Portraits
Lígia Soares
February
2023
Fri
17
About A minha vitória como ginasta de alta competição
Can we look at your piece as an autobiographical work? In what way? What do you think this performance can reveal about you as an artist?
It is an autobiographical piece if we consider that the deprivation of experience can be as important to a person's journey as their access to it.
I can explain: despite having as its title a phrase that points to a biographical experience, this piece can only be categorized as autobiographical in a very indirect way. The title, moreover, is a way of exposing a theme by its absence, considering the non-event a victory in relation to the event.
In fact, I would have really liked to have practiced, as a child, some high competition modality (which is currently called high performance) but this was not possible for me. Let's say that this piece can be a late reckoning with what I couldn't do as a child, but mainly the assertion that the absence of contexts of success and of competitiveness may be more rewarding than the tangibility of a victory.
In its relationship with my life, it is a project that relates intimately to the fact that I was born in the seventies and the idea of progress associated with consumerism, the cold war, the division of the world between winners and losers is now in the midst of a collapse.
During your creative process, were you inspired by any autobiographical work or self-portrait?
Not exactly. I was mainly inspired by a daily practice that I observed as I approached the training, the athletes, always from the perspective of the observer who reflects on what the human body that trains itself to overcome and overcome others, can and cannot do. This reflection has made me reckon to various experiences related to my adolescence, growing up and origins, but which now serve me to think in a non-personal way the social, economic, and affective relationships that people and their lives have in a logic of success and failure. I also went through several documents about the lives of iconic athletes and their influence and was slightly inspired by German Expressionism and their attempt to express themselves against orthogonality and order, to express a psychological dimension, skewed, uncertain and affected by the prospect of an end.
Desire and frustration, dream and fulfillment, obsession or abstraction: with which subjects can a person make a portrait? Will it say more of who portrays or who is portrayed?
Portraits are very difficult matters because they are attempts to shape an identity.
In this project, I use all these elements, which are also elements of drama and theatre, to enter into an also political or social consciousness. All these emotional and psychological elements that are ingrained to us as if the precious and unique thing that our personality is, emerged from them, carrying much more social and political issues than this obsession with identity allows us to probably see. This is the issue of this project. If what defines our contours belongs as much to us as to the context in which we live, we are much less made of chances and opportunities than perhaps we were made to believe.
In this way, I am using the world of gymnastics as a wrapper for a discourse that wants to free the world from the binomial of the best and worst, to reflect on this binomial in a more complex and critical way and to use the young age of the protagonists to show the tension created between the tangibility of these values and the intangible of the future that awaits them.
In the performance, we assume it - the theatre using gymnastics to dramatize the time in which we live, my generation using young gymnasts to reflect themselves, the performing arts using the artistic modality - and so, yes, it may have more to do with the portraitist than with the portrayal.
If our century could self-portray itself, what would this self-portrait look like? What if it could portray the 20th century? In a competition, which one would win?
It is exactly on this questions that this piece starts from: Who are now the winners and losers? How do we insist on categorizing acts, people and functions before values that are in a needed colapse? What forty years ago was the face of a better world can today be the face of a world in rapid decay. And it is proven that today's decay is caused precisely by what was once the reason for liberation and progress, the acceleration of the economy.
The idea of the winner and the loser, in my point of view, were reversed (or should it be) completely with the passage of the 20th century to the 21st century. Just like consumerism, productivity, nationalism and other values where the Western world still relies on. And everything is both very fast and too slow and, especially young people, do not know what to think or how to act and live as if stuck in two opposing times. It is indeed a turning point of a century, of the millennium and of something else that we are even afraid to name but which necessarily calls us all.
In my opinion, during the 20th century, we became more and more childish to wake up and already old and weak for a 21st century. And it is in this dilemma that we live.
Can we look at your piece as an autobiographical work? In what way? What do you think this performance can reveal about you as an artist?
It is an autobiographical piece if we consider that the deprivation of experience can be as important to a person's journey as their access to it.
I can explain: despite having as its title a phrase that points to a biographical experience, this piece can only be categorized as autobiographical in a very indirect way. The title, moreover, is a way of exposing a theme by its absence, considering the non-event a victory in relation to the event.
In fact, I would have really liked to have practiced, as a child, some high competition modality (which is currently called high performance) but this was not possible for me. Let's say that this piece can be a late reckoning with what I couldn't do as a child, but mainly the assertion that the absence of contexts of success and of competitiveness may be more rewarding than the tangibility of a victory.
In its relationship with my life, it is a project that relates intimately to the fact that I was born in the seventies and the idea of progress associated with consumerism, the cold war, the division of the world between winners and losers is now in the midst of a collapse.
During your creative process, were you inspired by any autobiographical work or self-portrait?
Not exactly. I was mainly inspired by a daily practice that I observed as I approached the training, the athletes, always from the perspective of the observer who reflects on what the human body that trains itself to overcome and overcome others, can and cannot do. This reflection has made me reckon to various experiences related to my adolescence, growing up and origins, but which now serve me to think in a non-personal way the social, economic, and affective relationships that people and their lives have in a logic of success and failure. I also went through several documents about the lives of iconic athletes and their influence and was slightly inspired by German Expressionism and their attempt to express themselves against orthogonality and order, to express a psychological dimension, skewed, uncertain and affected by the prospect of an end.
Desire and frustration, dream and fulfillment, obsession or abstraction: with which subjects can a person make a portrait? Will it say more of who portrays or who is portrayed?
Portraits are very difficult matters because they are attempts to shape an identity.
In this project, I use all these elements, which are also elements of drama and theatre, to enter into an also political or social consciousness. All these emotional and psychological elements that are ingrained to us as if the precious and unique thing that our personality is, emerged from them, carrying much more social and political issues than this obsession with identity allows us to probably see. This is the issue of this project. If what defines our contours belongs as much to us as to the context in which we live, we are much less made of chances and opportunities than perhaps we were made to believe.
In this way, I am using the world of gymnastics as a wrapper for a discourse that wants to free the world from the binomial of the best and worst, to reflect on this binomial in a more complex and critical way and to use the young age of the protagonists to show the tension created between the tangibility of these values and the intangible of the future that awaits them.
In the performance, we assume it - the theatre using gymnastics to dramatize the time in which we live, my generation using young gymnasts to reflect themselves, the performing arts using the artistic modality - and so, yes, it may have more to do with the portraitist than with the portrayal.
If our century could self-portray itself, what would this self-portrait look like? What if it could portray the 20th century? In a competition, which one would win?
It is exactly on this questions that this piece starts from: Who are now the winners and losers? How do we insist on categorizing acts, people and functions before values that are in a needed colapse? What forty years ago was the face of a better world can today be the face of a world in rapid decay. And it is proven that today's decay is caused precisely by what was once the reason for liberation and progress, the acceleration of the economy.
The idea of the winner and the loser, in my point of view, were reversed (or should it be) completely with the passage of the 20th century to the 21st century. Just like consumerism, productivity, nationalism and other values where the Western world still relies on. And everything is both very fast and too slow and, especially young people, do not know what to think or how to act and live as if stuck in two opposing times. It is indeed a turning point of a century, of the millennium and of something else that we are even afraid to name but which necessarily calls us all.
In my opinion, during the 20th century, we became more and more childish to wake up and already old and weak for a 21st century. And it is in this dilemma that we live.
© José Caldeira / TMP
