Insisting on Existing (Insistir em Existir) is an installation composed of a modular cement column, smaller cement artifacts with embedded gloves, a punching bag and a suspended tatami mat. The work reorganizes the logic of impact: the column occupies the place of the blow, the punching bag remains as a displaced shadow, and the tatami mat is removed from the floor and raised to the ceiling.

The installation distributes weight, structure and resistance as an unstable architecture. Cement appears not only as material density, but as a form of fixation: it retains gesture, labour, effort and interruption. Gloves of different typologies, associated with distinct regimes of body, protection and labour, are embedded in cement, making visible what sustains and wears down the systems that use them.

The work articulates force, repetition, exhaustion and survival. Insisting, here, is not metaphorical. It is a material condition. The body appears through the objects that train it, protect it, absorb impact or register labour: the glove, the bag, the tatami mat, the column. Together, they form a field in which resistance ceases to be heroic or abstract and becomes structural, heavy, precarious and exposed.

A displacement that occurred during the installation process was incorporated into the final configuration, affirming instability not as failure, but as a constitutive part of the work. The piece does not conceal instability; it uses it as form. Labour, time, accident, circulation and persistence become part of the same material system.

Presented in Insisting on Existing: Protocols of a Public Studio, the work condensed one of the central operations of the exhibition: the transformation of survival into structure.

The work and the exhibition share the title because the installation operated as one of the conceptual and material axes of the show, while remaining an autonomous piece within Analize Nicolini’s artistic practice.