, the fragility of the body and its perforation, the memory, and its reappropriation. At the CAPC Sede venue, on Rua Castro Matoso, the work presented reflects on the memory, its representation, its erasure, and, in a way, on movement. There is a focus on the concern over rigor and precision uniting both moments, an essential characteristic of the work of Gustavo Sumpta, whether in his sculptural work or in his performative work, which is also evoked here.

2. At Sereia there are two works we identify as bayonets: in the first room, a set of seven «bayonets» lined and engraved on the wall, titled Os Sete Magníficos. The title is appropriated from the epic 1960 western film of the same name (The MagnificentSeven), by John Sturges, starring Yul Brynner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and Steve McQueen, about bravery and resistance, an ode to hypermasculinity verging on caricature. However, it can also refer to a song of the same name from The Clash, ironic in the fresh light of Margaret Thatcher’s England, a working-class hero anthem about the daily struggle.

3. The «bayonets» are sculpted out of bronze — being, therefore, representations — aestheticized in their reproduction process on a noble league, connected to the tradition of sculpting ever since ancient times. The bronze bayonets were molded from a replica (with real and, in fact, military purposes) of the iron bayonet, present in the last room of Sereia, and made from the English model used in peninsular wars. So, let us start with the model sculptures that summon the neoclassical tradition of the mold from reality. In this case, however, the succession of mediations is wider because it begins with a «real» piece — in the sense that it is an effective weapon —, but it is a copy of the already existing original itself, which is also a replica. In a sense, the sculptures are representations of representations in a circuit that opens the exhibition as a reflection on representational processes, or, in other words, about the inevitable process of art replacement of an entity (let us call it «body»), by another, which replaces it and conveys its meaning. The Greek name for this conveyance of meaning is «metaphor».

4. In the next room coexist two sculptures: a foot support with a military function, molded from a similar piece already existing in the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova in Coimbra, the same room in which Sumptaexhibited his works at Bienal Anozero in 2017. This foot support, placed in front of a window — seemed to summon the positioning of an expectant body — indicating an observing point and a physical posture. This posture belongs to the military statuary domain: someone who observes or conquers a foot placed over a body, whether it be in an altercation on the ground, or on another human body: in any case, it is always a posture of dominance, therefore convertible into a monument. The other work is a composite fishhook hanging from the ceiling, resembling a noose, up to the sacrificed body. There is no one hanging from having been convicted, nobody fulfills the function of the sculpture that summons the capturing, nor will anybody use the foot support. All that is left are their ghosts, the haptic memory of the bodies that there would have been conquerors or conquered, dominators or dominated.

5. Guided by the ghosts, we enter the last room where two works complement one another. Neither is a representation (better yet, in this context, both are), since they are readymades: both from the 19th century, the table is an actual autopsy table and the bayonet is the British version of that very bayonet, previously used by the Wellington army, the liberating «force» of the French invasion, later copied for local use.

6. And finally, the 19th-century autopsy table. There is not much to say besides summoning the ghosts of all those nameless and memoryless who were analytically gutted and studied here. Ghosts are vividly present in the morphology of the anatomic table, like the draining of premeditated and domesticated fluids and the smells now extinct. Only a visual memory remains, projected by all those who solemnly and sadly comprehended the function of dismantling the body.

7. Therefore, everything here summons the fragility of the manipulated, perforated, gutted body, without any bodily presence, other than the artifacts however (real and fake, sculptural and taken from reality), being there to call it out. The pieces are ghostly molds for absent bodies, proficiently made present by the spectators themselves as replacements and metaphors of victims.

8. At Sede, only one room is occupied with only one work. It is a piece that outlives — better yet, remakes — a performance by Sumpta for a project of the BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts, titled Querover as minhas montanhas. The project took the work of the same name by Joseph Beuys as a reference and intended to refer to nature as a memory. During this durational performance, Sumpta threw cassette VHS tapes out of a CentroCultural de Belém window facing Praça do Império, tying a hoop around himself. On those cassettes, obsolete memories of another time, fragments now irretrievable floated. The sculpture makes that moment present, of an obsolescence that haunts the now, impossible to live or to recover. Only a wind can shake them, only a melancholy can make them alive.

9. Who cares. The fragile body of memory of the great glory only exists on expectations. And the name of that expectation is unknown, only remaining an echo of replacement, of metaphor that can just give back the halo of death and, in the best of cases, of survival.

10. And here we are to bury Caesar. And ironically, to wait for Mark Anthony.

Delfim Sardo