Destino común
16.11.2024
04.01.2025

Interview by Bernardo José de Souza

BJS: In our previous interview, on the subject of the exhibition “O canto dos sapos “[The frogs’ song] (Galería Luisa Strina, 2023), we spoke a great deal about not creating new objects, but rather re-examining our relationship to already existing material culture. Since then, a few elements have been repeated and new ones have appeared. They are like the patterns of a topography — at once the same and different — in a constant process of transformation. Would you like to comment on how things evolved between the previous exhibition and the new show “Destino común” [Common destiny]?

PA: When I finished installing “O canto dos sapos”, I realized that no element was repeated from work to work. The eyes couldn’t fully grasp what was around, which raised doubts as to whether what we saw could be a transitory arrangement, in which anything could literally be included or excluded. That sparked a questioning of the hierarchies to which we subject what surrounds us, and what we spoke of in the last interview continues in Destino común. Here too, the title alludes to an external and an internal aspect. On the one hand, the presage of a world, the only one that I believe is possible for now, and, on the other, a response to that presage which becomes a mixture of things that I do or think, often not asking myself about how they interconnect, where they head to or what is their status. As we can read in a poem by Tilsa Otta: “unx crece cuando el mundo crece en unx”. In that sense, there is a piece, or rather a situation, which describes the show: the fridge with different objects on top, a sort of space (like a kitchen drawer, with cutlery, candles, scissors, lighters, etc., or even a garbage bin) where we leave a fuller trail of what we are, and thus where needs are more important than those objects themselves.

BJS: A padlock is a padlock is a padlock is a padlock. It always returns to your works, almost like a phantasmagoria, or like a signature, a simultaneous closing and opening. I recall we spoke about that object that was absent in the last show. It now reappears, always inscrutable, closing and opening up new layers of meaning. Or even functioning like organizing mechanisms that end up disorganizing our perception of things in the world, as we discussed in the previous interview.

PA: Recently, a friend told me that my works seem like accents emphasised over things, a sort of signalling towards the internal. There’s some of that in padlocks. What is an umbrella, a rock, a garbage bin? Their presence alongside the works, like an extension, at once signals their limits and expands them. In their constant apparition (like in everyday life) they generate a comfort on which the eye alights, although they also disorganize and raise slightly chaotic questions: in which world do we live, what secret messages do they keep? As I prepared “Destino común”, I noticed that there had never been a material, or an object, that appeared across a whole exhibition like a signature, or at least never as deliberately as this time. In this trajectory, I began realizing that the padlock imbued the works with an external character, returning them quicker to reality. The padlock appears without notice, it causes friction, it magnetizes and leaves them in a place that is closer to life.

BJS: Not long ago, we spoke about the notion of nomadism and “ground fairs” — a sort of outdoors market, where all sort of functional, or even dysfunctional (broken/out of order), objects are sold. This made me think about both the need to give a new usage value to the objects around us and to bring them back to market, extracting a new symbolic or even commercial value from them. I believe this aspect deals with the precariousness of life and the material means for survival, as well as with an affective relationship with objects that accompany us along the road — relationships of use and intimacy with the technology around us, which allows us to live and give meaning to the objective and the subjective universe in equal measure. After all, the construction of the world is always based on a topography, a landscape and a stage in which we move, feel, think and act.

PA: This year, I visited the ethnographic museum in Asunción, Paraguay, and, as I looked at the ceramics and tools of the original people, I realized that some of them were nomadic in their forms and lightness. Overall, there wasn’t a declared ostentation of power, like there is, for instance, in Aztec or Inca manifestations. To me, the objects were imbued with a predisposition to move, to be carried or to change state. I had also read Pierre Castres’ “Crónica de los indios Guayaquís” [Chronicle of the Guayaqui Indians], which offers an account of the characteristics of this nomadic people that ended up being exterminated. Castres did not consider this type of society as unproductive, but as a society that produces only what is strictly necessary.  All of this brought me back to a reflection on whether I should produce more or less, whether there might be in my work something that is mobile, that prevents me from even visualizing and mapping what I do. Moreover, that ambulatory, provisional being is somehow related to the “ground-fairs” we spoke about; situations in which objects mix according to very disparate criteria and have the opportunity to re-order themselves again. A sort of map that is burnt every night. In most cases, those “fairs” arise from a parallel economy, producing an unsettling effect, as if they could occur at every street corner, beyond any power control. That feeling of unannounced apparition, and that unpredictable combination of objects, is one of the things that I reflected upon for this show.

BJS: The garbage bin reappears in this exhibition, and again as a replica. A good portion of material culture in the world is destined to become garbage as it exhausts its function, or becomes redundant or outdated. There is some irony in the fact that the garbage bin appears next to discardable pieces — an umbrella, a cardboard box, a container for our everyday use objects.

PA: The garbage bins cause an active mistrust. As soon as an object goes into them, it starts becoming something else, combining with a series of unknown elements. Like the padlocks, the bins bring the narrative to a close, although they also open it up. They are themselves a place that reflects a common destiny, in which what comes together coexist. In their rapport to the show, their emptiness may cause the vertigo you mention. If nothing is bound to sit still, if all objects had a mobile, ambulatory side, one of the possibilities is that they might end up in in the trash. In that sense, the pieces as a whole generate situations and places for the objects (spaces/containers) in which they can dwell, or rest, for a while.

BJS: At least since Magritte, black umbrellas are charged with mystery.  Perhaps they have always been: when closed, they hide their form, when open, they reveal their function. Here, they are prevented from being opened, as if hiding something. In its muteness, the umbrella is enormously eloquent precisely due to its somewhat surrealistic charge. On the other hand, it is a prosthetic of the human body, like so many that appear in your work.

PA: When I start preparing a show, I often go back to the work I did in the desert, an open, flat space where the pieces move freely and can be approached from any angle, a wall-less space, etc. That erring, desolate image generates a strange spectator, rather observed than observer. The closed umbrella can be used as a baton, a transient element, to expand our boundaries, a sort of prosthesis. In its horizontal position, divided by eye-screws at every 5 cm, it is also a measuring tool (to measure what surrounds us, to measure itself). Returning to your question, while the umbrella has been used by other artists, the padlock seemed to question that fascination, to leave it intact in its plenitude. As if what truly matters is not what we do with it but the fact that it reappears time after time.

BJS: “Design always presents itself as serving the human, but its real ambition is to redesign the human.” Beatriz Colomina. In her book, “Are We Human?”, the author claims that everything in the world is design: the landscape, the technologies we engender and coexist with, or even the human body and the human mind themselves, as well as language. And then she reflects on how design, beyond its original or immediate function, transforms its own creator. How did design, with which your work and play, redesigned your mind and your ideas as artist and human being?

PA: I believe that art is also a place for unknowing. In other words, to start from scratch. Some works have that character. Ricardo Carreira’s poems, that name what is seen and then name what they’ve named, are an example. In that sense, as I see what I do, I sometimes try to take a step back. The padlocks, mixed with works where they did not appear before, might be a sign of that. Or the replicas that return industrial objects to a prototype state with all that the process implies: to design them again, to measure them, to find their origin; or the quantity of symbols that now appear in “Destino común”, trying to generate the appropriate questions about who we are (fire logos, clovers, clips, a moon in a landscape of interwoven glasses, a Johnnie Walker sticker coming out of a drawer). To unlearn, un-invent, could be an auspicious pathways to reinitiate some aspects of our colonized reality.

BJS: Is there an end or a beginning in your process of creation? Or is it an endless, inexhaustible process of renaming things in the world and blow new life into them?

PA: I’d like my work to be perceived with a lack of conclusion, i.e., not describing a limited or stagnant path (stagnant water rots), but precisely the opposite.  For now, it certainly is a state of affairs, a state that might not need me anymore. In fact, whenever I finish a work, I think it might the last, but then I realize that life not only overcomes art but mandates and drives it. I think it entails some of the aforementioned accents, and that those impulses are increasingly less or more invisible in my works. In a book by António Bispo dos Santos I read a phrase that resonates with this: “Sometimes, walking along, we come across a beautiful, cosy rock to seat on”.