After the contemporary series of the ”The Organic Observations Prologue” from 2023, my new series is a little more focused on painting itself; a certain reconection after a long period off mixed media and digital media using. ”Platitudinous bizarreness” is, like the series from 2021, a second series of an year of a bigger artistic project. In 2021 the series ”Space-Being” were born closely to the ”Post human have always existed”, part of the book ”Les cultiver des images” published and exhibited on the following year, 2022. 2024 is also an year of ”two” series and several singular or dual pieces. From the dual pieces sides we had ”Your oceans are inside (vol.1)” ”(while) your tides are outside (vol. 2)” (two portraits with the model Mateus Marcondes) and the dual ”How do you see me? (vol.1)”, ”Is that enough? (vol. 2)”, both 2024 paintings – following singular other pieces like ”The War (vol. 1)”, ”D’avenir de Dyrphia”, ”Inside the fourth state” and ”Floraison hinvernale” from the same year (you can check these pieces accessing ”Paintings” tab on this website). All these creations are post – ”100 species of the Brazilian Fauna” series of paintings, from 2020, and before the ”Organic Observations” book and exhibition (schedule for Winter 2025).
”Platitudinous bizarreness” is, hence a composition based on human form, very different from the water and blue phase seen during ”The Organic Observations Prologue” series and Space-Being, the same for the very primary series of 2019, ”Relatively Observable Universe” and ”Afigurations of Time”. My human form series, portraits, are usually single pieces or dual pieces created in the middle of longer non-anthromorphic artworks. But, after an intense personal year, and the whole moment we’re living in as a global composition of societies, if was impossible to remain distant of the human form although all of these mentioned series are, actually, thoughts on contemporary modern societies and our relation with a diverse range of themes, despite the central issue of nature as traditional of my research. For these discussions I decided to create a more ”figurative” series, called ”Platitudinous bizarreness”, the horrible routines we’re used to engage with and to be part of – both west and east.
This series is built under 7 paintings, being the number 0, ”The Heat of Creation”, exhibited in UK in 2024 and accepted and two other exhibitions of the same year and country. This decision to share the first artwork of the series alone em before other pieces be completed was precisely due to it’s inner raw meaning and intensity: the heat of creation is the melting of our own individuality upon our artistic creations; something that spill out of us in the rigid or experimental technique; our internal volcanos, made of profound rocks and obscurities, creating the new islands of the what is visible from those invisible insights. This is the base of the how can we create, – a personal perspective and relation with the arts – very important to contextualized the unpersonal movement of talking about broad social themes, that resonates inside us somehow, before getting it’s final form. The Heat of creation is a 50 x 70 oil on canvas painting, followed by the ”first” series piece, ”Tale of infinity” (90 x 90 cm).
After the beginning of the series, the series split in two branches, under the themes of the The Art Rabbit Art Residency Program in Paris, end of 2024. The series then had a flip for, after ”The heat of Creation” and ”Tales of Infinity”, to a collection of six artworks, 4 paintings (Swan Lake, Hydromancy Through Tears, Odette’s Resignation and Siegfried’s Lock), one art-object (Broken Kaleidoorscope) and several poetry collages. Also, on the following semester, the art fiction ”Leão e o Unicórnio” (Lion and the Unicorn) was written, lightly inspired by the parisian atmosphere, picturing contemporary life and fantasy while approaching questions of philosophy of art and democracy. The book was originally written in portuguese, with passages in other languages as part of the fictional characters’ development, is to be published in November 2025 by Editora Libertinagem (1º Edition, Brasil).
You can also read an interview with the residency director regarding the creation of the pieces above during the residency in Paris. A Salon took place in the end of the residency, showing a collective artwork called ”Echoes of the Self” (December 2024).
What inspired you to get into the rabbit hole?
Both the history of Rabbit Hole, through previous editions, despite technical and collective aspects to be commented respectively, and the poems and theoretical material in the proposal of connection, art and magic were decisive factors in my choice. The program’s call included different collective activities, integration between artists, and an immersion proposal with practical outcomes such as salons and workshops, so that in addition to instigating serious and continuous development of each artist individually, it also proposed that the creation receive collective mentoring, in addition to the social return of being visitable by the public at different times of the calendar. The fact that the program was highly organized and timed, with the development of the activities culminating in gradual and authentic progress, was what made me certain of participating in the project.
- Can you tell us a little about your proposal?
My proposal for the residency was a maturation part of a series, aligned with the Rabbit Hole framework, while it was a project within the universe of interdisciplinary art that I have been investigating for some years. Nature (as a complex environment), technology (in its sense beyond the hegemonic) and the presentation of visual art (especially concerning portraits, both human and animal). These are themes that, in each location in which they are presented, have completely different results, especially because they are topics permeated by our collective, social experience, so creating in an environment that amplifies any of these points, such as the collectivity itself and integration with the space and the connection between people at Rabbit Hole, would certainly bring specificity to the creation.
Furthermore, in the residency, the symbolist content was already present in the open call for the residency, which led me to design a project more open to the surrealism of these issues: fragmentation, complementarity and the unfinished, as a gradual one. The unfinished is a way of dealing with artistic creation that aligns with the art of memory, as well as fragmentation. Pairs of works that complement each other in the art of remembrance. Originally, my project envisaged 10 small-scale compositions with accompanying texts, like small fragments of the collective and individual Parisian experience, attentive to the themes I already work on and considering multiple sensitive perceptions such as sounds and multimedia, in addition to oil painting.
This initial project became 9 paintings and a happening, in addition to unfinished video art works to date. The proposed sonority took on another dimension, that of the vibration of salt in “Echoes of the Self” and in the conceptual creation of the series “Platitudinous Bizarreness: Memory as delirium and Imagination”, where Tchaikovsky’s work meets Alice in Wonderland and other collective experiences during the Rabbit Hole activities such as chromatic workshops and aesthetic permanence (such as the use of red in the works, which was one of the common colours experienced by the artists).
- What happened to you on the first initiation days?
The first day was remarkable for the diversity of sensory stimuli such as smells, sounds and textures, in a very interesting symmetry with what I was looking for in the project I presented. The collective spirit and at the same time with its own encryption and discretion would set the tone for all collective activities from the first day onwards. It was also during the initiations that the references became clear through the performances, poems and general settings of those days.
During my registration I also worked with poetry, and somehow, both the material that was sent to us in advance, as well as the performances, and my own poems were in a cohesion without noise in the first days, as if reiterating a spirit of collective coincidence, almost magical, that would follow on other occasions during our conversations and activities, both individual and collective. The sounds, in addition to the poems, would also be striking in both the initial and final days, closing a cycle of both classical Western and Eastern references, in an interpolated mixture of possibilities for the following days.
In short, in the initial days, what happened to me was knowing that this had been the choice that should have been made, simply, without embellishments or other certainties despite the commitment to the sincerity and depth possible of what would emerge from those first sparks left by the first days in the residency. And it was very funny, I mean, the flesh, bones and soul of art, in my opinion, do not relay on the absence of fun or a lack of relaxation, but maybe exactly the opposite, the blood of an art body might be this energy, this first great excitement over something new, that springs curiosity and ease of movement – as in the initiation days.
- Did you fall down the rabbit hole?
Straight into it. With a golden key, a sketchbook and papercuts, a couple of hats, paint, a camera, and other few artists.
- What does it feel like?
‘’Like holding a thin transparent string,
Strong as diamond, natural as a spider web,
in a network of empty nests,
Blindfolded but with bare feet,
leading to somewhere new,
somehow, sum of coincidences
Connected by redness, limitless
Synchs of an old lullaby.’’
- How did your practice develop?
Although gradual, there was a creative flow directed towards daily creation. Between the residency activities, I walked both the way there and back. This time was essential to absorb what was experienced, discussed, created, modified, to separate and unite new ideas with what was being constructed daily. There were activities that we did inspired by the flâneur, in wandering as an experience between the conscious and the unconscious, as a reprogramming of the possibility of walking.
While this was an activity of the residency itself, my practice also developed when I was walking alone, observing the Parisian details while thinking and crossing information from the day. Every day, I kept a diary and made sketches related to what I experienced during the residency, in addition to working on collages from magazines collected on the same route between the room I was in and the Rabbit Hole location. Every day I read for at least two hours something related to our discussions or something additional, when I had already finished the original bibliography of the residency. I also had daily contact with the brush, or with text, or with poetry, as mentioned.
Every week, at least one work was finished, distilled from this daily experience. Was a sort of spatial-creative-process. Apart from the days of more persistent snow or rain, I used some time to ventilate myself by visiting exhibitions and museums and taking notes on works that also dialogued with my project as well as with possible collective projects. As someone who studies art history, I also revisited readings of other modern and contemporary art groups, seeking insights into our collective activities, such as planning works that could be developed by all or at least more than three artists simultaneously, of which we ended up planning and starting some, especially on laboratory days between two or more artists, highly in synch with sensorial perception experiments that were linked to studied theory.
- How were your processes affected by the rabbit hole?
The fact that it was an international residency based in a city like Paris, with so many layers, places and cultural possibilities, allowed for a process from “outside” to “inside”, whether alone or with collective works. For example, we made some recordings in the streets for a video art, which would only be possible because it is such a mobile program. I also make works outside the studio, but certainly less frequently. Furthermore, the proposal of Rabbit Hole itself, the books and experiences, conversations and confluences, made me have to go beyond some limits of media and technical habits that I had until then. For example, I had never mixed collage and painting before, much less collage, painting and object, as in the work “Broken Kaleidoorscope”. Likewise, “Echoes of the Self” was a very complex happening, involving a larger number of people than the experiences with happenings that I had had until then, even due to the interaction of very different media between the artists. Again, a type of artistic experience only possible due to the format of Rabbit Hole.
Another point was that due to the intensity and long daily duration of the creative process, there were so many references, notes, drafts and events, that it culminated in the need, even after the program, to transform some of these notes into something beyond the original project that had already been successfully completed, which was the book. The book being a work of fiction was an extremely new point for me, and it is a specific artistic need of the confluences of connection, magic, and art of the program. These were reverberations within the program and very close to its completion. I am sure that as time goes by, other parts of my process will be affected both by the creations already made and by the memories and remembrance of Rabbit Hole, with greater distance from the point of origin.
- Which process do you resonate with the most?
Processes that bring together hidden forms of what will be the final form, whether individually or collectively. For example, meetings to discuss themes, readings and research, cross-referencing information and seeing something new result. It is like allowing yourself to be extremely permeated and retain different media and information. At some point, this absorption is distilled into instant ideas, which synthesize all the information into a final form that, in turn, will be a gateway for those who observe it. In a way, my own process is also a rabbit hole, and perhaps that is why all of Rabbit Hole’s works have been so deep, meaningful and complex, whether individual or intended to be carried out in a group, whether long-lasting or ephemeral. It’s a fragmentation and reconstruction way to deal with phenomena that later on will turn into artwork. There’s unpredictability but certainty of a final result, like cooking. Sometimes we improvise but we need to know basically how a recipe works to change it. We learn some new and some are not good tasting. Same for my creative process (in the Residency and outside it).
In this sense, the Rabbit Hole process that resonated most with me was the one in which different perceptions were being organically shared, unpretentiously, through the workshop of other artists who showed unique sensibilities and possibilities, and particularly, the exercise of drift, starting from the Seine. From there I took many notes that took days and weeks to dialogue with other experiences and readings, as it transmuted a unique temporality, beyond the simple act of walking. Many people think that what I do is just painting or just a text, or just an installation, but these ‘final’ media are just containers for what comes from my side, and that will dialogue with the other side, the world, and people, other artists, other environments. For this, mobility exercises are essential, even more so when combined with indoor studies.
- Can you tell us about your specific project on “the art of remembering” – how did it evolve? ( images and descriptions)
As the project was shared above, here I will share specific works and a little about how they dialogue with some key readings and experiences of the residency, as well as small personal notes. I did not include the collage due to the excess of figures, but most of the works have a Dadaist collage part of them. Not all of them, some only have descriptive texts. There were collective works that are not included here and other independent works, so I am focusing on the pair of works “Magpies Mornings” and “Daily Absences”, and then on the painting and poetry collage works “Platitudinous Bizarreness: memory as delirium and imagination”.
‘’Magpies Mornings’’, oil on canvas. 2024, vol. 2.
It all started with ‘’Magpies Mornings’’. Unlike the more symbolist ‘surreal’ canvasses, Magpies Mornings and the next canvas are visibly artworks of ‘stabilization’, of recognizing space and surroundings before breaking it down to something more profound instead of the ‘first glance’. The view from my window, from the room where I lived and worked shortly. As someone who has studied ecology for a few years, I find it fascinating to observe how other animals deal with city architecture. They are part of society and its sounds, they appropriate what is there. Times have changed. And the literature of the residency included stories, like fables, among animals as well. The figure of the bird is very symbolic to me in each environment, and it was my adaptation from the first days of residence.
Absorbing the surroundings included also digesting the talks we had about the news on politics on that November. Historically, no tragedy is truly abrupt: a chain of events, more or less subtle to the general public, which, unconcerned with its justified complaints upon unjust experiences, passes through, in forsaken grief, the curtains of necropolitics. Gladly, none of my artworks are apart from contemporary events. Birds adapt to the architecture of the city such as we might adapt to uncomfortable conditions.
‘’I bet they watch attentively the accelerated human flow, full of traces of food and other waste. Perched among the Parisian chimneys, Magpies, birds of the same family as ravens, the corvidae, must have their discussions about our stupidity or innocence.
It may seem too much to want to say all this with a work of art of a roof and a bird, but that is precisely what I want to say: On the most subtle mornings the world experiences the greatest years of warlike transformation, and we are not the only ones experiencing such deformed shifts. From here on, more trees will be gone, more conservation areas will be gone, and we too will have to go to the tops of houses, of chimneys, to rest, observe and whisper, when the streets are too dangerous for our queer plumage.’’ – A little fragment I wrote about the piece specifically.
Moreover, was within this reflection that the word ‘’Delirium’’ (as social landscape was growing hostile for democracy and social rights) was born together with the resilience of ‘’Imagination’’, it came from simple reality, and them it became something else, as we will see on the next pieces. ‘’Delirium’’ was not a word out of ‘’the lack or awareness or the personal feeling of mixing reality and imagination’’, but rather as a word for political contrast between acceptance of diversity and the fight against it. Also I was already starting to read Wonder Adventures of Alice and, it is mostly a satirical book about political structure and power absurdities than only and just ‘a non-sense’ piece (in the sense of literary gender).
‘’Daily Absences’’, oil on canvas, 2024, vol.1.
Pairs, fragments, as in my project. ‘’Daily Absences’’ was the idea born after the initiation days of the residency. Another artist and I were talking about the Parisian reception to the social demands of other nationalities. We took two summaries from this conversation: ”The Pressure Cooker” and ”abstention”. From my window, the magpies in their collective movement contrasted with those closed windows, that is, the closed body, the decision not to participate openly in social problems or even, simply, in collectivities that engage more than just talking, but doing. ”Indoor” architectural space is a very interesting topic in the social sciences and in the arts as well. The inside and the outside. After the “harsh simplicity of a window”, we go to a totally different universe, we walk with another perspective, which is the next series. During the week of this screen, another artist and I had been experimenting with video art and intervention in the streets of Paris; That’s when I began to discover galleries of layers of Paris beyond their windows: there is, indeed, the possibility of depth, of the explicit and the unusual.
‘’Swan Lake’’, oil on canvas.
‘’Historically, the conflicts, the losts, the dreams, and our poor attempt of fight natural limits. But these is not a regular chess. Has its multiple Queen’s and kings, birds and feathers, tails and tales, colors on the moving squares.
Strongly recommended the reading of Alice’s Wonderland Adventures books 1 and 2, the history of Swan Lake composition by Tchaikovsky and a close look to the news of this year of 2024 to get some more hints for this riddle.’’ This however is quite social historical, environmental and multicultural look on some lines. The falling into the rabbit hole, as a whole, in the art of remembering, theme of the art residency being explored not as adaptation but exploration (in the sense of active creativity and curiosity over something new). There’s a lot to be unpacked with ‘’Swan Lake’’. Fragment, Sound and history (memory) are playing a visual part of Alice’s garden scene, onde o xadrez é uma vida lenta demais, rápida demais, que dilata a consciência das personagens e seus conflitos questionáveis.
The symbolism in ‘’Swan Lake’’ ranges from the pieces and birds selected to the delicate dance, Russian ballet, which dialogues in an intense background, with something as striking as Western chess for these historical moments. Tchaikovsky was a gay compositor living the mixings between western and eastern cultures. Second, chess, ballet, music, sports, they were part of most of the warmth and coldness between cultures during the late XIX till nowadays. It’s crazy the potential and the fail of our exchanges. Sometimes, the subtle makes the work of keeping alive the strongest needs from a diverse collective.
‘’Odette’s Resignation’’, oil on canvas.
The series matures through its storytelling format, a rhythm that gradually developed as activities took place at the residence and in Paris in general. After ‘’Swan Lake’’, ‘’Odette’s Resignation’’ does not show an identical battle, but the transformation of the human being and space: we see that now space itself twists and warps. The game is flexible. The movements are flexible. Our ‘’Odette’’, like Alice, and like so many metaphors framed here, is also physically adapting. If in ‘’Swam Lake’’ all the dancers are clearly ‘’the human being that is expected’’, and thus, there is a direct clash between the human figures and the ‘’other animals’’; queen, bishop, pawns; Now, Odette does not attack, but makes a kind of salute, while transforming, to the knight piece. The red present since the first screen is now part of you. During the residency we had some magical moments, and one of them was the connection with the color red in different forms. This integrates us, I believe. Magic and transformation. But this transformation is gradual.
Each painting in this series is like telling an old story, the “art of memory” of a battle between what is traditional (here, I could make many social and political comments that will be explored in other moments and other sharings about these works), and what is adaptation, recognition, restructuring, even revolution, and this is happening through connection, in an affective way: the works portrayed this war without explicit violence. We are observing the gradual changes, allowing ourselves. Each work is also inspired and permeated by certain sounds, as proposed in my original project, here, focusing on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, dialoguing with personal and collective symbolisms of the residency, with Derrida and The Wonder Adventures of Alice. We are going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
“In opposition to the core of her kingdom, she decides to become – what they once were – rather than impose her rule.”
‘’Hydromancy through Tears’’, oil on wood plaque.
‘’Hydromancy through Tears’’ is the third artwork of this new series I’ve been creating in the art residency. In fact, we’ve been creating more collective artworks and that’s essential to me. Water is an element that, whether on our walks along the Seine, in reading Alice, or in thinking about memory, desert, salt, and emotion, we always return to. The movement of return is something very important from the perspective of fragments, of a ‘soup of ideas’. It is one of the most important arts of my initial project, because in the storytelling line it is the moment of doubt and collective help: That board no longer exists, it is in ruins, and clearly a chess piece is helping Odette to leave. The departure is as important as the return. Memory exists as a return, but it also comes into existence from the moment it departs, from the moment we leave a place, from the moment we fragment an experience.
‘’Often in creative process we need to let go some previous intentions. I simply couldn’t “move on” to other ideas and sketches already organized for the following weeks even after getting done with the two pieces of Swan Lake. This fragment is very “through the looking glass”, since there’s two pieces that aren’t exactly in sync, more like glass fragments, united by some fleshy and delicate wood structure. I’ll explain this better on my next book, but here is a place where I share with you both final pieces and longer-term creative processes. Hydromancy is the art of prediction through the water. It’s a riddle, of course, because here my intentions are not the magical part of Hydromancy, but how water tells us the past and the future, since it waters life, literally. Through the tears refers to many things, from Alice’s tears pool from book 1 to the tears of nature’s sorrow and how we read it.’’ The anticipation in this artwork is the whole reason of it to be: ‘’Is they going into the water? (the dancer, the body, us?).
Insides of ‘’Broken Kaleidoorscope’’ (painting). Oil on wood plaque.
‘’ Odette finally enters the sea made of tears and serene vastness.”
‘’Broken Kaleidoorscope’’, oil and collage on wood plaque (object, side 2).
During the residency, we did collective collage exercises. This was one of the moments when being under certain references and experiences ‘forced’ me to combine techniques. It was the work that took the longest to create and the one with the most symbolic particularities: an object, made of two paintings, can be assembled by its empty intersections, areas without words, without textual language. Like the ‘’flesh and soul’’ of the body of connections, that which occurs ‘’inside’’ and ‘’between’’ two parts. This work is an intersection between ‘’imagination’’ and ‘’the possibility of exchange’’.
It is also a presentation of the flow of thought: we think words, phrases that we do not say, within the landscape of visuality in which we reside. We think, but what we exchange, sometimes, is not in the rationalization of all language. If you look at this assembled object, you will see several phrases that connect, complement each other, and question each other. There are poems hidden there. To create this work, I respected the time of the words, arranged on top of the wooden board, taken from the same newspapers and magazines that we had collectively used weeks before. The sentences were forming and distributing themselves. They either hide the image, or the images hide it (if we turn the work over). Surrealism and the realism of the loss of words, of disconnections. “Kaleidoscope”, made with a door in the middle, like the doors in Alice in Wonderland, but with our material limitations. It is a work that is difficult even for me to understand in its entirety.
‘’When the images are “outside”, language is “inside”: it took me hours to make this “cross-poem”, which, at the same time as it has entire sentences, also has the inherent chaos of the line of reasoning: you know when we talk to someone and we lack words? Or more, when we thought one way and did it another? Or when we don’t say it? Red like the flesh inside. This isn’t the first time I’ve made this analogy between flesh and a work of art, but this is the first presentation of this subtlety. Deep Surface, skin that absorbs and sweats.. There are areas without words, where language cannot reach, and yet there is connection. An inexpressible memory or an authenticity devoid of framing.
The images “Outward” are continuations of previous works: the human figure enters the waters of Hydromancy, in this vast pool of tears, and on the other side, an opening to a lake that covers the remnants of the war of “Swan Lake”, in colors pale, a calm and indifferent landscape, almost peaceful in the distance.’’ But, Kaleidoorscope is broken. Communication is always uncompleted, what it was and what it will be. Its presentation is that of an incomplete object, of realities connected by internal languages, limited words. An eternal transition, the fragments of the fragments, like a kaleidoscope itself.
‘’Siegfried’s Lock’’, oil on wood plaque.
Siegfried’s lock (in both Portuguese and French there is a play on words here) is the last work in the series “Platitudinous bizarreness: memory as delirium and imagination”. ‘’A Black swan touches a key at the bottom of the ocean, although it is necessarily on the surface of the water. These waters, open references to “Hydromancy through Tears”. Siegfried is the prince in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” He falls in love with Odette, a swan. Like Leda and the Swan in another performance and other genres, there is also a certain violence in Tchaikovsky. In my works, this Violence also takes form in certain acts, emphasizing war and delirium, Memory and the passage of time. Odette is the one who makes the human choice to renounce war, in previous works. Siegfried comes to the end, perhaps a swan, perhaps a tale.
And Alice in Wonderland, right at the beginning, Alice finds herself in a room with inaccessible doors: sometimes it’s her size that prevents her from going through them, sometimes the key. It’s an “Alice Effect” that we experience, “where we experience what is livable and accessible to us, although there are hundreds of realities that will never be explored.
Proportion, chance, device. An answer without a question. There is no lock on the painting.’’ Maybe was this absence of a locker (we started from a window), drove me to the book, weeks later. Curiously, the last artwork of this series was finished days before the ‘’Echoes of the Self’’, also a ‘’water-based’’ artwork, but this time ‘’real’’, since it was a collective happening of the artists on Rabbit Hole.
- You also mentioned you are writing a short book about the rabbit hole characters. Can you explain this a little bit.
Yes, I am writing a fiction based on my stay in the Rabbit Hole. The work is approximately 200 pages long, and contains, as part of its non-fiction, the real works I created during such stay. Instead of being a novel focused solely on artistic practice, it brings together the experiences of multiple artists, their exercises and wanderings in Paris, considering the political context of the time, moments of friendship and cultural exchange, as well as humdrum little experiences unrelated to art.
Real encounters have been given a new look, with ‘anachronisms’, as well as mystical creatures and surrealist scenes, entirely inspired by the depth of the program itself, but in a progression where the reflections I had during that period turn an oblivious reality into glances of magic that overflow symbolism, once it is now portrait as fantastic landscapes and events. As someone who writes only theory and non-fiction, this book is for myself, a sort of extension of the other artworks created during the residency, since The Rabbit Hole brought me to the need for a different writing technique for the art of remembering my own experience in the program in a particular surrealistic way.
The chapters are not arranged in the order in which they occurred, since the fictional order is essential to maintain the encryption and symbolism characteristic of both my own work and this book, as well as the work and individuality, temporality and space of those who were inspirations for the other characters. The book will have two versions, the first in my native language, Brazilian Portuguese, and an English translation. It is a contemporary work, with contemporary problems, survival strategies of imagination, creativity, affection and discipline in the midst of real tensions, which might reverberate and provoke reflections, critical thinking and diverse emotions in readers, whether they are artists or not.
- How have you been affected by the overall experience of being in the rabbit hole?
When I went to the residency, I had in mind that I would dedicate myself completely and would push my capacity for artistic transformation to the limit. In other words, the way I started, I believe, made a complete difference in the overall experience of being down to the Rabbit Hole program. Every day there, my dedication was almost exclusively to experiences, studies and creations that referred to the residency and to my original proposal to it, while I was open to changing the plans to reach connection, magic as transformation and the balance between solid schedules and the freedom to create through the residency activities.
As I said about the first days, there was a preparation: the writings that were sent to each artist almost like poetic puzzles transformed, during my experience at Rabbit Hole, into a very disciplined organization of weekly work creation and involvement in literature, in the bibliography of the theme of the “art of remembering”. When I wasn’t working indoors, I was talking to other artists and people who weren’t in the art world or didn’t work in the same media as me, or wandering around Paris amidst museums, galleries, temporary small exhibitions and other cultural events. In the end, I created a series of poetic collages, nine paintings, six of which belonged to the series called “Platitudinous Bizarreness: Memory as Delirium and Imagination,” and an artistic object that is also part of the series, in addition to the collective work Echoes of the Self, and, in a way, the book in development, which would be an extension and a “poetic synthesis” of it all.
I believe it was a very purposeful program, and so, when we decided to delve into big questions, we really followed the white rabbits of life to unbelievable places. Some creations gave me a lot of work, because they combined the universe of Rabbit Hole and those in it, with very deep emotions and thoughts of my own. Moreover, the fact the residency had people from different nationalities, was one of the greatest parts of it, once we were communicating in a synch of being sensible and aware of the world’s current chaos and challenges and being permeated by such reality of that period being in the Rabbit Hole, in addition to the individual events. These aspects make the density of the artwork content completely transferable from inside out through the entire experience with the residency. It was truly unforgettable and essential, and one of the most intense artistic experiences I have ever had until now.
The vibration experiment:
- What was your idea about the sound vibrations? What did you record? What did you experiment with?
I believe that materiality always allows us to reflect on temporality, both perceptively and symbolically, a central theme in my work. Time, which is related to memory, dreams and expectations, reality and unreality, control and lack of control – and all the in-between those ‘polarities’ including interpolations and transversalities between them-, are some of the manifestations that generally cause strangeness when applied to the conceptual artistic dimension if this does not produce the same rhythm and fulfilment of a continuous and stable timeline. A great example is when movies let open arcs and unanswered ends for certain questions, and we are not even commenting on the contemporary effect of hyperimmediatism which also amplifies our ‘wars’ against the complexity of time.
With ‘’Echoes of the Self’’, the vibration experiment had three stages: the first, the happening, namely a ‘language’ and phenomenon of the work of art that anchors it only in the present, never being subject to complete recording, unlike a painting or lasting languages; in addition to the happening, the hypothetical possibility of durability as transmutation (since the vibration of the salt, its redistribution by the sound impact of the environment would reposition it in comparison to a static environment, without sound, but the salt could only draw or splash colour on the final mesh on which it was resting) was incorporated within the happening, and finally, visuality, the moment in which the happening ends and the final work begins to solidify. For the visual aspect, the recording medium was photography, which makes it possible to intersect the temporalities of this work, as we can see in the picture below.
- How did it relate to the art of remembering?
The relation of some societies with the domestication of Time and their frustration at the impossibility of identifying each and every phenomenon related to it is a point that ‘’Echoes of the Self’’ evokes. We make a huge effort to keep track of time: metrics, sundials and atomic clocks; we paint works and try to reproduce music perfectly; literature looks at the past to make us feel the present and the future, and history tries to record the past in order to understand the politics of yesterday and today, for instance. These systematizations and analyses are a part of time too: rhythm is contained on it, but does not resume its properties. I believe there is another part, the one that we neglect; or worse, the one that we are unable to understand in its entirety and this causes some distress, which are very related to our urge to dominate, or to ‘have control upon’ to be more kind in words.
The time of nature, for example: salt makes up the sea, makes up the desert, is a conductor, is part of us, but we do not see it in this way, as ancestral, much less as material that retains the history of the present. Using vibrations with salt was a choice to connect works that refer to history and deserts, while also intentionally breaking expectations of control: there are art forms that make salt a permeable material through specific vibration patterns, creating symmetrical geometries. However, in an organic environment, where breathing, perspiration and free movement exist, salt will no longer be domesticated. In other words, time is a subtle, ephemeral event of the material that moves almost without the naked eye noticing it and partially dissolves. It is about everything we experience at that moment and that we cannot sufficiently record or understand, but that fills a large personal and collective time in a common space, assuming different corporealities – a reflection on the constitution of memory and how its residue is minimal, compared to the present movement, to the event that originates this memory.
