Interview with Barbara Piwowarska
"Footnoote: A Prototype", at Galeria da Boavista, in Lisbon, is the most recent intervention of the curatorial project Footnote, developed since 2018 by Barbara Piwowarska, that has been expanding in numerous contexts, spaces and objects. This was the motto for the conversation between Contemporânea and the polish curator, that currently works as artistic director of Casa de São Roque, in Porto. A talk that went beyond this specific exhibition, but through the whole footnote project and it's artistic and aesthetic horizons; carried out via e-mail during the month of April 2022.
David Silva Revés (DSR): Although this conversation focusses mainly on the exhibition Footnote 15: A Prototype, which you curated at Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon, I would to start by talking about the Footnote project as a whole. You describe it as an “ongoing project that applies 'a methodology of margins.” Care for briefly presenting this ongoing curatorial project and explaining what can be understood as a “methodology of margins”?
Barbara Piwowarska (BP): The Footnote project unfolded from a specific situation and moment and became an essential critical tool for me. In 2010 I was still working at the Centre for Contemporary Art [CCA] Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, which was in a crisis: the then new director was neither interested in our curatorial proposals nor in dialogue, so many of us had to leave. But before it happened, at least I could organise a small project that reflected my own situation. In order to do so, I was able to get a grant from the American Embassy that allowed me to set up a small “private,” unofficial show-intervention inside the large national institution. This was possible thanks to an amazing spatial coincidence of the castle as such, its natural hierarchy of floor divisions: I set the show up in the cellar underneath the castle's main exhibition floor, commenting literally [as bottom footnote] on what was above it.
Titled Footnote 1: Phantom Limb, it referred to the main-level exhibition Repeat from Theory of Vision focussed on Władysław Strzemiński’s paper tracings and on his treatise Theory of Vision. This project was curated by Professor Andrzej Turowski, an expert in Polish and Russian avant-garde based in Paris who has also been both a mentor and a friend to me for many years.
Artists and scholars such as R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider and Nicolás Guagnini [Union Gaucha Productions], Igor Krenz, Józef Robakowski, Yve-Alain Bois, and Andrzej Turowski himself took part in this first “footnote”. In the cellar, I decided to focus on the avant-garde work of sculptor Katarzyna Kobro [Strzemiński's wife, who at that time was still lesser known, marginalized] and its extraordinary American reception developed in 1980s within the October magazine circle, especially owing to Yve-Alain Bois, but also by contemporary New York artists from the Orchard collective [including Quaytman, Schneider, Guagnini]. They were displayed for the first time alongside related Polish works from 1970s–1980s and historical experimental films by Robakowski and Turowski.
Phantom Limb was also the title of a 1998 film by Brazilian-Argentinian duo Union Gaucha Productions, which also featured in this show. This research-based work proposed peripheral, marginal, non-existing transversal histories of modernisms from Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Poland, and also included footage recorded in the basement / storage area of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, that showed spatial compositions and sculptures by Katarzyna Kobro, juxtaposed with Lygia Clark's Bichos. The majority of Kobro’s sculptures had never been exhibited at museums, as they had simply been stored away during the 1990s. For me, here, “phantom limb” was a metaphor for something that didn’t exist — a metaphor for modernist projects and their failure, their absence, but also how they are able to stay around and resurface in the present day.
Footnote became an ongoing project on the margins of history, on the margins of the avant-garde. The term “methodology of margins” derives from this approach. It also stresses that my curatorial stance revolves around speaking from the perspective of the margin: I’m not part of the main text, nor can I set it. “Methodology of margins” also refers to Andrzej Turowski's 1998 book Awangardowe marginesy [Avant-Garde Margins].
DSV: The powerful, practical concept of footnote instinctively leads us to a textual, literary, and essayistic context. As a bottom-of-page comment, it contextualises the main text while referring to other realities and complementary or divergent directions. Taking into account how it slips into an exhibition context — and bearing in mind that what we're presented with are exactly these comments or footnotes — does each Footnote iteration somehow allude to a sort of virtual [or ideal, if you like] exhibition, which is thus actualised in a specific space without actually being there?
BP: Exactly. A footnote seems to be somewhat phantasmal, but it is a very “spatial” thing; it holds that "display" potential. I applied it to exhibition-making. In this case, it must be always site-specific.
It is a tool to add in specific details or comments on what does not fit into the main text — just something that you find important, something that, nonetheless, you’d prefer to state on the margin to help understand the phenomenon more broadly. The reader can find it at the bottom of the page, as opposed to the endnote, which is placed at the end of the text or publication. Some types of footnotes are more accessible than others. I prefer the ones that are placed directly below the text.
Over the years, the Footnote project has developed in various contexts. In addition to exhibitions, there have been several iterations in the form of publications, performative lectures, or interventions. Such was the case of Footnote 5: Screening Space, in 2011, a contribution for the conference Abstract Space — Concrete Media: Avant-gardes beyond Western Modernism, at MUMOK, Vienna, in the context of the exhibition Abstract Space. I had the honour of being invited by Sabeth Buchmann to make my “footnote” between talks by such eminent scholars as Krisztina Passuth, Margarita Tupitsyn, or Partha Mitter. There was also another Footnote in the form of a performative lecture, in reference to the Museum ON/OFF project, at Centre Pompidou, in the centre's permanent exhibition galleries, as part of the event-intervention Museum [science] fictions, organised by Elena Sorokina, which included presentations by Ekaterina Degot, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, and Gluklya [Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya], among others. That was when I presented Footnote 10: Museum of the Unknown, about Oskar Hansen, his Open Form practice, and his never realized project for the Skopje Museum of Modern Art.
DSR: The footnote, as a detached type area, is also something that perceptively affects reading, destabilising a general image to insert an/other/s. You've even have talked about it in relation to the project itself: “The footnote seeks to upend orders of legibility”.
How is this thought, which could be described as almost diagrammatic or constellation-like, structured in each research/exhibition event so as to engender lines of continuity but also others of tension or confrontation?
BP: Interestingly, when used in exhibitions, the footnote is a tool that gives you the opportunity to work in a non-linear, spatial, prototypical way. It is hard to answer your question, for it always is a work-in-progress which is developed with guest participants and invariably shaped by ongoing collaboration. In some iterations, you cannot previously establish the final goal and result — you can only get a grasp of its content when it has been set up. In that sense, I see all of this as an “artistic process.”
DSR: Based on what you say, and considering the project's strong theoretical and research component, which always stands before and beyond the actual artistic explorations and the exhibition proper, I also notice there is a particular keenness to enhance its educational aspect. Furthermore, one can tell there has been a steadfast effort to summon other agents — academic, institutional, para-artistic, and so — thus bringing about different relationships and critical perspectives.
BP: Yes, it gives you flexibility; it is open. Always a collaborative one, it can bring together people from different professions as well as different local communities. For instance: Footnote 14: Angel of History — though dedicated to Walter Benjamin — was designed for Casa São Roque, Porto, where I have been working for three years now. It is a new contemporary art centre located in the Campanhã district, in close neighbourhood of FCPorto football team stadium, far from the tourist heart of the city and attending especially to the local audience, which, overall, is not an artworld crowd. Footnote 14 commented on local contexts and transversalities: Walter Benjamin's family, how he never managed to escape through Portugal, the fact that his great granddaughter Lais Benjamin Campos was born in Berlin to a Brazilian father of Portuguese-German descent from near Porto. In this project, I sought to tell unknown stories from Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, and São Paulo which intersected Lourosa, Espinho, and Porto. Participants included artists, scholars, and teachers such as Aura Rosenberg, Chantal Benjamin, Lais Benjamin Campos, Marcelo de Souza Campos Granja, Patrizia Bach, Arno Gisinger, Frances Scholz, R.H. Quaytman, Joanna Zielińska, Jean-Luc Moulène, Jean-Michel Alberola, André Cepeda, Paulo Nozolino, and Sismógrafo, as well as authors such as João Barrento, Susana Camanho, and Maria Filomena Molder. As part of it, we organised a conference with Sismógrafo at Casa das Artes, and also published a bilingual book of the same title featuring the first extensive interview I did with Chantal Benjamin, one of Walter Benjamin's forgotten granddaughters.
DSR: This is the 15th Footnote show. The project has been shown in internationally diverse contexts and venues, and has followed different lines of force and critical directions throughout its previous iterations. Nonetheless, I notice that some works and artists have played a part in several exhibitions. That is the case of Igor Krenz's and Union Gaucha Productions's videos, which feature in Footnote 15: A Prototype but have already been displayed in other iterations of the Footnote project.
BP: Yes. For this project departed from research on Katarzyna Kobro and her international reception in the 1980s–2000s, several of the first Footnotes included Robakowski, Turowski, Krenz, and Union Gaucha Productions, as well as R.H. Quaytman [Rebecca Quaytman] — a great researcher both in Kobro and Benjamin. She took part in later chapters because of her expertise, but also because of others reasons and subject matters. In Footnote 6: As Model especially, at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, she contributed with new works dedicated to Kobro and Strzemiński. This iteration also featured a new sculptural installation by Liam Gillick titled Łódź Prototype, Anna Ostoya's Composition of Information, Lygia Clark's Bicho, and a replica of Kobro’s 1928 Composition, which was brought by Yve-Alain Bois directly from his house. As Quaytman played an important part in the previous Footnote 14, in Porto [because of Walter Benjamin], I decided to focus on different artists in Footnote 15: Ana Cardoso, Jorge Pinheiro, Tomás Cunha Ferreira, all based in Lisbon. This latest iteration, at Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon, was developed in collaboration with Cardoso, and subsequently our installation was “completed” by a site-specific intervention by Cunha Ferreira during the latter stages of the exhibition's setting up, using the pieces that comprise Murmur.
Tomás Cunha Ferreira: Murmur. Exhibition views. Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon. Photography: João Neves. Cortesy of the artist and Galerias Municipais de Lisboa.
DSR: Now, on to Footnote 15: A Prototype proper. In the brochure, we are told it departs from a collaboration between you and painter Ana Cardoso, who is also featured in the exhibition. We are also told that you both departed from a common interest in the work of Polish-Russian sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. How did you come together to make this exhibition? How did this joint work take shape in the exhibition?
BP: #15 is the most processual, prototypical iteration of the Footnote. It started in 2020, during lockdown, when I was doing a curatorial residency in Lisbon at Residências da Boavista, at the generous invitation of Galerias Municipais and Tobi Maier. The only thing you could do was visit artist’s studios, as all institutions and museums were closed. A Prototype originated at Ana Cardoso’s studio, near Galeria da Boavista, when she showed me her works and a pdf file where she had outlined an idea for a group exhibition in which her paintings could coexist with abstract works by Kobro, as her practice pivots between Constructivism and Unism. Like I said earlier, I had already done research on Kobro in Footnote 1: Phantom Limb, focussing mainly on the South and North-American reception of her work (Brasil, Argentina, USA) and on how she developed her abstract compositions in 1920s–1930s in relation to the viewer's body, unified with the time-space, upholding the rhythm of human lives, in dialogue with and opposition to the legacies of Constructivism, Neoplasticism, and Concrete Art.
Cardoso was interested in bringing together and creating a dialogue between Lisbon-based artists, American legacies, and Eastern European figures such as Kobro, and in her opinion, Lisbon art scene was entirely lacking in exhibitions focussing on abstraction.
Ana Cardoso: Pendente. Exhibition view. Footnote 15: a Prototype, Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon. Photography: João Neves. Cortesy of the artist and Galerias Municipais de Lisboa.
It was a quite natural way to finally start working on the project, as we knew each other from New York, where Ana had lived and studied for years, and where I'd spent long periods of time because of several scholarships. For Footnote 15: A Prototype, together, we invited artists and developed the project around her new installations, which would become the core of the show.
I have always taken an interest in her paintings as manipulative compositions—something that can be re-installed, something of a performative nature. Hers are always prototypical, unfinished works, with an open structure. They have a deep, discrete relationship with the Neo-Concrete movement legacy. Her paintings dialogue as well with American abstraction, formalism, and the work of Portuguese artist Tomás Cunha Ferreira, with whom she has shared many years of friendship and exchange, which is especially apparent in their gesture of sewing colourful fabrics and activating their surfaces. My collaboration with Ana thus evolved into a joint collaboration with Tomás. His work is permeated by Neo-Concrete experiments, as he spent many years in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro and grew up close to the Grupo Frente circle. Cunha Ferreira and Cardoso share Jorge Pinheiro's stance, for whom "an object is always a project for a new object."
DSR: Will this collaboration between you two extend to other places and shows? Or is it still too early to say so?
BP: We are currently planning an exhibition in Warsaw.
DSR: Looking at the title, the notion of prototype leads us to a notion of project, of primary model and potential form, the scale of which may eventually increase and expand in a standardised way. In the same way, it suggests something that is not yet fully finished and that, therefore, is still in an experimental state. How does this dialectic, or tensional mechanism, present itself in this particular exhibition?
BP: In this case, the exhibition is a prototype. That was how we worked on it, and that is how Ana Cardoso and Tomás Cunha Ferreira understand their works, as a prototype, as something that is never finished. In this show, all the works can be arranged differently; should we reposition something, it would still work as a whole, as the exhibition boasts a fully open structure that is enabled by the dynamic between the footnote and the prototype.
Galerias Municipais de Lisboa: Galeria da Boavista
Barbara Piwowarska is a curator and art historian specialized in the legacy of avant-garde and in contemporary art. Since 2019 she has been programming new art center Casa São Roque (CSR) in Porto in Campanhã, as its artistic director and curator, and which opened in October 2019 with the exhibition of Ana Jotta INVENTÓRIA. In 2017 she curated the Polish Pavilion for 57th Venice Biennale with Little Review by Sharon Lockhart. Since 2010, she has run the Footnote project, a series of itinerant exhibitions and interventions referencing existing institutions, situations, and concepts.
David Revés (Lisboa, 1992). Independent researcher and curator. Master in Art Studies, Theory and Criticism of Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto (2018). He has explored the area of new media and social networks, being interested in his intersections with art, museology, exhibition systems and issues related to the figure of the spectator. Develops a critical and essayistic practice with which he regularly contributes to some publications, artistic or academic projects.
Proofread: Diogo Montenegro.
Footnote 15: A Prototype. Exhibition views. Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon. Photography: João Neves. Cortesy of the artists and Galerias Municipais de Lisboa.