Secret Writing

Whatever be the geography, the pictographs or tracks of prehistoric writings are still found without being deciphered for the contemporary man. Very close to were I live there is the astonishing archaeological complex known as ‘Ingá’s Rock’, in the province of Paraíba, until now not yet deciphered, despite the effort of scholars such as anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists. Various examples of archaeological sites are spread throughout the provinces of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and above all Piauí, in Brazil. Examples of these writings still secret or not elucidated remain engraved on rocks found throughout the American continent, from north to south.

In his dashing book Envisioning Information Edward R. Tufte has reproduced ten of the Dighton interpretations. They date from the earliest, 1640, to the one from 1854. To say they deviate from the original inscription on the rock and then from themselves is understatement. Tufte uses the drawings to make a significant point about multiples, focusing on the way different drawings yielded sundry interpretations. “One researcher ‘triumphantly established’ the marks as Scythian,” Tufte writes; “a distinguished Orientalist detected the word melek (king) on the rock; others thought they saw Phoenician or Runic script. A Scandinavian antiquary translated the drawings into an account of a pre-Columbian sojourn to America by a party of Thornfinn the Hopeful.” And so on. As Tufte says: “same rock, different views…”

Although in a smaller scale, the series of etchings ‘Secret Writing’ that I present here is the unfolding of the prints made in 2002 under the series called “Incunabula and Myths”. The present prints a whole number of thirty three etchings measuring 10cm X 10cm also deal with marks and signs of primitive appearance that remind us of the origins of writing and make us think about the conquest of the very existence of man on earth. While engraving the metal surface came to my mind the way how the primitive man use to take a stick in his hands to register marks on different surfaces which survived throughout the time and still today make us thrill. The ‘table from Uruk’, the ‘Babylonian Stela’, the hieroglyphs from the walls of the temple of Karnak, the ‘Phaistos Disc’, the Rosetta Stone’, the Dighton’s Rock, the Ingá’s Rock, all these have raised the most different feelings in scholars and fed myself with ideas to invent my own secret writing. To identify each image in this series I borrowed from Ítalo Calvino the titles that he named his ‘Invisible Cities’, since, like him, in developing these images I felt myself exploring distant and imaginary geographies, discovering hand-writings submerse in dreams. To Calvino the cities as the dreams are built by desires and fears even that the connecting thread of its discourse be secret, that its rules be absurd, its perspectives be deceiving, and that all things hides each other. To me, also these prints are secret writings built by desire and pleasure to see the raw material transformed into images that remind us hand-writing, even that apparently they do not have a connecting thread and are deprived of an inner code, without a discourse, as a puzzle, but always taking into shape desire and secret wishes, for the artist himself not yet completely deciphered.

Recife, Abril de 2003

Sebastião Pedrosa