Expurgar papel:
cadáveres, onde
a memória coletiva ainda emerge
an exhibition by Carla Filipe13.SEPT.2025 — 23.DIC.2025
Saliva, Defiant Matter
(or, How to Flesh Out the Archive)
by Laura Vallés Vílchez
With Purging Paper: Corpses, Where Collective Memory Still Surfaces (2020–25), Carla Filipe extends a gesture first begun in Chewing Chewed Paper, the Desire to Understand the Old Continent in Order to Spit Out Its History (2014). Antwerp was the first city to receive this eruption: its streets, colonial museums, flea markets of dust and relics still resonate with the echo of an empire that has not disappeared but has lodged itself deep in the fibres of matter. The artist takes documents — family albums, postcards, photographs of zoos — chews them, spits them out, rearranges them. The archive becomes a food bolus: viscous, with filaments that still glint.
There is no asepsis here: there is saliva, swallowing, choking. A metabolism that exposes what is meant to be forgotten: that no archive is innocent. On every page lies power, violence, the domestication of memory, collective anaesthesia. When Carla chews, the body offers itself as a laboratory of history: it absorbs, fragments, suffers the imposition of what remains. Archive and body entwine, and a kind of purification and incarnation takes place. Dust, glue, hair: remnants smelling of damp, reminders that thinking is also to sweat, to vomit, to digest in pain. This is no lyrical gesture: it is a gesture of the gut, an acid reflux that burns the throat.
Each of the twenty panels of Purging Paper pulses like a counter-archive: fragile, diaristic, spectral. Where Achille Mbembe named the contradiction — the archive as both violence and evidence — the fragments breathe. Preservation and destruction are drawn taut. Restoration is attempted, forms are disordered, edges fray, and the trick of composition is savoured. The panels appear as exposed viscera: soft, throbbing, always on the verge of collapse.
Saliva threads through Filipe’s work in Antwerp, Porto, and now Madrid. In the Belgian imaginary: zoo cages, colonial exhibitions, missionary images from the Congo (1885–1960), documents reproducing exoticism and colonial exploitation. In the Lusophone context, nostalgia contests trauma: family albums from the Portuguese colonial wars (1961–1974) in Angola, Mozambique, or Guinea-Bissau; countless unmediated records of violence. Archives sway between propaganda and denunciation, between subjugation and resistance. Each fragment is inhaled and exhaled, matter incarnate. The panels float, sway, insist on movement: the archive transformed into organism. In this oscillation lies their political agency: what once seemed closed opens into the present, contaminating our very breath. Archival matter does not merely invoke historical memory; it demands a bodily ethics before the remains. As if to say to our fragmented, algorithmically tamed attention: looking is not enough — the throat and stomach must be engaged. Digestion becomes a collective act. The archive, perhaps, a shared regurgitation.
Barely a century ago, saliva — that unruly lubricant — was a crime. Spitting could mean imprisonment. During the Spanish flu, saliva was contagion. In the United States, the masculine gesture of spitting tobacco was disciplined into cigarettes and chewing gum: seventeenth- to nineteenth-century spittoons ended up melted down as ammunition during the Second World War. As Gabriel Pericás notes in his fascinating History of Lubrication: saliva went to war. Today, Carla’s digestive system is a political method: it absorbs, contaminates, pollinates. It cannot distinguish food from poison. Each gesture turns a document into metabolised flesh, reminding us that the twentieth century was the century of paper, of the typewriter, of ink as dried blood. That medium now dissolves like decomposing skin.
Seven works line the wall: Corpses (2025). Each roughly the size of a torso or limb. Archival matter transformed into bodily tissue: frayed edges, peeling layers, exposed glue. Unstable, they allow themselves to be viewed head-on but conceal their reverse. One Skeleton (2025) stands apart: an X-ray of stitched patches, fragments forming vertebrae, ribs, bones that uphold memory. A political anatomy, as the artist puts it: bodies carrying incomplete histories. Are they spectres? Remains neither buried nor cremated; the sensation is of carrying corpses. Echoes of twentieth-century violence return as global fever. Yet it should be noted that these works predate the horror that now haunts the nights of those of us left defenceless before genocide proclaimed in the name of peace, ethics, and coexistence; before those who redraw the straight lines of maps with impunity; before those who rejoice in erecting new borders. But the bodies were already here: open, dismembered, incomplete.
Among these corpses, Panels (2025) emerge: three works as visual hypertexts — fabrics, postcards, photographs, hair, eighteenth-century legal documents. Faces are cut, hidden, redistributed. Identity denied, generating new collective entities. Historical and social memory thus articulates as a plural narrative, in tension between colonisation, religion, and domestic life. In Carla’s work, there is respect for the material, but also rebellion: it is not about preserving an “impeccable archive” but disobeying history. A gesture recalling those who lived through the early years of Portuguese democracy and challenged the historical meanings upheld by the Estado Novo — a history, on the other side of the peninsula, not unfamiliar either.
At la_oficina, this narrative opens transnationally: colonial wars, women without history, industrial revolution. Compositions unsettle the familiar, reveal silent dogs, first elections, revolutionary women, armed forces, marriage and freedom. Here, the viewer’s body becomes an extension of the nervous system of a truncated, rearticulated archive. Suspended panels rock gently: movement is required to perceive front and back, folds and overlaps. Affective responses — anxiety, fascination, discomfort — circulate like neurotransmitters, linking image, body, and feeling. The Skeleton organises as precarious anatomy. The Corpses are limbs: invisible saliva, glue shining, layers peeling. Collectively, a documentary morgue.
Each image — soldiers, missionaries, domestic interiors — is a “bone” forming the framework of another collective history, whose right to opacity here transgresses ornament. Deliberately incomplete, it reflects absences, voids: the limits and recesses of knowledge production. Saliva — again — makes flesh with the archive and resists simplification. Purging Paper secretes affect: guilt, fascination, discomfort. Affective circulation turns memory into body, archive into organism, art into endocrine system. Carla metabolises a trans-European body. She neither merely preserves nor destroys; she resurrects. Each fragment is a restituted corpse, a body in transit.
To insist on the term “corpse” is to insist on the discomfort of memory: unburied, unresolved. In this sense, Carla offers a decisive framework, pointing to the need to stay with the trouble: not to resolve it, not to close it, but to inhabit its conflicted materiality. Filipe’s work refuses conclusion, purification, or separation of the remains, instead holding them in tension. Her artistic metabolism embodies what Donna Haraway described as “relational bodies”: assemblages in which human and material constitute each other mutually.
It is difficult not to think of Marina Vishmidt — who left us a year ago — and her argument that material speculation is not an embellishment of the political, but its very condition of possibility. Drawing on this insight, Filipe’s practice inhabits the contradiction of capital and material speculation as method: she chews, metabolises, reorganises the document, not to restore historical truth, but to activate its latent political force. In this sense, Purging Paper is not only a critical archive, but a speculative essay of temporalities: fragments of European empires, remains of anti-colonial struggles, domestic memories, and anonymous records coexist on a single pulsating surface.
Hence this essay dwells in the truncated, configuring itself as an exquisite corpse: a corpse working for a community that, as the artist herself expresses, resists being fully found. This essay reproduces the gesture of the work: fragmented, superimposed, recursive. Theoretical reflection, historical specificity, exhibition narrative, and affective description function as a living essay-organism. An essay that also salivates, containing the retching provoked by the violences of our wounded, global present — an essay that seeks to answer how to flesh out the archive with defiant matter.