The need to cry in public
I
At the time of writing, I am getting ready for another AAVP (Associação de Artistas Visuais em Portugal) meeting. As such, I will be writing this text between meetings—perhaps even during some of the weekly Zoom gatherings that have been scheduled. So, an informal group of artists decided to invite others to form a collective, with a view to creating an association of artists currently working in Portugal. I was one of the first ten people to integrate a discussion group, which has changed a lot over the past year. The first meetings (always virtual) took place in April 2020, at the end of the first month of lockdown. At first, the discussion was politically correct, in a respectful, considerate tone; nonetheless, as the very same opinions became more diversified and individualised, they became clearer, but also sharper. The original members started opposing the way the association was growing, and some people naturally left and others naturally joined in—that is, through invitation of the remaining members.
On 17 September 2020, another associate and I headed to the registry office and formalised the AAVP. This group has been growing and changing ever since, with the sole aim (up until today, 16 May 2021) of organising the first board of directors’ elections, which will take place with the first democratically elected list of associates, chosen by the partners (87 at the time). The provisional board, which I am part of, solely aims at having the AAVP legally recognised and operational. After registering it, we had to work on the association's statutes, which took us quite a few months, before presenting a list of associate candidates to the board.
Just like the other associates, I had to learn what it means to formalise an association. I was in charge of matters such as: talking to our accountant and to the bank, replying to e-mails, taking part in the new associate admissions group, but also arranging meetings with DGArtes [Directorate-General for the Arts], and attending and participating in various working groups (including parliamentary ones) that were formed to contribute toward matters as important as the legal framework of self-employed workers in the field of culture.
The fact that we are living through a very particular moment of our history—a global pandemic—required that the group members, now forced into compulsory confinement and distancing, stayed in touch in a different way. It would probably have been impossible to gather this group of people if there had been no pandemic. The small community we created decided to act as much as possible upon the inability to manage a class of "workers" who, up until then, had had no representation in state bodies, at a time when the Ministry of Culture was taking care of matters as delicate as elaborating the new legal framework of self-employed workers in the field of culture. For that reason, among others, it seemed to us that setting up this association was sorely needed.
Right at the start of the first AAVP document, which was written collaboratively, one reads:
"The AAVP's main aim is to promote the recognition of artistic work as a highly specialised professional activity. Likewise, the AAVP seeks to facilitate integration of visual artists as an active, solidary part of the cultural and social fabric as a whole, namely for discussing political and social decisions so as to build a critical, sensitive, creative society."
Working with governmental institutions has been the biggest challenge yet, for visual artists need to have representation in the social and economic fabric of the country. Used to years-long disinvestment in culture, the visual arts have been complacent with all sorts of successive irresponsible government policies, reaching the perjurious limit which saw us classified as "subsidy dependants." The truth—that which all who work in "culture" in Portugal know all too well—is that the centralised civics successive governments have adopted is an insufficient one, uncapable as it is of offering the population proper forms of cultural fruition to its fullest extent. Indeed, it has been thoroughly proven that a society in which art, through education, is constantly present in people's lives from an early age is a more developed, more cooperative, more complex, fairer society.
From the outset, the AAVP working group has undergone recurring restructuring in order to be able to work on its various projects, and has demonstrated how complex it is to maintain interpersonal relationships based on individual and collective work dedicated to a common good. This obviously has an impact on our institutions, which are managed by people like us. The dedication required to do any sort of work must have a common purpose. Ruthlessly analysed in the recent past by José Gil in Portugal, Hoje: O Medo de Existir (2005), the structural problem remains: how can a government, a country, function without holding everyone accountable? Portugal, a country which has never been—will it ever be?—regionalised or effectively decentralised, has transferred what was left of feudal land, which is now sold at a loss, to successive incompetent governments cunningly comprised of the very same owners. Portugal will not move forward because—here lies the major problem—nobody is willing to hand over their power to another agent at any given moment.
II
The fact that I was born in Almada made me aware from an early age of the political context I live in. While, on the one hand, I was able to keep clear of partisan displays, on the other I have always been particularly attentive to the ideological manoeuvres that make any human—as well as non-human—agent a political entity. I have always tried to hold the most obvious discursive forms at a distance, as I am interested not in generalisations but rather in the particularity and specificity of things. I see myself in Yvonne Rainer's words when she states that her artistic practice has nothing to do with political movements, although she is aware of their existence and of what they could mean:
“The condition for the making of my stuff lies in the continuation of my interest and energy. Just as ideological issues have no bearing on the nature of the work, neither does the tenor of current political and social conditions have any bearing on its execution. The world disintegrates around me. My connection to the world-in-crisis remains tenuous and remote. I can foresee a time when this remoteness must necessarily end, though I cannot foresee exactly when or how the relationship will change, or what circumstances will incite me to a different kind of action. … This statement is not on apology. … My body remains the enduring reality."[1]
It is a question I—and other artists, I believe—ask: how, and why, should one keep on working in moments when all seems superfluous, when politics act upon all in such a brutal way, when nothing seems to make sense anymore?
To me, there is a broad, complex but simple, particular answer: the space of freedom triggered by the artistic process is the best way to fight against the ignorance of the agents and social or political movements which believe themselves to be capable of generating order in the world and which, in doing so, use violence as a means to control the bodies of others. Rainer's need to keep her distance—although we know she is not really keeping it—is actually the seeking of lucidity in the midst of chaos; the seeking of non-meaning—developing her own language so as not to have to submit nor speak the language of the oppressor. Turning our TV off, or, on the other hand, keeping abreast of political developments through the avalanche of news, makes us no less complicit with the authoritarian gestures we condone inasmuch as we remain silent. Our bodies are the most real political space and the place of all struggles, and Rainer feels no less complicit for not having an apparently political body of work.
My adaptation to the artistic context has always been one of feeling I am not part of anything, nor of any movement, exactly because I am interested in creating my own language. My learning came from successive clashes, most of which with myself. I am interested in conscious forms of alienation. One must be aware of such forms of alienation, as well as of what lies behind them. One must regard social and political processes as tools of domination and biopower to control populations. One must be absent-minded but also alert. One must take the word and speak, as long as it has been deconstructed and decolonised from the linguistic structures that seek to normalise all discourses; one must realise each word carries a certain meaning within, as well as a heavy, potentially hurtful load. The violence transported by political discourses is pervaded by a mythological narrative based on false ideals of domination and power. We absolutely must debunk them. This is toilsome but utterly necessary work.
The current moment is one of collapse of the real. The belief system that has thrived over the past few centuries in Western culture—one based on the bourgeois financial progress of an economic model that employs scientific advances as a means to enhance the evolution of the human race, thus punishing and subjugating all other forms of life—is in rapid decline. Science is uncapable of responding quickly enough to the current global financial system, which is based on exchanges of commodities and people. The apparent freedom that bodies acquired upon the technical advances of science has now reached a dead-end, especially for those who believe external transformation is the answer.
Contemporânea's invitation to take part in this series of workshops and to develop thought for both online and later print publication is a privilege, and it obviously made me think of our privilege to be able to express ourselves in such a way. The space we have been creating—that safe space we all need—must be expanded to as many people as possible by means of formal and informal support communities. The world disintegrates around us, as Yvonne Rainer writes, but we still need a public space for discussion that is able to elude manipulation by greedy, abstract capital-fuelled algorithms. We ought to draw possible places for furtive, engaged gatherings, whether they be online or offline, screen- or people-mediated. We should be able to cry in public if we feel like it, without being seen as too fragile or without feeling we are uncapable of producing a discourse. We must break with the idea of appearance as the form of totality. More than seeing, we must listen, listen with our whole body, without reproducing voices we believe to be correct only because they are well-spoken and authoritarian. We must teach the body to express itself in a particular, specific way—with no patterns, with no preconceived choreographies of preestablished logics.
Pedro Barateiro (Almada, 1979) lives and works in Lisbon. Works with a variety of techniques, ranging from film, to performance and writing. His work has been centering on the attepmt to deconstruct binary narrative of ocidental tought and culture. Solo exhibitions include spaces like: Kunsthalle Basel; Museu de Serralves; Kunsthalle Lissabon; REDCAT; Museu Coleção Berardo; Pavilhão Branco - Museu da Cidade; Netwerk Aalst; Basement Roma; Kettle's Yard; Parkour; Lumiar Cité; and Spike Island. Collective exhibitions: 13th Sharjah Biennial; 29th São Paulo Biennal; 16th Biennal Sidney; and 5th Bienal of Berlin. His performances have been presented in Centre Pompidou, Théâtre de la Ville, L’école nationale supérieure des beaux-arts - ENSBA and Fondation Ricard (Paris); 98Weeks (Beirute); ZHdK (Zurique); Teatro São Luiz (Lisboa); SESC Pompeia, Centro Cultural São Paulo and Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo). His work is present in different private and public collections: Deusche Bank Collection; Fundação EDP; Museu de Serralves; Fundación ARCO; Fundación “la Caixa”; and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Barateiro organizes events and exhibitions in the space Spirit Shop, of his creation next to his atelier in Rua da Madalena in Lisbon.
[1] Written in March, 1968, this text was distribuited in the show accompaning “The Mind is a Muscle” by Yvonne Rainer. As Rainer said of performance, "it's not necessary read before observing". The text was published afterwards in Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), p. 71. The translation of this excerpt was made by the author of the text, since no portuguese translation exists.