MABE BETHONICO

Mabe Bethônico and the Collector (II) transforms the display boxes at this exhibition into greenhouses teeming with flowers, which present a color spectrum in six essays: Flowers: Box XI: Yellow (forty-eight clippings), White (thirty-eight clippings), Black and White (twenty-one clippings); Flowers: Box XII: Rose I (seven clippings), Rose II (eight clippings), Rose III (forty-five clippings).
While showing once again a small portion of her collection, which now comprises 2,620 clippings (120 more than when first exhibited at the museum), The Collector also invites us to view the whole set, which is available for consultation at the museum library. We shall trace the profile of this work's creator by taking its repertoire as a whole: the collector is an autonomous creature that has been busy collecting newspaper clippings since 1997. The Collector impulsively creates themes, becomes attached to them, and starts to pursue them in an almost obscene keen-eyed grabbing of images. Its bent for gathering is in proportion to its predominantly meticulous and selective character. While working on the continuous expansion of the collection, the Collector imposes on it a categorizing structure, albeit a transitory one, the themes of which are unfolded into several essays at increasingly minute levels of detail.
Look through, cut out, classify, store. These image gathering and collating procedures do not really correspond to the strict work of archivists, for whom there has to be a limit on variants in order to rationalize the various means of searching reference data. The Collector is more flexible and shifting, it weaves thematic patterns; it shuttles back to review and reclassify a sequence that may suddenly catch its attention.