The Untied Body of History

Nosa Senhora Desatadora dos Nós (Mary Untier of knots) is a Marian devotion popular in South America. It is believed that she is able to untie small everyday problems and unresolved questions. The devotion stems from a painting by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner, from ca. 1700. The painting was commissioned by Pater Rem, who according to the painting’s story, commissioned it due to his grandparents matrimonial issues. When his grandfather Wolfgang Langenmantel (1586–1637) was about to separate from his wife Frau Sophia Rentz (1590–1649), Pater Rem prayed in front of a Marian image and said: „In diesem religiösen Akt erhebe ich das Band der Ehe, löse alle Knoten und glätte es.“ After that, according to the story, the peace returned between the spouses and the separation didn’t take place. Pater Rem commissioned the painting ‘Knotenlöserin’ (The Untier) as a reminder of this event.

In South America, the devotion of Mary Untier of Knots is well known for solving everyday problems that present a feeling of complication or disturbance of a peaceful situation. It could be, for instance, related to health, work, marriage and money. As a strong presence in my own family, and an object of entanglement between German art history and Brazilian catholic culture, I use the image of the Untier of Knots in order to think about time and history. Is it possible to visualize history as a series of knots in time susceptible of being tied and untied? Complicated, prolonged, shortened, tangled or solved?

Over the past years I have been trying to construct the image of the Untier of History. By going through a museum’s collections, I search for knots depicted in their paintings in order to create her figure. The construction of such body proves to be so far as complex and unfixable as history, while the collection of knots turned into a habit. Here I have some of the images I’ve collected so far, from different museums, now certain that the knots as well as the body and history itself will continue, without a final figuration. One can only hope that by opening up this collection, a multitude of bodies may take shape, and new fragments may be added to the never complete body of History. Or that at least, a few more people start observing history’s entangled movements inside a museum, letting themselves be led by its knots.