Portraits
Sónia Baptista
February
2022
Thu
3
About Triste in English from Spanish
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?
My work has always been self-referential, at least since 2013 and at least until I get tired of myself. Although I get tired of myself several times, and in this process, balanced between the disappointment and the abundance with/from my world, it is important for me to leave myself behind and go to meet other people. So even if I feel delighted or unenchanted with myself, it's in my personal experience that I trust. One of the things that gives me more pleasure in creating is to weave the points of connection between things, it is to see these possibilities, correspondences, relationships, harmonious and dissonating, between everything that exists and what does not exist – it is this magic of research and reflection that weaves a pattern that reveals itself in the creative process and that doesn’t finish after the creative object is presented. The act of creation is an act of continuity, ashy and permeable, without boundaries between the material and the immaterial. This is the revelation and I am, as a creator, the person who reveals.
During your creative process, did you based or were you inspired by any autobiographical work, self-portrait or other reference (artistic or other)?
For this work, as for all my work, I start from a long process of research with many readings, viewings, etc. Many links, many PDFs, many books. I don't even know where I started. But I know that when the idea that this work really had to start from my personal experience, from my experience with melancholy, sadness and depression (an idea that I resisted for a long time, in vain, there it is, I did not want to focus the speech on me) started to become clearer for me, and that this sharing, in the first person, was essential, then the problem of how to do it, how to communicate, how to talk about things so personal, so "serious", so potentially serious without falling into a melodramatic, moralistic, sensationalist discourse, appeared. The solution, disarming for the drawing of this communication, turned out to be humour, to take a step back and observe my experience from outside, my experience in relation to other experiences. They say Mark Twain said: "Humour is equal to tragedy plus time." So, with the lightness of the edges of my personal experience emaciated by the passage of time, at the time, for example, it was very important to find a stand up set by Tig Notaro, an American comedian, entitled "Hello, I have cancer" (available on Spotify, check it out). I thought: can I do like her? From my personal tragedy, talk about, in this case, the experience and the taboo of depression? A posteriori, in recent years, I have known the works of Hanna Gadsby and Bo Burnham, brilliant and exciting in the dismantling of the colossus that is survive with mental illnesses.
Vinícius de Moraes sings that "It is better to be cheerful than to be sad. / Joy is the best thing there is." Is it? Can we speak of a joy of sadness?
Umm... it's relative, like everything else, isn't it? Sadness is a place of good, comfortable, healthy living, for some, as joy is for others. Joy can be displaced, displaced from the world or too self-centered, for many. Melancholy is a state of mind, often creative, full of style, attractive, photogenic. In depression there is no light, there is no floor. If depression could sing, because singing is almost always not possible, it would sing: "sadness has no end, happiness, does.”
How can sadness and the feminine eventually dialogue and enhance each other?
A few years ago I remember some American artists, comedians, say, in order to defend the maintenance of their environments almost or nothing woman friendly, that women were not funny, couldn’t make jokes. It was said and it is said that women can’t have fun, create less humorous material, do not create, nor play many funny characters, and that humour destroy gracefulness, beauty does not make people laugh, freedom is not well-behaved. Often the place of humour seems, to women, unattainable, dangerous or a kind of absurd luxury, a way of living in denial about the heaviness of the world, of living in this world as mute as it is, as it was created, as it is being perpetuated. Women with no voice, objectified, harmed... how not to be sad? How could women not have inscribed in their genetic code, centuries and centuries of deep sadness, of dismay, hopelessness, resignation? Despite everything, it takes courage, it is vital to remember - that with sadness come the will to fight, the courage to fight for the end, of this unjust, world.
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?
My work has always been self-referential, at least since 2013 and at least until I get tired of myself. Although I get tired of myself several times, and in this process, balanced between the disappointment and the abundance with/from my world, it is important for me to leave myself behind and go to meet other people. So even if I feel delighted or unenchanted with myself, it's in my personal experience that I trust. One of the things that gives me more pleasure in creating is to weave the points of connection between things, it is to see these possibilities, correspondences, relationships, harmonious and dissonating, between everything that exists and what does not exist – it is this magic of research and reflection that weaves a pattern that reveals itself in the creative process and that doesn’t finish after the creative object is presented. The act of creation is an act of continuity, ashy and permeable, without boundaries between the material and the immaterial. This is the revelation and I am, as a creator, the person who reveals.
During your creative process, did you based or were you inspired by any autobiographical work, self-portrait or other reference (artistic or other)?
For this work, as for all my work, I start from a long process of research with many readings, viewings, etc. Many links, many PDFs, many books. I don't even know where I started. But I know that when the idea that this work really had to start from my personal experience, from my experience with melancholy, sadness and depression (an idea that I resisted for a long time, in vain, there it is, I did not want to focus the speech on me) started to become clearer for me, and that this sharing, in the first person, was essential, then the problem of how to do it, how to communicate, how to talk about things so personal, so "serious", so potentially serious without falling into a melodramatic, moralistic, sensationalist discourse, appeared. The solution, disarming for the drawing of this communication, turned out to be humour, to take a step back and observe my experience from outside, my experience in relation to other experiences. They say Mark Twain said: "Humour is equal to tragedy plus time." So, with the lightness of the edges of my personal experience emaciated by the passage of time, at the time, for example, it was very important to find a stand up set by Tig Notaro, an American comedian, entitled "Hello, I have cancer" (available on Spotify, check it out). I thought: can I do like her? From my personal tragedy, talk about, in this case, the experience and the taboo of depression? A posteriori, in recent years, I have known the works of Hanna Gadsby and Bo Burnham, brilliant and exciting in the dismantling of the colossus that is survive with mental illnesses.
Vinícius de Moraes sings that "It is better to be cheerful than to be sad. / Joy is the best thing there is." Is it? Can we speak of a joy of sadness?
Umm... it's relative, like everything else, isn't it? Sadness is a place of good, comfortable, healthy living, for some, as joy is for others. Joy can be displaced, displaced from the world or too self-centered, for many. Melancholy is a state of mind, often creative, full of style, attractive, photogenic. In depression there is no light, there is no floor. If depression could sing, because singing is almost always not possible, it would sing: "sadness has no end, happiness, does.”
How can sadness and the feminine eventually dialogue and enhance each other?
A few years ago I remember some American artists, comedians, say, in order to defend the maintenance of their environments almost or nothing woman friendly, that women were not funny, couldn’t make jokes. It was said and it is said that women can’t have fun, create less humorous material, do not create, nor play many funny characters, and that humour destroy gracefulness, beauty does not make people laugh, freedom is not well-behaved. Often the place of humour seems, to women, unattainable, dangerous or a kind of absurd luxury, a way of living in denial about the heaviness of the world, of living in this world as mute as it is, as it was created, as it is being perpetuated. Women with no voice, objectified, harmed... how not to be sad? How could women not have inscribed in their genetic code, centuries and centuries of deep sadness, of dismay, hopelessness, resignation? Despite everything, it takes courage, it is vital to remember - that with sadness come the will to fight, the courage to fight for the end, of this unjust, world.
© Vitorino Coragem
