Contemporary Laboratory: Point of View. Spectacle Conference Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel, December 12, 2014 and Experimentations, November 5, Casa Daros. Photos: Beatriz Torres and Jessica Gogan.

House 1: Biographies

Raphael Giammattey

Generally, the artist is concerned with creating doubles. However, sometimes it is necessary to take a step back in order to stare into the abyss within. Even when one isn’t entirely conscious of what one is producing, it is fundamental, every now and then, to create brief biographies. Each of the 17 artists, who participated in the Contemporary Laboratory, wrote his/her portrait having in mind the experience engendered by the course.

Luiza Coimbra
“My identification with the word ‘artist’ comes from my childhood, when people around me called me that, as I was a child who liked to draw. So, my first relation with the term comes from other people’s points of view of what they identified as art. I only call myself ‘an artist’ when I become aware of a poetic practice that I am doing.”

Tomaz Bevilaqua
“Moved by music of the most diverse styles, I felt the need of pursuing a way to manufacture music in which I could explore and control as much as possible, as much as in forms of learning and understanding the heart of songs and sounds, as in putting into practice everything I wanted to, sonorously speaking.”

Tathiane Peixoto
“A distracted observer of ordinary things who likes to talk while throwing out seeds. The experience I had at Daros made me see new paths, shortcuts in such a blocked society that almost leads us to losing hope in new futures, where everything seems so trivial in the cave of already invented inventions. Art is when Chronos stops my alienation and surprises me. I just conceive it. Who said I could make art?”

Bia Lopes
“I’m the result of what passes through me. Sometimes I’m light, other times I’m heavy. How do I give it back? I live now, so I can give it back to the world… I like to spread around the pieces of what I’ve been or seen, dreamt or felt. I dislocate these fragments in space and appropriate other fragments for myself. Eternal walker of a world I try to create…”

Julia Falcão
“To create and to think together with the perception of others. To be able to experience it in an environment willing to teach and encourage new propositions and possibilities and to allow them to be experienced inside this laboratorial space.”

Michel Schettert
“Create, share, argue, change, fight, get out and get in, drink coffee, look, go and come back, accept, suggest, stagger, challenge, imagine, wait, try, put in and take out, meet, exchange, tire, listen, fit, poke, speak up, write, arrange, draw, close. Continue.”

Lucas Bueno
“Daros provided the medium. We gave the fingers. From these the details unfolded. All of a sudden [something] gave that wasn’t given. But that was giving and was given. So much that it gave. Even changing what was given.” (T.N. The Portuguese original plays on the words Daros, the conjugation of dar [to give] and other words beginning with ‘d’: dedos [fingers] and dados [facts or details]).

Jandir Jr.
“’You won’t see everything.” I heard this during the Contemporary Laboratory. I found it biographical, despite being premonitory. They call me a young artist, if they prefer. I don’t like it. I prefer Jandir.”

Antonio Amador
“I’ve always liked things that intrigued me. Magic tricks, for instance. They fascinate me. I’m almost obsessed. Not because I want to understand how they are done, only because I like to see them happen. I guess that is one of the reasons I became an artist: to experience and to produce experiences that don’t necessarily have an explanation.”

Aline Besouro
“We embraced ourselves virtually and physically, as far as I can remember.”

Felipe Nunes
“Affection is the main thread of human relationships; it creates new signs, weaves the body and stitches time.”

Henrique Castro
“In my pockets things hybridize, rub against each other, and I always end up discovering something that has been forgotten in the middle of necessary stuff. I don’t organize or ‘sectorize’ them. My pockets choose what they want to carry.”

Luan Machado
“I’m a descendant of Indians and Negroes. In my body-soul, I dance the dance of the dead oriental people. The theatre of my life is in the biography of this body. The rest is just a recording.”

Ana Beatriz Coelho
“I’m not an artist.”

Raphael Giammattey
“As not everything can be said when we have to talk about all the things we do and as we can’t be all the ideas of the ‘artist’ that we have, I’d rather be an artwork metamorphosing into a multidimensional artist.”

Camila Mozzini
“To be an artist is: to be. And we all are. If I could define it here I wouldn’t be. It’s a mystery. It’s like poetry that plays with the words. It’s a twist. How this twist occurs… I don’t know. I become an artist in this desert of not knowing – without knowing that I am. And if I know, I want to unlearn.”

Gabriel Cavalleiro
“Being an artist was my alternative to exist in the world. Re-editing it. Allowing myself to fit in.”