Portraits
Joana von Mayer Trindade & Hugo Calhim Cristóvão / NuIsIs ZoBoP
May
2022
Wed
18
About RITE OF DECAY
Can we look at your show as an autobiographical work? In what way? What do you think this show can reveal about you as a creator?
The presence of death in my life has been a constant, and inevitability ideas as death, mourning, extension, decay, and end-of-life rituals have crossed me and invaded my creations. RITE OF DECAY comes at the end of 2018 after a pause to be present in the last times of a close person's life, and consequently a new reflection and a reconfiguration of my way of being and being in the world, as an individual and artist. Not forgetting that the most individual issues, in addition to being inserted in a specific social and cultural context, are always crossed by collective and global issues. The political problems this year that have raised the growing pessimism of previous years, such as the election of the far right in Brazil, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by the United States, highlighting their support for Israel's Zionist policy and increased aggression against the Palestinian people, and many other wars in other parts of the world, led me to discover Emil Cioran, a Franco-Romanian philosopher who addresses the issues of time, death, birth, suicide, with a radically pessimistic, nihilistic and paradoxical thought who denies the value of life without desiring death. And, for him, suicide is neither necessary nor effective, not because it is immoral or sinful, but because it is an act that happens too late, because evil has already been done by the time we are born. The way it approaches human existence or any other endorsed with consciousness, stating that any kind of consciousness would have benefited if it had never been born, leaving only the potential of existing, begins my investigation of a body full of memories that potentiate various existences and their deaths in a dance with their most experienced or ancestral ghosts.
During your creative process, were you inspired by any autobiographical work or self-portrait?
I would not say that I have been directly inspired by some work or artist, despite much of what we are being the result of various encounters and influences. But there are some artists who, in one way or another, follow me on my journey. Perhaps the most present in this case was Louise Bourgeois.
This project is based on the construction of a reflection on death, on the end, right? How do you build something from the end? What can be born from there? What can be born when we kill meaning and matter?
After death, there’s a whole process of acceptance, of farewell, of grief. Death keeps on happening several times throughout our lives, whether we witness the disappearance of some close human beings or the end of a relationship, for example. And death is an event for whom witnesses it, potentiating a transformation in its existential condition. The end of one cycle is the beginning of another, as matter that turns into another when it dies. We are beings endowed with consciousness and memory, but the prevailing "The History" , invented by the white man, and which governs the so called norms that even today a minority of people struggles to destroy, is full of wars, invasions, violations, explorations of other human beings, living beings and natural resources. It’s embarrassing our current situation, on the imminence of a Third World War, when the experience we possess as humanity should have taught us to care and to respect what surrounds us. We live in a state of chronic amnesia, destroying and rebuilding an "ideal world", until there will be no more world to live.
What relationship can we establish between RITE OF DECAY and SU8MARINO? Which places are evoked, built, rebuilt and connected (or not?)
Both pieces happen in the dark. In SU8MARINO (2016/17), the light belongs to the body that lights up the space in which it lives. In RITE OF DECAY, the light is external and lights up the body, sometimes the empty space. SU8MARINO comes from a reflection on identity, power and territory on the context of “Deterritorialization” from Gilles Deleuze. The (de/re) construction of a body in constant mutations, which is not fixed, is not related to any rooted form, where the occupation of space is wide and frequent, with predominance of a movement closer to the ground, low; and when power ceases to be a possibility to begin to exist, it disappears in search of another. In RITE OF DECAY, the body is always vertical and remains mostly in the same place, with the feet rooted in the ground, circumscribed to a place where the (des) multiplication of these various powers occurs, connecting to SU8MARINO perhaps in the promise of an existence that remains phantom of itself, inhabiting the "between" the being and the not being, the existence and the nothing.
Can we look at your show as an autobiographical work? In what way? What do you think this show can reveal about you as a creator?
The presence of death in my life has been a constant, and inevitability ideas as death, mourning, extension, decay, and end-of-life rituals have crossed me and invaded my creations. RITE OF DECAY comes at the end of 2018 after a pause to be present in the last times of a close person's life, and consequently a new reflection and a reconfiguration of my way of being and being in the world, as an individual and artist. Not forgetting that the most individual issues, in addition to being inserted in a specific social and cultural context, are always crossed by collective and global issues. The political problems this year that have raised the growing pessimism of previous years, such as the election of the far right in Brazil, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by the United States, highlighting their support for Israel's Zionist policy and increased aggression against the Palestinian people, and many other wars in other parts of the world, led me to discover Emil Cioran, a Franco-Romanian philosopher who addresses the issues of time, death, birth, suicide, with a radically pessimistic, nihilistic and paradoxical thought who denies the value of life without desiring death. And, for him, suicide is neither necessary nor effective, not because it is immoral or sinful, but because it is an act that happens too late, because evil has already been done by the time we are born. The way it approaches human existence or any other endorsed with consciousness, stating that any kind of consciousness would have benefited if it had never been born, leaving only the potential of existing, begins my investigation of a body full of memories that potentiate various existences and their deaths in a dance with their most experienced or ancestral ghosts.
During your creative process, were you inspired by any autobiographical work or self-portrait?
I would not say that I have been directly inspired by some work or artist, despite much of what we are being the result of various encounters and influences. But there are some artists who, in one way or another, follow me on my journey. Perhaps the most present in this case was Louise Bourgeois.
This project is based on the construction of a reflection on death, on the end, right? How do you build something from the end? What can be born from there? What can be born when we kill meaning and matter?
After death, there’s a whole process of acceptance, of farewell, of grief. Death keeps on happening several times throughout our lives, whether we witness the disappearance of some close human beings or the end of a relationship, for example. And death is an event for whom witnesses it, potentiating a transformation in its existential condition. The end of one cycle is the beginning of another, as matter that turns into another when it dies. We are beings endowed with consciousness and memory, but the prevailing "The History" , invented by the white man, and which governs the so called norms that even today a minority of people struggles to destroy, is full of wars, invasions, violations, explorations of other human beings, living beings and natural resources. It’s embarrassing our current situation, on the imminence of a Third World War, when the experience we possess as humanity should have taught us to care and to respect what surrounds us. We live in a state of chronic amnesia, destroying and rebuilding an "ideal world", until there will be no more world to live.
What relationship can we establish between RITE OF DECAY and SU8MARINO? Which places are evoked, built, rebuilt and connected (or not?)
Both pieces happen in the dark. In SU8MARINO (2016/17), the light belongs to the body that lights up the space in which it lives. In RITE OF DECAY, the light is external and lights up the body, sometimes the empty space. SU8MARINO comes from a reflection on identity, power and territory on the context of “Deterritorialization” from Gilles Deleuze. The (de/re) construction of a body in constant mutations, which is not fixed, is not related to any rooted form, where the occupation of space is wide and frequent, with predominance of a movement closer to the ground, low; and when power ceases to be a possibility to begin to exist, it disappears in search of another. In RITE OF DECAY, the body is always vertical and remains mostly in the same place, with the feet rooted in the ground, circumscribed to a place where the (des) multiplication of these various powers occurs, connecting to SU8MARINO perhaps in the promise of an existence that remains phantom of itself, inhabiting the "between" the being and the not being, the existence and the nothing.
© José Caldeira
