Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Notes#013

'We are accustomed to hearing that democracy is the worst of governments with the exception of all the others.' (Ranciére, 2006, 4)

Democracy has been hated since ancient times as a perversion of the good government due to the excess of license which with intensive participation ruins the state; this has been re-directed to the search of material prosperity and private pleasures which results on citizen’s indifference towards the common good and the weakening of public authority. So if not by the illness death comes by the cure.

The diagnosis is identical today, people are disengaged from politics, and if politics is, as in ancient times, the search for the common good, and today’s citizen is the individual consumer pursuing his private affairs we can see how democracy was reduced to a mere form of society emptied from politics, and seen as a corruption of it’s people and not of its government.

Who is entitled to govern has always been the question in search of the good government and it is where democracy, states Rancière, reveals the trouble. Plato lists seven titles to govern; four related to birth: being older, or the father, highborn, free; and two associated to relations in nature: stronger over the weaker, wiser over the ignorant. The first four, base government of kinship; the latter two on excellence, and according to Rancière it is where politics commences, when the title to govern is separated from kinship, and also when the seventh title appears – the drawing of lots – the title of chance, the democratic title which is no title. And that is what is so outrageous for some people: that age, birth or even wisdom has to ‘bow before the law of chance.’

Then, if politics begins when the power of birth is undermined and its true nature disclosed – property-owning power – democracy creates a rupture relegating to different places the principle of government and the principle of society, and this dissociation is its ultimate meaning: ‘the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.’ (45) And for Rancière ‘if politics means anything it means something that is added to the possible governments’, that naturally are oligarchic, ‘and put themselves forward as models for the construction of larger an more complex human communities.’ (45) This something is democracy, the government of chance. So in his view democracy is neither a type of constitution nor a form of society, ‘but is this ungovernable on which every government must ultimately find out it is based.’ (49) The condition to have a political government, thus, is to be founded on the absence of title to govern, and politics exists only if there is a supplementary title, and again the scandal of democracy, is that this title is the absence of title; the power of anyone at all. So at the bottom of every government is equality, for inequality cannot exist without a ‘multitude of egalitarian relations’.

Democracy has been confused with representative democracy, but lets not be fooled says Rancière, ‘representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of population’ it represents the property owning minorities ‘who are entitled to take charge of public affairs.’ But again democracy is not a type of constitution; it can never be identified with a juridico-political form. It is the power of the people – not of the majority but of anyone and everyone – and this power works beneath the state, because of its egalitarian foundation; and beyond the state, because its public activity frustrate the ‘State’s tendency to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere’. The State’s tendency is to shrink this public sphere , by relegating the interventions of the citizen’s to the private domain; democracy fights this tendency in the endless effort to enlarge this sphere. This struggle is then about distribution, a key concept in Rancière’s thought, the ‘distribution of the public and the private that shores up the twofold domination of the oligarchy in the State and in society’. This re-distribution is a struggle to: defend the ‘public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private’ (56); recognize ‘the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth;’ (55) by doing so it enlarges the ‘recognition, as equals and as political subjects those who have been relegated by the State law to the private life of inferior beings.’

The idea of becoming a political subject is also paramount to Rancière’s thought; are man and citizen the same subject? Rancière unpacks this question through Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx notion of Human Rights. To the first these are the rights of bare life, of those who do not belong to any constitutional national community, therefore without rights, so the Human Rights are an illusion; to the latter these are the rights of citizens, property owners who belong to a national community, therefore the rights of those who have rights. But to Rancière they both miss that the one of politics exists only through that supplement which is democracy. Neither bare life, nor citizenship of constitutional texts are political subjects, these are always defined by an interval between identities, when the distribution of terms and places are overturned.

Rancière uses the statement of Olympe Gouges to further this idea: 'Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum', i.e., if she can be sentenced to death then she does not belong solely to the domestic life. ‘Women can therefore claim rights as women and as citizens, an identical right that, however, can only be asserted in the form of the supplement.’ (60) Gouges, maintains Rancière, proved wrong both Arendt’s and Marx’s views. She ‘inserted a third possibility: women's and citizen's rights are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.’ (61) They are deprived of the rights but at the same time they exercise them. Politics is that operation of splitting into two – which he illustrates with the example of the women that in 1955 refused to leave the white people’s seat in an Alabama bus. ‘That is what the democratic process implies: the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular.’ Democracy must constantly bring into ‘play, inventions of forms of subjectivation and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life, in a ‘political movement that blurs both the given distribution of the individuals and the collective, and the accepted boundary of the political and the social.’

Ranciére call us to renounce to the faith in the vision of democracy by the multitude, which is such a dreadful task; but if we understand democracy’s true meaning, that an ‘egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts,’ (96) and that ‘it is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts,’ then, as he finishes ‘to those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence,’ democracy can ‘inspire courage, and hence joy.’ (97)

Participation in, and the construction of, democracy, according to Rancière, is then to act in the intervals of our own identity split and therefore fight the state’s privatization of our private life with single and precarious gestures of equality.

RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Notes#012

Which kind of participation is possible in Plato's aristocracy?


In his book Republic, Plato supposedly transcribes a conversation between Socrates and some young Athenians that starts by analysing what is justice leading to the creation of a just city. This ideal city follows – what was identified by Leon Battista Alberti during the Renaissance as – concinnitas universarum partium, or the harmony and concord in all the parts in relation to one another, where each and every organ mind its own performance and to remove one part compromises the whole. Being on one’s place is here proved to be the required participation in this city. Divided in four elements: wisdom, bravery, temperance and justice; Socrates will analyse the city’s first three elements believing that the remainder would be justice, the gathering’s inquire. As the appetite is the largest element in an individual, followed by courage and both governed by his reason, the smallest element; so is the city ruled by a few wise men and women or by a king with a true love for philosophy, helped by soldiers and a larger amount of auxiliaries. Each element does it occupation, that should be a single one if to be done with excellence, and respect the rule of the few and this harmony and respect to the wise element is what makes a man or a city just. To be sure, in such a city to be a just man means performing the assign task, be it to be a shoemaker or a philosopher, according to one’s gifts and training; and this is the required participation, to be just.

Why then, have I been dreaming about the reasons to escape Plato's perfect city and fall into the extravagant excesses of a democracy? For I truly have.

Until the city is ruled by philosophers there shall be no constitution worth being called a city, under this oath Socrates debates on the reasons why philosophers are considered useless by the multitude and nevertheless are the right ones for the job. The reason being that philosophers are the ones with access to the essential forms lighten by good and revealed by pure reason. To achieve this level of knowledge requires years of training in several subjects and to be considered as guardians requires a just city. Democracy for him is not a just constitution but the third level of decay from the desired one, aristocracy. An oligarch’s son, the democrat is blinded by license; all appetites are alike for him, good and evil; everyone has equal participation in civic right, liberty and equality is his motto. Jusque ici tout va bien. However it is not the fall but the landing that matters, and as is noticed in their conversation to do anything in excess seldom fails to provoke a violent reaction to the opposite extreme. Democracy destruction shall be by the metamorphosis of the object of its supreme good – freedom, into its worse shape: excessive slavery, and with this tiranny arises.

This hate of democracy is as old as its very origin, ancient Greece. And today’s hate formula is not against democracy itself, conversely to Plato’s idea, democracy is not a corrupt form of government, the problem is about the people, democratic civilization. What provokes the crisis of democracy is nothing other that the intensity of democratic life (Ranciére, 2006, 7).


PLATO. 1997. Republic. Wordsworth.
RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.


continued on note #13 with the reading of Ranciére's Hatred of Democracy

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Notes#011


A performance done in October 2009 at Avenida dos Aliados, Praça da Liberdade and Largo dos Lóios - Porto by the name Coreto. An ephemeral piece made out of cardboard that echos those structures of Porto's Romantic gardens, once filled with the music of local brass bands are nowadays quite abandoned. This intervention was made in the context of an educational project - Artistic Interventions in Public Spaces and Site Specific work - by André Silva, Cláudia Lopes, Dalila Gonçalves and Inês Gama.

you can see the original news in portuguese here

It seems that the bandstand had a programme with music and that interaction was the goal. Unfortunately I could not see if there was any, and of what kind. The truth is that this Avenue after being requalified three years ago have been the target of several artistic interventions that try a posteriori to inquire what has not been examined before the urban intervention: what was it used for and what can it be used for on an everyday basis.

you find in this blog my own investigation after the works were finished on how it was being used.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

After Party C213

Todos à festa!
Caldeira 213 no Senhorio
R. Duque de Loulé 239, 2º
Porto.
3.Jan.2010
17:00

Monday, December 07, 2009

streetmoney003


streetmoney003
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta
money found on the streets of London since the 24th of September.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

I would Prefer To!


(5th attempt, and certaintly not the last, to clarify my research)

Art, as politics, pose questions of responsibility about our role in society (1) and a politicized art can be part of the toolkit of the radical and plural democratic project (Mouffe, 2009). Democracy should be under constant revision, and the role of one and each citizen is paramount to the maintenance of its project, or it is not. Notions of participation and resistance are then an important aspect for this maintenance. My affiliation would be to art that call to arms and inspire people to take action but the contemporary discourse seems to be much more directed towards passive resistance. This led me to think of the political gesture of Michael Angelo’s David and Agamben notion of passive resistance seen through Melville’s character Bartleby who “would prefer not to” (2) , as different examples of resistance. On the one hand a call for an active participation on the other a call for inaction as strategies of defeating hegemonic systems. Being the first utopian, ideological and outdated and the latter conforming to the Zeitgeist and offering potential effect. This poses a problem to my own position as a possible conservative one (in the sense of maintaining old left-wing pro active strategies), and how to understand this idea of participation through non-participation, which I visceral refuse. But why? is it because I want to hold on to outdated ideals? Or is there really something counter-productive leading to global inaction on theorising around refusal as a positivist resistance position?

So what is at stake is active/passive resistance, participative participation and non-participative participation. Is one excluding the other? Believing that the latter does really have a potential for change, and is the strategy to follow, what would happen if we would just ALL disengage? We should not forget that Melville’s Bartleby dies in the end. Does this mean that the opposite it true, that the participation of ALL is ultimately ineffective? If active participation might help the formation of collectives is refusal individualistic? Is this a matter of which has stronger agency? I was before holding on to the idea of the small gesture , as a dear one, but is the small gesture (3) actually a refusal of participating in grand visible projects?



Kris Cohen gave –in the lecture “atmospheres of participation”– the Tutti Bianchi squad as an example of refusal. The Tutti Bianchi operates on the G8 summits as a heavily padded group of people under white overalls that conduct a kind of Gandhi resistance. Staying in front of the mass of demonstrators they take the blows of the riot police without being hurt. I argue that this is not exactly a sit in protest, they prepare themselves in advance and do attempt to progress in the confront field to win territory and by doing so affirming the eligibility of demonstrating and how the local governments have been pushing this protests further and further from the actual location of the meetings (4). But if this extraordinary form of resistance is truly a Bartlebian one, what does this make of my argument of these being different types of participation? But is it really, or are theorists just pushing it a bit to far?

1 ( Bernadette Buckley lectures in art and politics helped to articulation this idea)
2 ( A month of lectures and reading led me to this feeling of a contemporary celebration of inaction, failure, non reciprocity, indifference, doing wrong as active modes of expressing dissactisfaction and therefore sites of resistance.)
3 (Hannula, M. (2006) the Politics of Small Gestures – Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art, Art-ist)
4 ( I owe this notion to Oliver Ressler)

Friday, November 20, 2009

Notes#010



Signs of Revolt Bricklane 91 - Shop 14 / truman Brewery - London

Brian Holmes write on the catalogue that "all of the activists-artists in this exhibition, and probably most of the visitors as weel, took part somehow in the inspiring and dramatic events created by the movement of movements - events that started well before Seatle, for example at the Carnival against Capital in the city of London on June 18th 1999, or at any one of the surprising and often hilarious Reclaim the Streets parties... some of us will meet again and again beneath the teargas and water canons ... only to learn that the leader of our supposedly democratic countries cared nothing for the votes that were cast in the streets." meaning that new forms of protest have to be experimented?


View of the exhibition

Holmes also wrote about the role of art as offering a "foretaste of a better life" but also an incompleteness, which means "an invitation to participate ... the art of the protest movements mingles dream and reality, beauty and terror, and expresses a symbolic violence of a necessary break with society as it is, while never forgetting that the real violence continues."



Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army /CIRCA

"the decade to come will see the most passionate struggle of them all: the one that finally takes apart the neoliberal system, to invent a future that no one claims to own and that no one trades away for profit, a future that everybody can live with." and I would argue that this struggle has to be fought on everyday life and maybe it is through this scope that the 3 years art project of Sarah Cole in a primary school takes its most radical democractic patine

NEST LIFE

Notes#009

Serena Korda


The Library of Secrets

The Library of Secrets is a mobile library conceived from the love of keeping and finding things amongst the pages of books. The Library of Secrets invites you to leave your thoughts, wisdoms and secrets amongst the pages of one or more of the 400 books in its collection. Peruse the shelves for your favourite 19th or 20th century classic or maybe just rummage through the books to find other peoples secrets.

Between 2007-2008 The Library took up residence in different venues across Whitstable as part of Whitstable Biennale 2008. For a whole year the The Library of Secrets hosted a series of events including the Book Club Debate, which met every 6 weeks. The Book Club focused on discussing books that inspired the films Peter Cushing starred in, including; Dracula, Lolita, The Hound of the Baskerville’s, Frankenstein, Nineteen Eighty Four and The End of the Affair. These classics are often imbedded in our knowledge through their film adaptation rather than the original novel. The Book Club Debates were chaired by myself and a host of visiting experts, lively debate was followed by a screening of the film each book inspired. The Book Club Debate was documented through a series of book reviews written by myself and members of the Book Club.

The Library of Secrets also became a mini publishing house producing a series of artist’s books that chart the development of the library and its relationship with its members. The books and multiples that have been produced include, ‘The Book Club Debate Whitstable’, ‘The Writing Challenge’ and ‘Things Found Inside Books’.




I attended the Real Wold Seminar at the Whitechapel, and this was how I got to know Serena's work. A work that according to Serena's own words seeks to intervene in everyday life, to disrupt everyday. One of the things that interest her the most is story telling, other people's stories, things you don't find in books, but in this piece the audience does find those bits and pieces of people's life inside books, for she invited the audience to leave secrets in between the pages of the many books on tour. Working with people is the other big interest in her work, to ask for collaboration on the very creative process, as for example in the answers lies at the end of the line for the Tube, local crossword puzzle fanatics were invited to help her create puzzles to be distributed across the Jubilee line.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Notes#008

ANDRÉ ALVES


A sort of portable story telling device. this structure exemplifies in perfection the kind of aesthetics I am interested in my own work, a sort of DIY and bricoleur tactic, grabbing whatever is lying around and still with attractive materialization.

André is currently studying Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati -US
see more here

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Notes#007


Carey Young -Donor Card
Frieze 2009

Impossible Exchange (curated by Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado) Frieze Projects

“Carey Young once wrote that she explores ‘how the artist’s role, agency and identity could or might need to change in response to the collapsing categories between business, politics and culture’. She has been appropriating corporate ideology and manipulating it in order to examine the era of global capitalism. Recently, she has focused on the law apparatus and its realtionship to civil government. For example, with the assistance of a legal team, she once created a United-States-Constitution-free zone within a New York-based gallery. Contractual agreements with the visitor have been one fo Young’s major strategies, and Donorcard (2005 –ongoing) is one of the works that better represents this aspect of her practice. Wallet-size human organ donor cards in general, and the design of such a document issued by the British NHS in particular, inspired Young in the making of this work. Each time it is on view, Young previously signs a limited edition of Donorcards copies, which are free to take and also have to be signed by the viewer in order to become art, a status that will last only while both of them are alive. In a new instalment of its preservation, for Frieze Projects Young is signing the work at the booth during the VIP preview of FAF. bringing together the language of jurisdiction, authorship, and rituals of collecting, Young comments on the forms of power ruling the art world.

Donorcard was created with the assistance of a legal team comprising Robert Lands of Finers Stephens Innocent LLP and Dr. Jaime Stapleton of Birkbeck College.”

"Mining institutional critique, community-based movements, self-organization traditions, and activism, their proposals address the production of symbolic value in the “age of questioned capitalism” – an expression suggested by the global financial crises. Through their socially engaged practice “impossible exchange” establishes a counter-public sphere that radically envisions change on the economic, political, and cultural levels."




Carey Young Donor Card

By principle in Portugal everyone is an organ donor unless one manifests the will against it to the health ministry (RENNDA) in a system of contracting/out, thus taking advantage of people's natural inertia the country has an enormous potential donors list . In the UK we have a completely different approach, one has to join organ donation. Hence the former has a non donors card, while the latter a donor card.

uk donor card
Politically, we can say in the Portuguese case that the state (even though one has the possibility to sign out) is taking the decision for the citizens by presuming that everyone would want to be an organ donor, whilst in the UK the citizens are accounted for the decision, but then the state has to campaign for people to meet that responsibility. Uk's example seems the most democratic to me, in an horizon of a social responsible society were our relation to others - human beings and not - is constantly being activated and reevaluated, but I also know that most of the time we function in automatic pilot, and that's why the Portuguese example might be more effective for the case presented, but then what does that tell us about a more general political engagement?

Monday, October 26, 2009

Notes#006


photo taken from here

in Germany it is not allowed to have a stall on the street to sell, but if you actually don't have anything on the ground you can make your own business, as this Grill Walkers do. I find interesting the ways people bend the laws :-) and reclaim the public space for their benefit.

see also

Notes#005


Royal Observatory - Greenwich


TIME STTOD STILL FOR ME WHEN...
card from the time and society gallery to stick on the board.



this post is under construction

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Notes#004



Sancho Silva

His work for the 2007 exhibition Depósito. Anotações sobre Densidade e Conhecimento at Reitoria da Universidade do Porto, curated by Paulo Cunha e Silva, was a Street Museum (I am searching the web for information, but it is difficult to find, text or images on the specific piece). I remember calling it a generous piece of art. Basically it was a shelf made of wood, that stood on four legs. On the one side a transparent acrylic surface, on the other a wooden plate, that could be lifted up. Passers-by were suppose to place on the self compartiments whatever they might find interesting, or just happen to have in their pockets, and this would be there on exhibition. The piece was outside the University building, in the public space. It mimicked the academy selves, but had a democratic use.This street furniture or invitation was also close to the famous student Cafe Piolho, so it had plenty use, and also vandalism, it did not last until the end of the exhibition. Still it was a similiar proposition to those I have been doing in my own practice. Invited for an exhibition that dealt with the depot of the Science University, and questions of displaying, preserving and educating, Sancho Silva takes the question to the streets, what is worth to present, protect and discuss?


image of the inside - by MSM

Arte Capital - text (pt)

the photos of the piece are a courtesy of Sancho Silva (see more here)

this post is under construction

Notes#003


Heath Bunting orchard project

Orchard of Avon

I met Heath last summer in Bristol and went on one of his triming tours. He keeps track of the apple trees (which are mainly along the Avon Gorge) and cleans them from parasitical plants. At some point a map of these trees is made public so people can harvest them. I guess this is part of his commitment to nature but also reclaiming this common space - natural ground in the interstices of private and state property. By taking the fruit of the "blind" farmers planting, people are picking the fruit of their own doing :-) for this trees are most probably there because people throw away the apple cores after eating them. There are several phases in this project: the unintentional planting; the identification, listing and nurture of the apple trees and finally the publication of their location and invitation for a public harvest. The public enters first in this last bit, harvesting the fruits of heaths labour, but clearly is invited as well to 'adopt' his own orchard.




Heath Bunting - Avon Orchard map

see also
Irational website

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Notes#002


Felix Gonzales-Torres 1993


The Art of Participation from 1950 to now

"this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process"

Abramović/Ulay, Vito Acconci, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke, George Brecht, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett, John Cage, c a l c and Johannes Gees, Janet Cardiff, Lygia Clark, Minerva Cuevas, Maria Eichhorn, VALIE EXPORT, Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin, Fluxus Collective, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Jochen Gerz, Matthias Gommel, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Allan Kaprow, Henning Lohner and Van Carlson, Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, and Bruce Tomb, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ,Tom Marioni, MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates), Antoni Muntadas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, Raqs Media Collective, Robert Rauschenberg, Warren Sack, Mieko Shiomi, Torolab, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Stephen Willats, Erwin Wurm.

under construction --- will be looking at this SFMOMA exhibition closely ... more soon

http://blog.sfmoma.org/tag/art-of-participation/

Felix Gonzales-Torres (at the SFMOMA show)
Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com

Notes#001


Erwin Wurm One Minute Sculptures

I remember striking a pose for a polaroid camera at Museu do Chiado, while pressuring a chair sideways to my body with my right upper warm. I stuck that polaroid photograph inside a dictionary, not to lose it, and maybe as a way to revisite the action. Together with that chair I was a sculpture, the polaroid photo attest to that, with no need of being signed by the author, as 1961 Manzioni's Living Sculptures did. But did I really felt like a scupture? I just remember the desire of wanting to take part of Wurm's work, much out of a fan feeling more than wanting to experience being a sculpture. The museum surroundings, a low broad white plinth - if I remember correctly, a chair, a bucket, and maybe some other object. Those objects are there to trigger our action, to potentiate our becoming, they were not themselves the sculpture - or ready-mades, neither would we be it alone. The combination of both, body and object, were the sculpture, the action itself. Still I recall this experience just as a curious episode. Mere participation is not what is at stake for me, but its relation to politics.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with Richard Wiseman


(in the corridor)

"In After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions, major artists and writers exhibit newly-commissioned and existing work, inspired by Charles Darwin's book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Their pieces explore Darwin's theory that expressing emotion is not unique to humans, but is shared with animals." See NHM website

"The exhibition itself starts outside the gallery with an installation involving mirrors by Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with psychologist Richard Wiseman. Not only does the reflection employ the viewer as part of the installation, but the instructions – through image and word – to display certain behaviours make this a compelling installation. The installation includes a twist that gestures to practices of surveillance and observation of the chimp and human world alike."

(inside)

Gustav Metzger



"The exhibition draws together the themes and methodologies that have informed the London-based artist’s practice from 1959 until the present day. The broad cross-section of works on view include Metzger’s auto-destructive and auto-creative works of the 1960s, such as his pioneering liquid crystal projections; the ongoing Historic Photographs series, which responds to major events and catastrophes; and later works exploring ecological issues, globalisation and commercialisation. Film footage of seminal performances and actions are exhibited, as well as a new, participative
installation using the archive of newspapers Metzger has been collecting since 1995."
see serpentine gallery website


(Media)



I was particularly interested in the following piece, Historic Photographs: To Crawl Into - Anschluss Vienna March 1938 1996 (here above), where one had to crawl under a big piece of fabric to be able to see a photograph on the floor and on how that changes our relation/interpretation to its content. A grainy photograph of people kneeled down, the association with the horrors of the second world war is immediate, even before reading the title, Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. I looked for the image on google images today, and realized the importance it had to involve my whole body in the experience of this art work, how fragile and pathetic I felt and how strange it was to realise that those portrayed on the image were looking much more confused and anxious... the privacy of my gaze and the impossibility of seeing the whole image...

Forth Plinth



see Antony Gormley's Forth Plinth

"We saw sea monsters, Nazis, and – inevitably – plenty of nudity. But was Antony Gormley's One and Other actually any good?" see guardian

yes, it is not exactly the speakers corner.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Pato Donald



As necessidades quotidianas são de extrema importância, apesar de quase sempre eliminadas das expressões maiores :-) das artes. Tornam-se rotineiras e servem de fundo, pedestal as nossas actividades, aquelas dignas de nota. A importância de que sejam quase mecânicas permitem realmente produzir outras coisas que não sobreviver. É isso mesmo que tenho feito nas últimas duas semanas sobreviver, aprender quase tudo de novo, como se compra um bilhete de autocarro, faz uma cópia na biblioteca, abre a porta do estúdio A; onde se toma um café razoável, compra boa fruta ou um vaso; estar à espera da nova conta bancária, como pagar as propinas ou perceber a forma mais barata e rápida de ir ao centro de Londres. Enfim, mas em breve, passada a instrução, posso voltar a por a cabeça no lugar :-)

Monday, July 20, 2009

parada do orgulho gay - Porto


Eu amo quem quiser, seja homem ou mulher
ou outra pessoa qualquer !!!


Gay Pride

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Utopias, Ciborgues e Outras Casas nas Árvores



Oficina de Criação Artística com Carla Cruz


Datas:
22, 23 e 24 de Julho, das 19:00 às 22:00
25 de Julho das 14:00 às 18:00
Local:
Centro de Memória (google maps), Vila do Conde
Público-alvo:
todos os interessados

Nunca foi tempo de sermos pessimistas, mudar o mundo disse Marx, mudar a vida disse Rimbaud, mudar de vida disse Variações. Sim o mundo é composto de mudança, e hoje como sempre precisamos de novas projecções para o futuro, imaginar o impossível, criar gestos que reflictam a pluralidade da existência, ou seja novas Utopias. A proposta desta oficina é exactamente a de imaginarmos criticamente uma nova cidade*, mas também uma nova mulher e homem para essa cidade, daí a noção de ciborgue, que de acordo com Donna Haraway é um híbrido entre máquina e organismo, uma criatura de realidade social bem como ficcional, uma possibilidade de novas construções de relacionamento social.

Ficha de Inscrição (Microsoft Office - Word)

Do resultado da oficina sairá a obra a apresentar na 5ª edição do Circular Festival de Artes Performativas, que decorrerá de 19 a 26 de Setembro de 2009.

*cidade/polis - civilização

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991).

Tuesday, June 16, 2009


Tsurus - e a lenda de quem fizer 1000

Monday, June 15, 2009

Eu Pisei as Flores


Rua das Flores - 12 de Junho - Porto
"É favor Pisar as Flores". Esta “interferência” é um dos projectos dos participantes no 1º Curso de Especialização em Intervenções Artísticas em Espaços Públicos da Universidade Lusófona do Porto. A equipa do Projecto Flores Adriana Oliveira . Irene Loureiro . João Medeiros

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Vila do Conde

Friday, June 05, 2009


Vila do Conde

Wednesday, June 03, 2009


Vila do Conde

Saturday, May 02, 2009

MAYDAY - Porto


1º de Maio no Porto

Thursday, April 30, 2009

MAYDAY

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Tecktonik



Não fazia ideia do que era tecktonik, até este passado Domingo à tarde na Praça D. João I no Porto, é uma dança, e foi também um campeonato informal....



Thursday, April 16, 2009

Objecto Urbano não Identificado



encontrei estas intervenções na minha rua e na rua Fernandes Tomás - gosto :-)

inútil


junto ao mercado do bolhão - a tapar a sinalização do Metro do Porto.

 
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