Contemporary Laboratory: experimentations, December 2014. Casa Daros. Photo: Jessica Gogan.
House 2 – Questions
Raphael Giammattey
How to answer a question asked by an artist? How to listen to what he or she wants to tell us? Did the artists have a message when they elaborated the questions for us young artists? Would the question be more a provocation than a question? Does the question mark really want to question us? The words below are an attempt to stick to the memory/experience of the Contemporary Laboratory and to dialogue with the question, rather than answering it.
01. Coletivo E and Instituto MESA
If you could resign from anything what would it be?
Seven months ago I chose that question in the process to be accepted by the Laboratory: resigning from something–in my case I chose my bed, especially, the relation I had with it. Today it has become the question I ask to most people I know. The last answer I got was from a friend who said he would resign from his family. More than a question, it converted into a symbol of what we can abandon in order to transform ourselves into a better world.
What have you learnt without being taught? How was this process?
The schedule was set and the places were chosen so we could be together in a class, to talk about art. However, in order to do so, it was necessary to step out of the temporality that composed it.
What do you carry in your pocket? What kind of “pocket stuff” might carry a bit of your poetics, your subjectivity?
I wonder what would happen to us if we carried words in our pockets.
02. Fred Coelho
Nowadays, what are the cultures we should “counter”?
I wouldn’t put the word counter in quotation marks. I also don’t know if I would make the decision of beginning a sentence – which has the fair intention of asking – with the world nowadays, obliterating the past. It comes to my mind to transfer the quotation marks from the word counter to the word cultures. Finally, the question mark is what remains.
03. Geo Britto
What revolution can an artist make in the 21st century?
Close your eyes and when you open them stop letting yourself be guided by the world. Close your eyes and when you open them, let perception change you. Close your eyes and when you open them, understand the importance of the tension between the visible and the invisible.
04. Rafucko
What is natural to you?
One does not try to search for these or those words; one just searches to say them. To speak naturally is to not think about speaking.
05. Gustavo Ciríaco
How can we create a field of innocence?
It is symptomatic that in the 21st century the artist declares he/she is not an artist. This representation of oneself is in perfect opposition to the idea that everyone is an artist. Even if innocence cannot be forged, a field of innocence can be created and should be invented once the issues of the art world are not inside this field. The acceptance of oneself as an artist in opposition to the legitimization of oneself as an artist is a question that emerges in the field of innocence. The field of innocence generates perceptions from the difference between what is normal and what is extraordinary.
06. Barbara Szaniecki
Would it be possible to consider today the 2013 protests as an amplified field of art?
It sounds odd to say the protests of June 2013 as if the expression claimed a past. A timeline is only worth it if we can extend it on the ground. But we should pay particular attention to the word that accompanies the line – time. The timeline withdraws its main element instead of materializing it. On the edges of the timeline, where something starts and ends simultaneously, we should be capable of expanding our field of action.
07. Ricardo Basbaum
How can we indicate what exists between “me” and “me as an artist”? Are there convergences and divergences in these demands?
It is harder to talk about what exists between “me” and “me as an artist” than to talk about art, because there are references about art but there is no way of demarcating “me” and “me as an artist”: it isn’t the public or the critics or the artist or the intellectual. To indicate it, it is necessary to fix on the wall the unthinkable and share the space of restlessness with silent listening.
08. Vivian Caccuri
How to deal with the impatience of the audience? Should we embrace or challenge it? How to take a stand on the amount of information that causes this impatience? Should we simplify the propositions or should we resist?
You won’t see everything is not a just chance phrase that captured the minds of the artists of the spectacle conference.
09. Laura Lima
In 200 years what will your artwork be like?
Durability isn’t an issue when it comes to time in its present form. An artwork lasts as long as it should. Duration is organic; it isn’t late or early. In order to last for ten, 15, 50, 100, or 200 years, the artwork can never become present.
