However, as a repository of this powerful set of works – previously restricted to eyes confined to a domestic and private environment, this virtual space aims to make the Collection available to other eyes, enabling new paths for and with its pieces. Aware of its potential as research material, in this interface the Calmon-Stock Collection generously makes its content accessible to all who are interested in it, investing in expanding the possibilities of interpretation and investigation of this intimate and powerful aggregation.

On the page titled “The Collection”, it is offered to us as a complete set, through a grid that allows for the expansion of connections between the pieces. I am captivated by the infinite range of possible relationships between the works, I imagine and rehearse associative threads as far as the eye can see. I feel compelled to point out: the apparent randomness that the images readily present to us is just that, mere appearance. In fact, here we observe the Collection from its natural growth movement. In an equally simple and fertile organizational gesture, the works are ordered here based on their respective acquisitions, signaling the intrinsic process of formation of the set and the variation in themes that, little by little, are incorporated into this intimate and precise amalgamation of works. We observe this set as a living organism, and, since it is alive, in continuous change, subject to varying addition parameters, where we identify a certain power.

The simple observation of this page and its visuality combine, in itself, the insistent memory of André Malraux who prostrates himself over an immense set of images [img. 1], in its intimate and evident process of creative elaboration. Instigated, I also look into the Collection. I observe the images gathered: they are collages, sculptures and photographs. I see faces, bodies, letters and some animals, as well as small intriguing objects, sculptures made from construction materials, paintings with clever irony, embroidery, videos, digital works and compositions with a sharply political nature.

The profusion of images and iconographic motifs combine well-known historiographic references, almost referencing seminal manifestations of the archive such as André Malraux's Imaginary Museum. And it's great that we have Malraux close by (again) when thinking about the Calmon-Stock collection site, since his propositions (announced in 1947 in his The Voices of Silence) are prescient manifestos of the digital era, already then locating the displacement of physical art object through photographic reproduction. More than that, Malraux is important to us because he privileges the curatorial gesture, explicitly locating the individual and creative act in the process of grouping and displaying works and their reproductions, an important detail for the elocubration we aim for here.

Moving away from the French critic's specificities (although not his ambitions), in his Unpacking My Library: A Discourse on Collecting (1931), Walter Benjamin investigates the act of collecting, highlighting the creative potentials he observes in the process. In the essay, the author subjects the existence of the collector to a “very mysterious relationship with property”, affirming him as a passionate and indispensable figure (after all, according to the author, “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its agent ”). Thus, for Benjamin, every collection would be fed by the intimate drives of its collector, whose existence would be subject “to a relationship with things that (…) studies them and loves them as the setting, as the theater of their destiny.”

That said, making it possible to observe the Collection from its natural order of establishment is a generous and inventive feature of this digital archive. More than that, this simple gesture brings to light the drives and aesthetics of collectors, the thoughts, aesthetics, affection and appreciation of Roberto and André. And, in doing so, it soon makes it possible to glimpse the collection not as a static, self-enclosed set, but, on the contrary, as a living, pulsating matter, shaped by its constituent affinities.

This intimate and objective curatorial gesture, which shifts the presentation of the works – abandoning predictable links such as thematic, formal or authorial affinities – and organizes them based on their acquisition orders, explains the intimate and gradual process of elaboration of the Collection, in particular the process presupposed in suddenly “realizing” that you have an art collection in your hands, as its organizers so well narrate. This organization, therefore, highlights the importance given by Benjamin to the collector's affections, here, in particular, those of André and Roberto. More than that, this gesture allows us to observe the significant change progressively manifested in the additions that found and consolidate this amalgamation of works, especially in the most recent acquisitions.

The significant twist that, for me, clarifies and consolidates the essential importance of collectors is the clear intuition of the historical situation in which they found themselves inserted. When faced with the terrible political situation in Brazil (after the election of a fascist to the presidency of the republic in 2018), André and Roberto take an objective and pragmatic position towards the agency involved in the process of acquiring works. Firm and very aware of the role played by capital (not just symbolic) displaced through their support and acquisitions, they turn their attention to the voices of more diverse, forcefully positioned artists.

These recent acquisitions – which take shape in the works of artists such as Moara Brasil Tupinambá, Barbara Milano, Kandú Puri and Ventura Profana – and the support granted to the collectives Tupinambá Lambido and Levante Nacional Trovoa are established from the clear perception of the possibility of strengthening represented by acquisition processes. More than that, these are inclusions that make clear the Collection's awareness of its context and material implications, making it less exempt and homogeneous, more forceful, less masculine and white, more urgent and pertinent.

Thus, the more than 300 pieces “inscribed” in this “magic circle” that Benjamin speaks of create a set that does not arise randomly, but rather from the aesthetic (and, in the Kantian sense, also political) opportunities and criteria of its organizers. . Reverberating the observation of the collectors themselves, when we confront the Collection in its completeness, the “everything” seems “more than the sum” of its constituent elements. This extensive miscellany offers us almost infinite possibilities for interpretation, investigation and reflection. The Collection itself knows more than we would ever be able to extract from it. And, perhaps for this reason, the image of Malraux, captivated by the communion of images, is the image of all of us when faced with the Calmon-Stock Collection.

Image 1: André Malraux reviewing the photographs selected for his As Vozes do Silêncio (1947).