PHANTASMS

An Interview with Regina Silveira

Dan Cameron

For the past few decades, the work of Regina Silveira hás steadily increased in prominence so that, at age 71, she hás become one of the most visible Brazilian artists working today. Silveira’s art emphasizes conditionality & impermanence, yet it is able to dominate large public spaces with relative ease. Her primary concern is with the image, and exploring ways that the image can be grafted onto an already-existing structure, and in the process change the meaning of that structure for those who encounter it. Projected shadows, distortions of perspective and other fairly straightforward techniques have become, in Silveira’s hands, instruments in service of a complete feeling of dislocation between structure & user.

Generationally, Silveira’s art is a hybrid, its author having experienced firsthand both Conceptual Art in Europe and the U.S. and the Tropicália movement in Brazil, and emerged as something of an offspring of those two movements. In fact, her work hás evolved with great consistency since the 1970s, but always with an internal logic that is sensed immediately by the viewer long before its mechanics can be put into words. In particular, the phenomenon of anamorphosis, whereby the tampering with the conventions of geometrical illusion can affect our perceptions of the greater world surrounding us, became a growing área of concern. As the result of her immersive studies in this area, Silveira’s shadow extension and light projection pieces, through both their ephemeral nature and their virtuosic manipulation of space, have become captivating experiences within urban spaces around the world, entering the lives and imaginations of many thousands of individuals who had no intention of viewing them, but simply happened to be in the same location at the moment they appeared.

Although my only collaborations with Regina Silveira have been in the 2006 Taipei Biennial -- where she created a mesmerizing vinyl-decal mural of countless footprints moving diagonally across the facade of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum -- and in the forthcoming 2011 edition of Prospect New Orleans, I have known of her work since the early 1990s, when she had a number of exhibitions and projects in New York. By mid-decade, when I finally had the opportunity to experience Silveira’s work on a more systematic basis in Brazil, some of the questions below began forming in my mind. It was only once I was able to come to terms with her art through my own curatorial development that I then became more interested in learning about her own perspective on the way in which her art functions in the physical, and the not-so-physical, world.

DC

Interview Dan Cameron – Regina Silveira

1 - We are at a point in recent art history in which public art is in a state of crisis: too few new ideas, too much repetition of forms, too much stone, bronze and steel. How does your practice manage to remain public while avoiding all of these pitfalls?

2 - What does ‘political’ mean in terms of your art?

3 - Your artistic career has been a series of apparent detours hat later turn out to be connected to the whole. How do you approach a stylistic transition?

4 - How would you describe your relationship to the Tropicalia movement? 4 – Como você descreveria sua relação com o movimento da Tropicália?

5 - What are the non-Brazilian art movements that have had the greatest influence on your work?

6 - Is it your belief that contemporary art’s strong dependency on private collectors has kept it away from the attention of the public that needs it the most?

7 - Thirty years ago, Rosalind Krauss called for an expansion of the field of sculpture, and you seem to have extended that manifesto to include drawing. Is drawing another form of sculpture for you?

8 - Before global art became a cliche, your work always pointed to a kind of universal viewer experience. Is this something that you’re conscious of?

9 - The notion that visual distortion can stimulate a degree of mental activity that would otherwise be difficult to attain seems to be key to your work. How did you arrive at this point of departure?

10 - What do you think is the greatest achievement of art during your lifetime, and its greatest shortcoming?

ANSWERS

1 – My strategy has been to opt for a relative ephemerality, of the sort potentized by digital matrices, since they allow for open series of replicas – either identical or adapted to the varied dimensionality of places and supports. When I associated digital matrices with industrial materials for the coating of surfaces, especially removable ones such as adhesive vinyl, I was able to take on and control the scale of very large-size projects. But perhaps the most important thing has been the emphasis on impermanence, based on the more

fluid attitude of associating the work to the concepts, operations and results of urban interventions – even close to the actions of graffiti – with the intention that they exist only as temporary occupations, to transform and resignify specific places. But I haven’t always managed to escape from the difficulties that can jeopardize the permanence of public works, especially when located in “tougher” urban spaces, far from the care and the repertoire of formal art spaces. In a period of five years my work Duplo [Double] – commissioned by a private university, with a very rigorous finishing in white marble and black porcelain, in a closed square guarded by the institution – became totally graffitied and deprecated after the university stopped taking care of the square and abandoned it to be used freely, but in a predatory way, by the neediest segments of the population in that area. It was a great lesson for me; instead of realizing that pristine work (which in reality ended up being offered as a large support for interventions and a wide range of uses), I should have thought about a collaboration or complicity with elements of this same population, I could have even invented a work that would have allowed this predatory and mutant appropriation – directly for them... On the other hand, Teorema da Gaveta [The Drawer Theorem], the ceramic panel that covers various parts of the façade of the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the Universidade de São Paulo at São Carlos, made even before Duplo, remains intact and well preserved, possibly because of the much better resolved relation of this work with its users, most of them students from this university campus, certainly more motivated by the sort of “visual charade” which is the true theme of this artwork.

2 - The political consists in the assault on perception, in the transformation brought about by grafting something into the given space in such a way as to magically change its relationship with the real, altering the experience and understanding of the place. In terms of my work, the political is an operation of estrangement: making things, places and worlds “something else” for a moment, or even “never-more-the-same”, after being inhabited by the fiction.

3 - I believe that strong stylistic changes certainly took place before the 1970s, when I was still struggling to impress changes in my practice as a painter headed toward an expressive, material and somewhat gestural abstraction, resulting from a very traditional art training. But I think that from then on, frankly,

I can see my work as one large whole, with almost necessary variants – or, as I like to think of it – a well of a single poetics, which I am continuously digging. My interest in the image – in the sense of a practice and a reflection on the nature of images as a representation of the world, and how they operate as mediators of perception, in the strictly political sense of representation – has been a common and constant platform for many of my apparent comings and goings, over the last decades. I can also see recurrences – in the attitudes of disassembling the traditional visual codes, in my interest for space and for architecture, under various forms, and in the curiosity and opening to nonartistic, new or technological media for explorations and various collaborations. Alongside these recurrences there are some common threads linking a good part of what I have done from the 1970s up to now, without apparent connection. One of them is the photographic and indexical basis of a good part of my production, which includes the projected shadows, the distortions of perspective, and the various phantasmagorias that I have projected in various urban contexts.

4 – In the years of the Tropicália movement (1967 and ’68) I was living outside Brazil, based in Madrid, as a fellow with the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, for studies in the history of art and painting. In that period of military dictatorship in Brazil, Tropicália instated an experimentalism with anarchic leanings that was a true leap for the quality of the language used in poetry and music. All of this reached me, almost without delay, as a desired transgression at a moment when I myself was beginning to make close contact with (and be influenced by) the counterculture of other geographies, some of which were fully established. For me it was a time of radical rupture, in personal and professional terms. This was when I abandoned painting and delved deep into the experience and recognition of other kinds of poetics, with conceptual foundations sustained by new media and supports, which required me to develop a totally new repertoire. In 1973, when I returned to live and work in Brazil, I entered into close productive contact with a group of concrete poets, both with the “leading lights” Augusto and Haroldo de Campos as well as with the younger constellation; and in the post-Tropicália times I was able to draw closer, in terms of the sensibility itself, to musicians, artists and poets such as Caetano Veloso, Oiticica and Paulo Leminski, as well as many others who left a conceptual legacy that greatly influenced later generations. In short, the Tropicalia years were definitive ruptures in many latitudes – for me as well – and in any case it was a period of

“molting to another shell” to assume, from then on, this syntony (?) of mine with more hybrid languages.

5 – I often say that I am ecumenical, always open and interested in exchanges with other fields of language which are not necessarily those that I work with, nor limited only to contemporaneity. Nevertheless, I can say that my imagination and path have been significantly influenced by neo-Dadaist and conceptual manifestations of the 1970s, developed on generational platforms closer to my own. Seeing the exhibition Information at MoMA in 1971 and being at Encuentros de Pamplona, held in homage to John Cage in 1973, really marked and changed my artistic outlook. The effect was as strong as what had happened to me during the previous decade, when I left painting and more traditional forms of art after I found, in Europe, the manifestations and exhibitions that celebrated kinetic art, arte programmata, arte povera, and the initial stages of computer art. In those years – which I still consider as the time of my art training – all of this triggered reflections that literally revolutionized my prior “convictions”. Years later, when I was fully involved in my postgraduate studies, my contact with the work by Duchamp and, especially, his conceptual and pseudo-scientific sources, triggered important reflections and intensely stimulated my imagination. In historical mannerism – the first moment of art as invention – I was able to find many affinities with my work and my postures. I don’t even need to say that this constituted a “line” for me – it was like finding my own “family”.

6 - Really, this dependence runs counter to the true functions of art and the role of the artist, which is to magically mediate the relation with the world, at all times. I am aware that reaching and interacting with a broader public, of all ages – even an anonymous one lacking experience with the protective spaces of art –only takes place effectively in the public space, or else in the few (but fortunately increasing) institutional spaces that lend importance to this interaction. In my public practices over the last years, the graphic interventions that temporarily cover architectures and façades have certainly sought to situate the work within this potentiality. But the interventions, operations or strategies – whatever you wish to call them – that have most stimulated this direction, which is fundamental for me, are precisely the projections of light in various urban

contexts that I have been doing since the late 1990s. When I make nocturnal projections of fictional images on the highest and darkest parts of buildings, on walls and in the streets, in movement through heavily populated urban areas, along paths previously selected for being significant or emblematic for that place, my preferred operation is that of estrangement, and the best tactic is surprise. I have made various kinds of luminous or phantasmagoric writings – the superhero, the fly, the flying saucer, the word luz [light] or animal tracks – by way of gobos or lasers, using devices in constant movement, with the aim of altering the normal view of the things and places, momentarily interrupting the indifference and influencing people’s perceptions. But in fact, the result could never be evaluated; for example, there was no way to know the effect caused on the passengers of a certain bus that crossed the projection of light – here we are speaking of a fluid and tenuous happening that is poetically blended with the real.

7 - I would say expanded graphics, more than drawing – however, when I think of drawing in the sense of writing, making inscriptions or graphic signs, even with light or shadows, I can see the confluence between the two terms. But what attracts me more to graphics than drawing is the idea of the matrix and reproducibility, and, moreover, the possibility of its hybridism with the digital imaginary, which is constantly giving rise to more techniques for producing images. In any case, I agree and I also see this graphic/drawing overflow of mine, going beyond the customary supports, as a strategy for invading other dimensions, architectures and even urban fabrics. But specifically considering the relation with sculpture, I believe my work is in an almost purely optical area that borders on the sculptural. What I have done the most is to coat surfaces and volumes with drawings and patterns that never manage to leave the plane they are adhered to, yet use different strategies to suggest another spatiality, which can be volumetric, dizzying or labyrinthine. This applies both to my work with objects as well as my interventions on various architectures. The real space is a datum that I never modify physically, because for me it is the existing space that is offered, used as a contingent support. This given space is the challenge that I need to confront, to inscribe the desired transformations. Parallel with this, I want to say that this expanded and spatialized drawing also has a markedly temporal (and possibly more allegorical) character, which is the

indexical sign itself. The graphic splotches consisting of marks and tracks of all kinds, in different degrees of accumulation that I have used to coat, speckle or wrap buildings or interior spaces can be very well perceived as an overlaid visual narrative, concerning a happening in time.

8 - Perhaps because the poetics implied in my works is derived from the illusionist tradition – a longstanding, pervasive trend deeply entrenched in visual perception – even when my entire thrust is focused on operations of transgression and disassembling of codes, they are there, at the basis, like a decodifable passport allowing the poetic leap. I have also never made any secret of the choices I make in terms of repertoires of banal images, of objects in common use and easy interpretation, with the intention of making them “something else”, and this means to say: ambiguous or transformed up to the very limits of recognition, by way of operations provided by diverse geometries and distortions of perspective. But if on the one hand I allow for easy access, on the other I want to include a trap: the new perception will become stuck to the memory of that image. The printed silhouette of a flattened corkscrew, thin and distorted in anamorphosis will always be a ressacarrolhas,1 as poet Haroldo de Campos wrote in the small poem that reached me at the door of my house, on the morning after the inauguration of the exhibition Anamorfas, where I saw him taking notes in front of each one of the images. (Later published in “A educação dos cinco sentidos”, Brasiliense, 1985).

9 – In the late 1970s I started to get interested in the relationships between optics, perception and visual representation – in the sense of contingencies of the point of view and of the limits and arbitrarities of highly codified systems of representation, such as perspective and photography, which are aimed at a nearly scientific similarity in relation to the perceived real. In this direction I began to explore the effects of the marginal aberrations that sustain the geometry of anamorphoses and yet today are at the bases of so many digital transformations. The graphic series Anamorfas [Anamorphs], which I concluded in 1980, refers to this context of ideas. Anamorfas was a sort of starting point for

1 There is an untranslatable play on words here in the Portuguese text. The neologism ressacarrolhas is constructed from a blend of the word ressaca [hangover] with saca-rolhas [corkscrew], mentioned earlier in the same sentence". [translator’s note]

a reflexive practice that involved different ways of disassembling the codes of representation, very much supported in distortions conditioned by vantage points. When I took the work from paper into space, in my first installations constituted with painted silhouettes – as in the series In Absentia, in which I consider the notions of icon and absence – I came to a much better understanding of the role played by one’s point of view, which is, basically, the place of this eye that apprehends or captures, also philosophically, the visualities of the world. The way that it could give rise to multiple distortions, re- perspectivizing perspectives by the simple displacement of positions, provided insight for rethinking some questions of representation such as “phantasm”, fiction or simulacrum. Although with variations and additions, I believe that these starting points have extended up to the present.

10 – Here I don’t think that I can give you specific responses and point to isolated manifestations, or individual artworks or artists. Making an overall summary, think that the greatest thing during the time of my generation, which is certainly a privileged generation for witnessing and experiencing so many things, could have been the taking of art as a language. Clearly, meta-language was already there before, in Monet, and entered the 20th century in the succession of historical vanguards. In this summary I refer more precisely to the focus on language that appears as a questioning into the nature and function of art in the 1960s and ’70s. Here I’m not thinking so much about self-reference as about that art which reflects on its role in the social as language. Perhaps this was the greatest driver of art in the time of my generation’s life. In regard to the failures, I prefer to be more limited in my scope: in a problematic area like public art, the shortcomings arose from the immense difficulties of negotiation inherently posed by permanent works. Until today, issues such as control or a lack of imagination – but also the educational aspects properly speaking – remain to be solved, in order to foster the understanding of everything that comes into play when art is installed in the public space. This is far from the understanding of art as an investment.

ILLUMINATING ART… AND PEOPLE

Regina Silveira’s name means contemporary art at its best. In a very personal and enticing way. Her art is contemporary by displaying a cutting-edge approach to art, namely the conceptual one, meaning it deals with the idea of logical beauty, which is definitely the beauty of early XXIst century.

However, Regina Silveira has opened to her art a very peculiar path, far away from the cerebral and aesthetic indiference of most tendencies of contemporary art. In short, it is not a boring art and it is not a decorative one either: it says something meaningful to the beholder. This is something the artist obtains by introducing the representational language in her art: there are figures in her art, figures the public can acknowledge and identify with. An art that most of the times comes with an ironic twist which makes people smile in a rather natural and spontaneous way. This is the case of Aufklärung 2 (the light bulb attached to a twisted cord) and of Track Series (Race).

In Aufkärung 2, where one expects light to come from a straight and orderly device, it comes from a twisted cord, like in a labyrinth : what sort of light is this, what sort of Enlightenment is this? The light bulb is shining, though – it must be a miracle. This is the human Aufklärung.

Track Series (Race) shows the impressive skidding imprints of tires attached to surprisingly small toy cars. The skidding imprints are imposing shadows; the childish toys nevertheless minimize its impact, which could be dramatic otherwise. This work is both a recollection of things past and dreamed of and the expression of a wishful thinking: it is a short story of these all too contemporary days.

Aufklärung 1 (with the word LICHT painted and illuminated) is another happy example of Regina’s logical beauty: she often recurs to visual and material printed words in order to make people really see what they usually see

without paying attention to it. Light is that which renders things visible – but light itself must become visible and that’s what Regina’s work is about. This is a work of art and an appeal to more light in the world, underlined by its title. Aufklärung, Enlightenment, one of the most relevant human acquisition, comes in a varied number of forms and it is up to art to remember it and help make it quite clear and visible. In a masterly and aesthetically attractive way, such as Regina Silveira’s.

Teixeira Coelho

Mirrors of heaven

Teixeira Coelho

Every great artist is dangerous. Dangerous for those who work with and around her (the gallery that shows her works, the artisans that execute the basic tasks she requires), for the critics (uncertain as to the value of what this artist shows them), and for the public (who do not know how to react to something that does not show the usual signs of artisticity and suspect that all this is ultimately being done against them – and they usually do not know how true this is…).

Dangerous this artist is above all to herself when she does things that puts her work, the possibility of executing it and its acknowledgement at risk. This kind of artist is a generalized threat.

The most uncommon radicality of Regina Silveira can be seen in three basic traits of her work. To begin with, at a time when one will insist that anything whatsoever is art, Regina Silveira associates herself with some of the most founding bases of art tradition: the know how, the expertise, the mastering of the code, the painstaking requirement that everything should be in its right place, rigorously calculating its effects.

Secondly, in her committing to the narrative accumulated by art tradition, from which she extracts certain techniques – the perspective, which she reinvents; the anamorphosis, magnified; and some fundamental themes (the easel, the artist 's studio, the geometrical solids taken from one`s_first ever art lessons, the main works by famous artists).

Thirdly, in her deciding to profoundly review ways of using and representing these themes and techniques.

Regina Silveira rejects the commonplaces and the ruts in which part of contemporary art gets stuck, such as insisting on easy procedures (as in much installation and performance) or the literality of what is represented (too much servile realism in photography) or on the other hand insisting on the obscurity of what is allegedly put in the work (as in those conceptualisms that have in the artist himself or in the professional group of the curators its first or only public). Most of all, she does not “addresses issues” , which is the weakest pretexts for doing art today (or that which is supposed to be art) and at the same time the most common pretext for it.

Regina Silveira pushes the vital principles of her contemporary art to their extremes. ln her own words--and she knows what she is talking about—her chosen battlefield is that of representation, with all its limits and alternatives. But this does not mean she is trapped within the narrow bounds of an art that only speaks of art. The world outside art is also involved in her pieces: the world of everyday people and objects, the artificial world of man, the world of the history of the place where this art is being made. Objects in the world she takes possession of may be a huge monument or sculpture group by a major Brazilian modernist artist or an almost irrelevant ladder or pool, or a tiny filthy fly or an iconic piece by a founding father of contemporary art. Her recurring territory is metaphysics--an uncomfortable place where nobody ventures lightly—but also that of the most mundane irony. Almost always, both these two “subjects” battle for space in one and the same work. This, again, disturbs the public, dealers, and critics.

The great majority of contemporary visual art in fact consists of works that are too small, or too brief (even when they are large in size), too breathless to contain more than one aesthetic category, much less categories that accumulates antagonistic tones. Today, this multiplicity of nuances is more often seen in literature or the cinema. But it may be found in the work of truly dangerous artists of the past, or of the present day.

Furthermore, in the case of Regina Silveira usually there is not a solid work that the artist leaves behind as an aesthetic residue. of her action. Her material of choice may be either an worthless object that may be thrown away when her piece is removed from the venue in question (a saint, a sphere) or (perhaps more commonly) paint applied on the floor and on the wall that is later erased, or a vinyl cut out and applied and then taken off and ruined. There is a physical instability in the work of this artist (sometimes what one purchases from her is just a CD—ROM with instructions for the production and installation of the work) that can only be proposed by someone who is completely

sure of what she is doing in the context of a scenario that is however still dominated by traditional values (the canvas, the solid objetc, the beautiful material).

The aesthetic values Regina Silveira poses are demanding values, values that at the same time are constantly put at risk (by herself, to begin with).

Running all risks, and not least that of finding herself alone in her own lane, Regina Silveira has defined for her art a place of national and now worldwide dimension--which suits very well an artist that, as every great artist, is audaciously striving to populate the world with her devices. . Danger and depths to the ocean God gave But it is in him that the sky reflects. Fernando Pessoa

Teixeira Coelho “Espejos del Cielo, Proyecto Sublime, n. 5, Regina Silveira” Sublime, Madrid/ Madri, n.6, Nov-Dec/nov.-dez. 2002 (Traducción Adolfo Montejo Navas)

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EXTENDED  PRINT

Maria  Bonomi  and  Regina  Silveira:  two  Brazilian  artists, perspectives   they   open   to     art,     society   and   the   role   of   the museums.

Teixeira  Coelho1

Print   also   has   changed   –   from   an   intimate   and   delicate   experience between   the   artist,   the   artwork   and   the   beholder   to   a   large   mass enjoyment  in  open  public  spaces  right  in  the  middle  of  everyday  life.  Like any  other  art.  The  artist  of  print  does  not  work  alone  anymore,  nor  does the  beholder  stands  alone  seeing  a  print,  which  does  not  fit  in  a  museum and  is  not  collectible,  much  less  a  multiple.  The  boundaries  among  the  arts have  dissolved,  print  has  allowed  itself  the  same  liberties  other  art  media have  had  for  decades  now.  The  way  the  pubic  approaches  the  new  print has  also  changed:  labels  and  texts  are  irrelevant,  even  the  curator  is  not  on view.    Print  now  is  seen  on  the  skin  of  a  museum,  not  in  its  interior;  it    is again   totally   contemporary,   even   its   aura   is   back.   For   decades,   the   art object   prevailed,   then   it   was   the   age   of   the   museums   and   then,   the curator’s;  now,  considering  print,  the  public  is  in  the  foreground.

Technology   changes   culture.   Of   course,   what   changes   technology   is   culture   – which  means  culture  changes  itself  even  if    most  people  would  like  to    believe that   culture   is   what   remains   identical   to   itself,   ever   (this   is   a   useful   belief   for cultural   policy   makers   but   not   an   evidence   in     the   real   world).   In   short, technology  changes  because  culture  changes  although  these  changes  are  usually more  visible  when  seen  from    the  perspective  of  technology:  changes  seem  more palatable   that   way,   more   neutral,   more   indisputable   and   more...   irresistible. More  desirable,  even.  Most  people  want  technology  to  change  and  accept  those changes  easily,  welcome  them  –  but    don’t  want  culture  to  change.  That  seems  to be   the   equation   with   which     the   human   kind     deals   with   one   of   its   basic paradoxes.

1  From  MASP-­‐São  Paulo  Art  Museum  and  USP-­‐University  of  São  Paulo,  former  director  of  MAC-­‐Museum  of Contemporary  Art;  tcnetto@gmail.com

2

Changes   come   to   art   also,   through   technology.   The   idea   of   printing   is   directly associated  to  the  way  one  obtains  a  copy  on  paper   (or  other  material)  from  a matrix  over  which  paint  (in  the  old  days)  had  been  spread.  The  producer  of  the print   –   the   artist—used   to   be     personally   involved   in   the   process,   manually involved  in  it.    The  hand  was  decisive,  the  same  hand  newly  found  in  the  walls  of an  Indonesian  cave  and  that  is  now  marveling  the  world;  and  with  the  hand,  the entire  body  of  the  artist  was  involved:  the  personal  rhythm  was  essential,  just like  the  inspiring  works  of  the  French  paleoanthropologist  André  Leroy  Gourhan have  shown.2    The  man  or  the  woman,  their  hands,  the  material  with  which  they worked,  all  that  counted  and  were  in  an  intimate  relation.  At  the  very    least,  that artist  –let’s  call  him  or  her  the  traditional  artist-­‐-­‐    was  supposed  to  first  make  a drawing  so  that  a  craftsman  could  eventually,  if  that  was  the  case,  transfer  it  to  a matrix   and   then   produce   the   corresponding   engraving,   if   that   was   the   artist’s choice.

But  technology  has  changed,  print  has  a  much  more  enlarged  meaning  today  and the   artist   does   not   even   has   to   put   his   hands   on   the   material   in   any   of   its manifestations  –  not  to  generate  the  original  drawing,  not  to  generate  the  matrix, nothing.     There   is   now   a   distance   between   the   artist   and   his   work.   Instead   of hands   on,   a   magic   expression   in   the   60s   and   70s   of   the   20th   century   for     art education,  now  it  is  all  about  hands  off.  It  has  been  like  this  for  half  a  century  now and   it   has   been   even   more   so   since   the   computer   became   a   widely   used   tool anyone  could  have  in  a  private  and  individual  office.  From  the  hands  to  the  mind, from  matter  to  an  idea:    this  double    transfer  has  been  a  most  meaningful  one. Now,  before  arriving  to    the  final  and  “hard”  product  in  front  of  him  or  her,  the whole  preceding  process  is  a  virtual  one,  if  not  a  conceptual  one.

Let  me  show  you  how  two  very  important  Brazilian  artists  are  dealing    with  the new  technological  possibilities  for  print  and  how  meaningful    have  been  these changes  for  the  entire  system  of  art  production  nowadays  –and  by  that  I  mean  the production  of  the  artwork  itself,  properly  speaking;    its  diffusion  or  distribution; the   exchange   stage   (what   and   how   much     must   one   give   back   in   order   to   get access   to   the   artwork);   and   its   use   or   consumption   (or   fruition,   to   put   it   in   a higher  level).

One  of  these  artists  is  Maria  Bonomi,  a  remarkable  name  in  Brazilian  printing, widely  known  outside  Brazil  as  well.  Born  in  Italy  in  1935,  but  in  Brazil  since  she was   11,   Maria   has   dedicated   herself   completely   to   printing.   Her   works   are everywhere  and  widely  acclaimed.  Let’s  see  some  of  her  “prints  as  public  art”:

2  L’homme  et  la  matière.  (Paris,  Albin  Michel,  1943);  Le  geste  et  la  parole  (Paris, Albin  Michel,  1964-­‐65).

3

This  is  a  wall  in  one  of  São  Paulo  subway’s  station,  from  2005.  Let’s  take  a  closer look  at  it,  from  a  different  angle:

or    in  this  image:

4 This  looks  like  a  true    print,  an  engraving.  Its  truth,  like  in  a  traditional  print,    lies in  the  carving,  its  truth  can  be  found    inside  its  traces,  its  traits,  its  furrows,  its scores.    The  artist  is  in  each  one  of  these  carvings.  In  front  of  this  image

we  feel  like  if  we  were      in  front  of  a  print  on  paper  that  has  come  out  of  an engraving.  In  this  image  however

we  see  the  engraving  in  3-­‐D,  so  to  speak:  it  looks  like  a  matrix,  a  piece  of  wood for   instance   from   which   some   parts   have   been   removed;   but   now,   instead   of wood   there   is   a   concrete   wall,   cement.   This   is   a   true   extended   or     amplified engraving.    With  a  physical  sensuality  that  does  not  exist  in  the  paper  format  (in traditional  printing,  the  sensuality  would  eventually  be  in  the  paper,  would  be  fit when  the  hand  of  the  beholder  touched  the  paper;  on  the  wall,  the  sensuality  is in  the  work  itelf,  in  the  “printing).

When  one  compares  these  extended  prints  by  Maria  to  some  of  her  “true”  prints like  these

5

Buggy,  xylography  105  x  85  cm,  1985

Ways  into  yourbody xylography,  100  x  210  cm,  1975

one  is  immediately  aware  that    they    do  share  the  same  nature  with  their  subway station  sister  and  that  they  come  from  the  same  imaginary.

And  this  is  how  Maria’s  “matrix”    looked  like  when  it  was  been  prepared  or  built in  that  subway  station:

6

What  strike  us  most  are  not  only  the  size  of  it  but  also  the  number  of  people working  on  it.  There  is  not  one  artist  only  (and  lonely)  anymore  –  and  actually Maria   herself   idoes   not   show   in   the   picture:     there   are   dozens   of   workers preparing   Maria’s   artwork.   Can   we   call   them   artists?     They   are,   at   least, craftsmen:  the  printers.  The  truth  is  the  artist  is  not  alone  anymore,  she  is  not one,  she  is  dozens.  This  reminds  me  one  of  Walt  Whitman’s  lines  taken  from  one of  his  Modern  poems:  I  am  large,  I  contain  multitudes.  When  Whitman  wrote  that line  he  had  in  mind  a  very  specific  situation:  he  was  asking  himself  whether  he contradicted  himself:  “Do  I  contradict  myself?  Very  well  then,  I  contradict  myself, I   am   large,   I   contain   multitudes.”   The   difference   between   himself   and   a contemporary  artist  is  that  the  contemporary  artist  does  not  need  to  contradict herself  in  order  to  contain  multitudes  in  herself:  the  contemporary  artist  is  large, she  contains  multitudes.  The  contemporary  artist  needs  multitudes  in  order  to have  her  work  done  –  unless  she  is  happy  within  the  limits  of  her  old  medium frontiers,  a  territory  which  she  could  occupy  herself  alone  with  her  small  piece  of wood   to   be   carved,   her   print   and   her   rather   small   piece   of   paper.   That   old territory  is  alright    and  it  has  its  place  in  today’s  art  world,  of  course.  But  if  this artist  wants  to  dialogue  with  the  new  reality,  she  must  contain  multitudes,  she must  be  able  to  contain  multitudes.  In  a  way,  a  contemporary  artist  like  Maria goes  back  to  the  16th  century    in  Western  tradition  when  an  artist  needed  also  a small  platoon  of  assistants  in  order  to  have  his  work  done:  if  he  was  a  paointer, he   would   eventually   need   a   specialist   in   ears,   another   specialist   in   hands, another  one  to  prepare  his  canvas,  his  colors….  This  is  what  we  call  a  revolution, a  re-­‐volution,  a  going  back  to  a  certain  point  in  the  past.  Technologies  also  allow for   revolutions,   for   “going   back”:   after   a   time   when   the   reality   of   art   was translated  by  the  image  of  the  artist  alone  in  his  studio  or  in  front  of  his  canvas placed  outdoor,  the  artist  is  again  back  to  the  plant,  to  the  factory  –  Andy  Warhol was   right   when   he   called   his   studio   a   factory,   and   so   is   Damien   Hirst   or   Jeff Koons  and  many  others…

Maria  does  not  contain  multitudes  in  herself  when  she  makes  art  only,  she  also contains   multitudes   seeing   her   art     because   what   she   does   is   public   art   for multitudes,  like  in  that  subway  station  in  São  Paulo,  used  daily  by  multitudes. She   also   does   another   kind   of   public   art,   like   this   one   in   a   private   house   in Manaus,  the  capital  of  Amazon:

7

Let’s  take  a  look  now  at  another  Brazilian  artist,  Regina  Silveira,  born  in  1939, another  woman  artist  (the  women  artist  are  very  important  in  Brazil  at  last,  and some  of  them  are  highly  priced  in  the  international  art  market,  should  that  be  a way  of  evaluating  their  art:

This  work,  Stampede,  was  installed  on  the  façade  of  the  Biennial building  in  São  Paulo  during  its  XXIV  edition,  in  1998.  What  you  see  here are  prints  of    different  animal’s    paws.

These   two   images   below   are   from   another   site   specific installation,  this  time    at  the  Taipei  Fine  Arts  Museum  in  2006,  for  the  VI Taipei  Biennial,  and  it’s  called  Irruption.    What  you  see  is  a  multitude  of human  feet:

8

The   human   imprint,   like   those   pre-­‐historical   paintings     in   the   walls   of   the Indonesian  cave  or    the  French  caves,  is  back  again,  forceful,  powerful.

Below,  Rerum  Naturae  (Things  of  Nature;    the  table  with  pottery)  over  Mundus Admirabilis     on   the   floor   and   background   (Wonderful     World),   2010,   an installation  mixing  two  different  artworks  by  Regina  at  the  Philagraphika  2010 exhibition  (Moore  College  of  Art  and  Science,  Philadelphia,  USA):

9 Next,  Lumen,  2005,  at  the  Cristal  Palace,  Reina  Sofia  Art  Museum, Madrid:

Like  in  Maria’s  case,  when  one  compares  these  extended  prints  by  Regina  with some   of   her   “true”   prints   one   knows   at   once   all   of   them   came   from   the   same imaginary  and  share  the  same  formal  nature:

10

Hammock  hook  (The  Eclipse  Series),  2003.  Inkjet  print  on  backlight,  73x53  cm.

And    the  following    one  is  the  work  Regina  did  for  my  museum,  MASP-­‐São  Paulo Art  Museum,  and  which  I  had  the  chance  to  curate:  Thread  in  Blue,  2010,  like  the previous  ones  a  digital  print  on  adhesive  vinyl,  occupying  2.300  square  meters on  all  four  façades  of  the  building:

11

If  we  look  closely  at  it,  we’ll  see  it  is  rather  different  from Maria’s  work:

12

There   is   no   sensation   of   a   3-­‐D   here,   there   are   no   visible   traces,   no   traits,   no carving,  no  furrows:  the  image  is  flat  and  it  shows  on  a  flat  surface:  the  image  is printed  like  on  paper,  it  is  just  not  a  paper  anymore  but  a  piece  of  vinyl.  It  is  a printing   machine     that   produces   this   art,   just   like   in   the   old   days,   but   this machine    is  now      a  modern  ink  jet  printer:  there  is  no  “weighting  on  the  paper, the  paper  does    not  pass  under  a  heavy  cylinder  to  have  the  image  imprinted  on it,   the   image   is   obtained   the   way   a   image   on   a   paper   in   the   newspaper   is obtained,  so  to  speak.  But  contrary  to  what  happened  before,  or  what  happens with  the  newspaper  today,    this  image  does  not  come  out  in  one  single  and  whole piece:   as   one   can   see   in   the   photo,   it   comes   in   a   number   of   different   slices, hundreds  of    them.  Again,  a  significant  number  of  workers  are  required  to  put this   piece   together:   at   least   two   or   three   digital   programmers,   a   number   of workers  at  the  printing  bureau  and,  as  one  can  see  in  the  photo,  what  is  needed now  are  specialists  in  rappel,  those  people  that  hang  themselves  over  the  abyss, climbing  up  and  down  cliffs  or  building  façades.  The  image  is  first  sketched  or loosely   drawn   by   the   artist,   then   introduced   in   a   computer   that   will   “treat”   it digitally  and  transform  it  in  a  number  of  different  matrices,  then  these  matrices are  enlarged,  them  they  go  to  the  printer  who  will  have  a  very  difficult  problem adjusting  everything,  then  the  professionals  of  the  rappel  will  be  hired  to  install the   artwork   in   the   façade   of   the   museum   after   the   transit   authorities   have altered  the  traffic  around  the  museum  in  order  to  avoid  any  possible  accident… There   is   just   a   very   small   analogy   between   this   extended   print   and   the traditional  print  of  which  this  very  same  museum  has  a  large  stock  in  its  gallery and  storage  rooms.

13

A  view  of  Thread  in  blue  on  the    back  façade  of  MASP  (taken  from  an  helicopter).

Again,   both   Maria’s   and   Regina’s   work   share   another   characteristic:   they   are unique   works,   not   multiples,   they   cannot   be   reproduced.   They   are   absolutely rare,  a  one-­‐time-­‐only  event:  they  cannot  be  transported,  removed,  sold,  they  are unique  just  like  a  canvas  by  Tiziano  or  Da  Vinci.  Their  aura,  in  the  way  Walter Benjamin   described   it   in   his   “The   work   of   art   in   the   age   of   Mechanical Reproduction”  (1936)3,  does  exist,  it  is  there  –  and  like  in  a  true  auratic  work, people  have  to  go  where  they  are  if  they  want  to  see  it.  This  is  one  of  the  most important  aspect  of  the  relation  between  the  body  of  a    work  of  art  and  the  body of  the  beholder:  to  move  the  body  to  where  the  art  is.  With  a  rather  important difference  in  the  case  of  Regina’s  work:  it  exists  for  a  short  period  of  time  only and  then  it  disappears;  if  you  saw  it,  you  saw;  if  you  don’t,  you  won’t…

And  the  museum  will  not  be  able  to  store  Regina’s  artwork,  nor  Maria’s,  an  art not  to  be  stored,  an  art  that  actually,  in  Regina’s  case,    will  be  destroyed  in  the process  of  removing  it  from  the  façade  (Maria’s  will  live  longer).  This  work  by Regina    on  MASP’s  façades    is  made  to  be  destroyed,  its  end  is  inscribed  in  its birth,   in   its     DNA   and   is   totally   predictable–   just   like   for   us,   humans.     It   will survive  in  documents  and  in  the  memory  of  those  who  saw  it  there.  All  that  is  left is  a  digital  archive  with  the  instructions  for  reinstalling  it  if  that  ever  happens (most  probably,  it  won’t…)

This  is  a  totally  new  approach  to  print,  to  art,  to  graphic  art,  to  public  art,  to  the way  people  see  art,  to  art’s  destiny,  to  the  way  art  is  collected  (is  this  a  collectible

3    Published  by  Schocken/Random  House,  edited  by Hannah Arendt.

14 art,  anyway?),  to  the  way  a  museum  must  deal  with  this  art  –  to  the  role  of  the museum  itself.  Art  made  for  public  spaces  has  always  existed,  for  sure.  Trajan’s Arch  cannot  be  removed  or  stored  or  sold  and  collected,  nor  can  the  obelisk  at the  center  of  the  Place  de  la  Concorde  in  Paris.  But  for  print,  or  for  the  graphs      as Regina  calls  them,  it  is  a  great  move.  The  “old”  print  forms  and  formats  will  not disappear,   the   “old”   format   is   also   a   contemporary   one.   But   a   new   reality   has emerged.  We  have  been  talking  about  mass  society,  mass  communication,  mass media,   mass   art   for   quite   some   time   now.   The   mass   reality   is   finally   installed right  among  us.  When  the  installation  of  Regina’  work  was  finally  completed  (it took  almost  four  weeks  just  to  install    it  on  the  façades,  not  to  the  mention  the months  in  the  preparation  of  the  material  in  different  professional  studios)  the entire  city  was  transformed  in  its  relation  to  this  museum  –  and  to  this  artist. One  could  see  Regina’s  work  from  afar.  People  would  stop  in  the  side  walk  and marvel   at   what   they   were   seeing,   just   like   they   did   underground   in   front   of Maria’s  work.  The  relation  between  the  audience  and  the  artwork  is  a  totally  new one.  Astonishment  may  be  the  right  word  to  describe  the  new  scenario,  a  word that  maybe  has  never  been  applied  to  print’s  old  format.  It  is  not  a  better  relation or  a  worse  one:  it  is  just  different,  contemporary.  Before,  the  artwork  was  in  our hands,   it   was   fragile,   we   would   dominate   it   at   least   physically.   Today,   the artwork  is  huge,  we  are  fragile  in   front  of  it,  we  don’t  control  it  anymore,  not even  physically.  This  is  already    a  new  trend.  It  is  not  the  dominant  format,  the dominant   art   yet,   but   its   is   the   emerging   one,   no   doubt.   What   remains   to   be understood   is   which   format   is   now   the   residual   one…   There   is   a   new representation  of  art  in  its  relation  to  life  and  the  world,  one  that  reminds  us  this Jorge  Luis  Borges’  short  story4  in  which  a  cartographer  wishes  to  draw  a  map  so perfect  that  it  comes  out  the  actual  real    size  of  the  real  territory  it  is  mapping… Regina’s  skies  were  almost  true  skies,  they  worked  like  that.

Fact   is   the   entire   system  of  art  production,   in   this   case   of   print   production   or graphic   production,   is   being   changed:   production   has   changed   (we   saw   the preparation  for  Maria’s  wall  in  the  subway  station  and  we  saw  the  rappelists  at work  for  Regina);    the  diffusion,  the  distribution    of  the  work  to  the  public  (the exposure  of  the  work  to  the  public)  occurs  in  a  new  context  and  situation;    the exchange  phase  is  transformed  (in  Brazil  just  like  in  a  number  of  other  Western countries,   people   willing   to   see   art   inside   a   museum   have   to   pay   for   a   ticket before  entering;  this  new  public  art  is  for  free);  and  the  use  or  fruition  of  the  art is  also  beyond  old  systems  of  communication  with  the  public  and  of  “education of   the   public”,   if   one   can   say   so   (labels   have   no   place   here,   there   is   no introductory  text  by  a  curator  presenting  the  work,  there  is  hardly  any  need  for  a catalogue  –  which  anyway  would  show  very  little  of  what  is  actually  seen  when one  is  in  front  of  the  art  itself;  this  art  is  to  be  experienced  directly,  in  a  corps-­‐à-­‐ corps,  body-­‐to-­‐body  contact).

4  First  published  under  the  title  “On  Rigor  in  Science”  in    the  March  1946  edition  of  Los  Anales  de Buenos  Aires,  año  1,n.  3,  as  part  of  a  piece  called  (in  a  very  appropriate  way  for  this  paper) “Museo”  (“Museum”);  now  it  is  found  in  the  volume  of  collected  short  stories  El  Hacedor  (The  one who  makes).

15 Extended   printing   with   unexpected   new   materials   for   “printing”   –concrete, cement,     adhesive   vinyl     -­‐-­‐   means   extended   audience,   extended   art,   extended public   art,   extended   art   experience,   extended   cities,   extended   worlds   –   and extended  questions  submitted  to  the  museums.    Can  they  reply  to  what  is  been presented   to   them?   Do   they   have   to?     Museums   are   still   strong   points   of attraction  and  they  are  needed  but  this  new  kind  of  art  –which  is  not  a  specialty of  printing  and  which  is  not  just  big—  poses  problems  that  at  least  we  in  Brazil are  not  addressing  fast  enough  and  clearly  enough…  Museums  should  not  be    for residual  art  or  for  the  dominant  art  only  –m  or  should  they?  Can  they  cope  with the   emerging   art?   Can   they   be   creative   in   a   way   it   has   never   been   necessary before?

Teixeira  Coelho São  Paulo,  October  2014

Effects and affections

This interview was done via email between the end of May and the beginning of June, 2006, in the middle of the international turmoil that Regina Silveira’s life has become. Answers were written in Jerusalem, at Amsterdam’s airport, in Taipei and, finally, in São Paulo. From my end, as I received her replies, I opted to make some comments at the end of some of them, as a form to express my enthusiasm and affinity with what Regina was saying, since I couldn’t do it in person. In the body of the text these comments may be identified by the use of a different color, the graphic solution we found in order to allow the reader to capture the dynamics of the interview and realize that the answers and the comments were written in different moments.

Marcio Doctors – I would like to begin our conversation by talking about what made you work with light. What is the function of light in the inner logics of your work?

Regina Silveira – For a long time my work was marked by the use of projected shadows, but in reality light was always implicit in these projections, due to the simple causal relation between both. Light and shade form a pair and an unquestionable polarity. Nevertheless, and not losing sight of this, I believe that a stronger focus on light’s pole was gradually introduced in my work with the dialogue it started to have with architectonic spaces in some of my latest works and installations. Maybe what brought me to place light as a stronger poetic nucleus can be explained by yet another polarity, which could be stated as a thought on built matter (mental / human) and the immaterial (the idea of transcendence). Perhaps…

But it was never about physical light, with its fundamental function of illuminating built spaces. In the beginning it was a kind of light captured and affixed in the very architecture it was contained. This was done by painted registers of this light that were applied on the venue. Then, and for some time, I turned to an almost objectualized light, which sometimes was painted on the objects. More recently, I have been using light’s magical ability to deconstruct and transform some architectonic interiors of large proportions.

I have also been interested by a more phantasmagoric or even ephemeral relationship between light and architecture. In these cases, light appears as a luminous apparition, a kind of phantasmagoria projected inside closed architectures or as a luminous inscription that overflows to the epidermis of urban context, a writing of light, project on façades and gables.

Marcio Doctors – I think it would be interesting if you could exemplify, with works and throughout your career, how such use of light in architecture is processed.

Regina Silveira – Encasing light within architecture started with Behind the Glass (1991), an installation characterized by a specificity and ephemerality already found in the institution’ proposal. In this work, I registered (with black and silver paint) the pattern of light and shade formed by the nighttime illumination of Washington Square (NY) inside the windows of Grey Art Gallery at New York University (NYU). Several years later the same operation was the basis of the work Capture / Captura (2000), which was an ephemerous register, painted in silver, of the light pattern that fell on the floor and walls of a hallway located in the second floor of Itaú Cultural in São Paulo, before the

building’s restoration. During several days the work took place at the moment when the sunlight went through the building’s side windows, exactly at 10:10am.

Sunshade / Solombra (1990) and Vortex / Vórtice (1994) are other key installations for the understanding of this paradigm of light in my work. These works may be understood as doorposts of light that shed shadows inside architectonic spaces, but in a paradoxical way, since they displace the effect of light, which virtually would go through windows and openings and illuminate a closed space. Instead of a ‘halo’ or an illumined place, light expands itself to form something that could be perceived as an extensive box of shadows.

Double (2003) and Chimera / Quimera (2003), on the other hand, are phantasms. Both are replicas of light, apparitions installed inside dimly lit closed spaces, in the lineage of Equinox / Equinócio (2002), but in its second version, the one of Fiesp-SP, when the sphere, with painted shade and light, was fitted on a projection identical to itself.

During the last years, both the project All Nights / Todas las noches (1999) and the interventions I carried inside São Paulo’s CCBB building (Lumen, during the exhibition Clearlight / Claraluz, 2003) and at the Crystal Palace in Retiro Park, Madrid (Bluememory / Memoriazul, during the exhibition Lumen, 2005), correspond to the intention of using light to deconstruct – in a virtual way – architectures that are essentially beautiful or too present for the artist’s intervention.

In these works, I used a good number of artifices to make the light go through and radically transform closed architectonic spaces, some of them transparent.

Such trajectory having light as the main poetic nucleus has been punctuated, since 1997, by works that I see as luminous inscriptions. These writings with light have been sometimes affixed on architecture, like LUZ (at MAC-USP, 2000), and Transligth / Tranluz (Crystal Palace, Madrid, 2006) and, other times, put to function as moving images projected on the urban context. That was the case of Super Hero (Night and Day) / Super Herói (Night and Day) (1997), in its laser version, in Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, and the mobile scriptures (Transit / Trânsito, 2002 and UFO, 2006), moving through the city during the night.

In some of these works the luminous inscription had a critical intention that was fundamental, like the giant fly on deteriorated urban areas. But in others my goal was the poetic dimension per se. In these cases, the works gained tautological meanings, the work representing/meaning itself, and such was the case of LUZ ZUL (2003), in the version placed next to the window of CCBB-SP, and of NOOR LIGHT / NOOR LUZ (2005) – luminous projection of the word ‘light’ in urdu calligraphy, performed at the markets and darkest areas of Lahore, Pakistan, during three consecutive nights.

Marcio Doctors – One thing in your work that has always impressed and interested me is the encounter of the poetical and technical dimensions that, I believe, is quite present in this exhibition. How would you describe this process and this relation? The illusory and the magic represent an important dimension of this process?

Regina Silveira – Indeed, I have great interest in the exploration of techniques of image

production, this has been permeating my whole production and comes from my curiosity about resources brought up by new medias. Without a doubt, this is connected to my attitude, also recurrent, of reflecting and critically inquiry about the nature of visual representation. Nevertheless, I’m not an artist specialized in the technological routes of medias and languages, for throughout the years I have been mixing artisan and traditional processes with the resources of the most recent and sophisticated technologies, often reduced to their simplest expression. If something characterizes my work from the technical point of view it is precisely the hybrid use of means of production.

In the beginning of the 1970’s, I produced graphic works utilizing several printing techniques (both traditional and industrial) which include video-art explorations, but specially using fast reproduction medias – from photocopy to microfilm – for dissemination in publications and other alternative means.

In the 1980’s, when I began to make installations directly painted on the exhibition venues, like the series In Absentia (1982, 1983-1993), I also used artisan resources, such as tapestries, painted ceramics and cutouts of wood boards. I tried solutions that would grant permanence to the conceptions created mainly as ephemerous works for institutional spaces. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that my emphasis was never on the technical procedures, since my works were not per se investigations about the medias they used.

In the series of tapestries hand-embroidered by specialized professionals, in mid-1980’s, the most important point was to know how and in what degree the kind of stitch chosen would affect and transform the silhouettes I had produced (I myself never embroidered anything…).

When I started to adopt more and more digital resources for creating my works, in mid- 1990’s, I was able to confer more velocity in their conception, specially those of large formats. I also were able to have access to new supports that helped me to overcome the challenges of large architectural scales – on which I had to plan my interventions – with a greater degree of precision, not to mention the new kind of permanence I could grant to my site specific installations: the potentiality of repetition, present in digital matrixes.

Since I began my activities with imprints the technical work has been shared with other collaborators, who have specialized skills that I myself don’t have. My goal is not the technical dimension, but the poetical one. The more sophisticated the technical resources may be, they should not have relevance. Their main function is to turn poetics more incisive. For this reason, in many works, the equipments are shown as low-tech resources or simply are not even present, so not to distract the viewer’s attention of that which should be perceived.

Perhaps the illusion of some projected images, such as the ones of Equinox, Double and Chimera, derive from this fact, being offered to the spectator as a visual trick and magical perception.

Marcio Doctors – I really appreciate how you emphasizes the poetical aspect of your work. I think it is important for people to perceive your work from this perspective. It is too simple and a reductionism to associate your work to the investigation of new medias

and technologies. All artists who limited themselves to technical aspects didn’t add anything to the process of art, which function is to inquiry into the mystery. I believe that, the closer to the mystery, the larger are the possibilities of a work to create several layers of meanings. And, the more intense this possibility is, the greater the vigor and the permanence of the plastic discourse of the artist. Art is not supposed to answer or find anything: its function is to expand our field of perception. We know that all artists who limited themselves to technique for technique sake (which is not your case) were swallowed by it, because who understands about technique is the technician.

When I mentioned the ‘illusory’ and the ‘magic’, I see it clear now, I was referring to the deepest layer of your work, which is the commentary on representation. I know this is an old and almost exhausted issue, but one that didn’t lose yet its fundamental function at the crossroads between art and philosophy, specially in this moment when we are still learning to decipher the codes of a world where virtuality became a possible dimension of an experience of human reality. I think that when Modern Art dismantled the canons of classical naturalistic representation it was planting the seeds of the world that technology ended up granting a real form, and at the bottom desired to allow a more immediate relation between art and nature, in the sense of not allowing the natural forces to escape (landscape), bringing them closer, as the Impressionist did – they who wanted to be where the light was. That is, the criticism of the order of representation aimed, on one hand, to follow nature’s flow, in the sense of being equal to it (a process that culminated with the dissolution of the frontier between art and life from the Sixties on) and, on the other hand, proposed such an intense displacement from outer reality that created a world turned on itself (a process that culminated with the creation of a virtual reality). In short: the criticism of representation is a paradoxical process, opened toward the reality of nature’s potencies and closed on itself, creating a parallel world of human forces. After establishing such paradox, one of the functions of art became dealing with the tension created by these two fields.

Marcio Doctors – How was working at Telemar’s façade? How would you interpret LUZ ZUL and the ideas of inversion and transparency contained in this work?

Regina Silveira – Façades covered with glass and skylights are wonderful supports for the development of ideas that imply a relationship between architecture and the universe of color-light. They work as light doorposts that connect the building’s inner and outer spaces, operating as a filter of light to those inside and as a backlight to those looking from the outside. I’m also concern about their capacity of throwing into the architectural interior a whole world of luminous reflections, when these transparent surfaces filter the bright sunlight.

Skylights and glass façades are familiar supports for me since Clearlight and the giant intervention in the Crystal Palace, but it does not mean this intervention now was less of a challenge, for even if previous practices may make a difference, the results are never totally predictable. There is a large part of the conception that remains open for the conditions brought about by the building itself.

I had also cut the word ‘light’ as a luminous writing in other architectures at the front window of Bank of Brazil Cultural Center in São Paulo (CCBB-SP) and in the apse of the Crystal Palace in Madrid, in which the inverted reflex were strongly projected against

the floor, allowing one to read the inverted word. Nevertheless, in spite of all these premises, the intervention on Telemar’s façade carries other implications, with their own effects and complexities .

LUZ ZUL contains an inversion, which apprehension – and understanding – happens from the place from where the word is read, that is, inside or outside the building. To make LUZ appear as a visible word, cut and illuminated from behind, on Telemar’s façade, from the point of view of someone outside the building, is for sure the simplest operation. Much more complex is what happens inside. There, this same word, turned illegible, that is, ZUL – when receiving strong light coming from outside – should project itself, in smaller sizes, once again inverted and quite fragmented, on the several levels of the building’s interior, staircases, walls and furniture.

I believe as well that this whole ‘cascade’ of intercrossed projections will be affect by the blue color-light filtered by the adhesive pellicle. The effect of the bluish environment may reinforce the “corrected” reading of ZUL as AZUL [blue].

For sure, at Telemar, the most unpredictable effect will be the fragmentation of the luminous reflexes inside the building, given the numerous obstacles of its interior architecture, and the way the several levels, some opaque and other diaphanous, will intersect and mingle all projections. Perhaps it will be possible to understand LUZ ZUL as a kind of luminous kaleidoscope.

Marcio Doctors – I’m impressed by your capacity to see, or, better saying, of make visible (I like to joke saying that those who make us see are writers, while visual artists ‘create presences’). The thing I like most in Memoryblue, in the Crystal Palace, and Lumen, in the CCBB-SP, is the fragmentation. At one point I was afraid that wouldn’t happen in Telemar building. Fragmentation, for me, carries a strong metaphorical meaning, which in this work will be simply put into motion by the most impalpable of all things, which is light. This dimension will requalify the space of the building’s interior architecture, in the sense it will intensify the vertigo contained in that succession of glass staircases and steps. It will requalify the meaning of fragmentation in your work as well, since it will happen in a natural way, without the help of a digital projection, as was the case in CCBB-SP, or of plotted projections, as in the Crystal Palace. In this way, this concept will gain a new level of meaning, the use of a natural conductor – impalpable and almost with no material density –, light, as transit for virtuality. It is as if you put nature in the place of technology.

Marcio Doctors – Please, comment Moonscape.

Regina Silveira – In Moonscape there is the intention to point out to infinite dimensions, through a clear allusion – both visual and auditive – of the infinite cosmic space: at least in the way I imagine it. The spheres of Moonscape do not exactly represent planets, but are spherical bodies I dimensioned so to seem heavy and immense. They ‘roll’ on two different walls, but always over the same horizon line, a kind of low horizon, where the spheres hide from time to time, rolling and decreasing in size, during the 8 minute loop projection.

Truly, Moonscape consists of the identical projection of a single sphere, performing the

same sequence of a slow movement on two walls juxtaposed in a right angle. The small alleatory delay that I established between the two projections is the cause of the open and apparently incalculable combination between positions and the relative sizes of the two moving spheres.

The sphere was digitalized and animated by Ronaldo Kiel, in 2001, when I imagined a stage scenery for the presentation of one of the plays of the group Anita Cheng Dance, at Joyce Soho, in New York. In the scenery, three large size spheres slowed rolled on the back walls and on the stage lateral sides and, often during the show, the dancers interacted with the spheres and with the shadows of the dancers projected on them.

When I recreated those spheres for Moonscape, the group Olhar Periférico was in charge of the angular setup and of the new sequence of movements of the spheres, and this was complemented by Rogerio Rochlitz’s soundtrack. When I requested this soundtrack I asked it to invoke the distances and possible sonorities of the cosmic space.

Marcio Doctors – Please, talk about Double and about Pulsar.

Regina Silveira – Double is a luminous replica magically displayed along with its origin: a large wooden cube with which it shares the projected shadow. This work deals with the real and its representation, emphasizing representation as a ‘phantasm’.

The cube, which is a very simple geometrical form, was made with maximum technical care, in order to be of a pristine beauty, but unquestionable belonging to the real. The painting on the cube’s corners, in black and white, registers a fixed pattern of light and shade, and the black edges border the area of the shadow projected on the floor. The shadow spread through the floor and walls moves ahead embracing the luminous replica at the back wall. The double of the illuminated cube comes from the photo image of a similar cube, but in miniature, done as a recording on glass (dycroic gobo) and projected on the wall. From a given point of view, the viewer sees the border of the shadow projected on the wall in perfect alignment with the base of the real cube and of the cube replicated by the projection. This produces the magical perception that the replica is located inside the wall or simply that the back wall is no longer there.

Pulsar was originated by a small work I did for the exhibition Al fuoco, Al fuoco!, organized by an Italian gallery (Il Gabbiano, La Spezzia, in 1997), that invited the participant artists to send a work done with box of matches. I did then a kind of pre- Pulsar, based on the same operations and poetic principles of the Pulsar presented in this exhibition. But in the previous work this very same intention was already present: of transforming the matchbox into the extraordinary place from where light and the stars are born. Only the technical solution was much more precarious, for in that work, useful as a kind of draft for the future Pulsar, I placed inside the box a common battery and a small lantern lamp. The procedure of cutting and letting out a star in perspective from the little box’s side, allowing the light to physically escape through the hole, was maintained in the new Pulsar.

From the very beginning what motivated my imagination was to think about that light imprisoned inside a matchbox with the label Fiat Lux, which paradoxically worked as a readymade title, quite convenient and appropriate.

The light that escaped through a lateral hole and projected a small but quite brilliant star on the wall made me think of the matchbox as a birthplace of stars. In order to develop this idea, I only ‘attached’ to the small star a much larger and projected one, originated from a metallic gobo with an opening with the shape of a star and set into a specific projector near the matchbox.

The shape of both stars are similar, independently of the contrast between their sizes. On one side, the larger star touches a tip of the smaller one and, on the other extremity, it is much more elongated and diffuse, escaping toward the infinite.

Marcio Doctors – How do you relate the metaphorical content of the idea of light with your work? For you, is there such level of meaning or you are more interested in the technical and objective aspects? Or, still, what interests you is to use a technological language in order to draw metaphorical extractions of reality so that we could better perceive it?

Regina Silveira – Unquestionably, there is in my work, for some time now, this level of meaning and interpretation. I myself have been investigating when and how these metaphorical meanings of light – taken as a spiritual source of illumination and transcendence – started to be part of some of my site specific installations.

As far as I’m aware this began with All Nights (1998-1999), a not carried-out project I did for five contiguous rooms of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) of Monterrey, Mexico. For this project, I imagined that those rooms for temporary exhibitions, in the ground floor of that impressive building created by Legorreta, would have their ceilings taken off and would be exposed to two intense light sources capable of covering all exhibition spaces with strong projected shadows. The effect would be a lunar illumination on an empty museum, for the rooms would keep only the benches, the bases and the glass cases, with no art being exhibited, and everything covered by almost 5 miles of black adhesive vinyl. In my project, the only architectural element that would be kept from the removed ceiling would be the immense concrete sphere that the architect placed in precarious equilibrium on the exact angle of the walls that limit the exhibition space before the inner yard.

All Nights would make night fall on the museum and on art in the museums. For me, it was a remarkable reflection about the place of art and the place of art in the sculpture- museums of current days. Perhaps it was a too critical project for that museum and, for this reason, it was formally denied and kept in stand-by until today.

I can’t explain in words the meaning of this demolishing light/shadow of All Nights, nor how it could be related to the idea of transcendence – these connections take place in the same area of the mind where artistic ideas are born, and are kept nebulous for the artist himself. But I know that the spheres I did for Equinox and The Lesson / A Lição – works that deal with light and art, in a special relation – are descendents of that sphere hanging over the darkened halls. They ask from the viewer a time-elongated contemplative attitude toward what is being offered by the works: magic, wonderment and surprise with the scale, an almost cosmic relation with the spheres in which the patterns of light and shade are painted in two identical sides.

The association of these contents with technological languages is also a fact, and it is related to the need to produce immaterial images, make simulations, plan works in dilated scales, and so on; in short, to operate with new materials and procedures. All Nights itself was originated by sophisticated digital technologies – the 3D digital maquette was made in partnership with the architect Claudio Bueno, at the time working at the Nucleus of Technology in Architecture and Urbanism (Nutau) of the University of São Paulo – and the presentation of the work to MARCO was made in the form of a website housed by Nutau.

Other instances in which I believe metaphorical approaches to light are clearly exemplified are the works Lumen and Memoryblue. In them, I try to invoke the perception, or, better saying, the feeling of a luminous event virtually dynamic, catastrophic and also amazing, in which light goes through closed spaces, transforming the matter of the building that it at same time invades and demolishes into luminous shards. A lot of technology is necessary to produce those strong projections and digital images with enough power and definition to cover such large and high spaces…

Marcio Doctors – I agree with you. These works that keep such poetical and philosophical dimension at the same time are the ones that make use of a very sophisticated technology. This meeting point between art, philosophy and the technical use of science reminds me of the moment when philosophy was born, when these pulsations were gathered and throbbing in their desire to become knowledge. Better saying, I’m able to perceive, through these works, the same perplexity man must have felt before the forces of nature, when he founded philosophy as an organized perception of reality. They have this dimension of perplexity and enchantment, which found the basis for the organization of chaos: a rationality that agenciates the metaphysics of immanence. A vigorous manner of facing man’s destiny.

When I thought of the collection of works that form this Telemar exhibition – the final choice was the result of a rich and organic process in which those involved with the project suggested the pieces – what I had in the back of my mind, guiding my thoughts, was that I wanted an exhibition in which the dimension of the poetic, in association to this perplexity of the foundation of the logos, would involve the spectator. I hope we will be able to reach this goal. I think that works like Moonlight (in its cosmic choreography), Pulsar (in its ludic simplicity), Double (with its sharp criticism to representation, mimesis and the double) and, finally LUZ ZUL (blowing up with tautology and light the meaning of things and space, inquiring us about the relationship between word and image) may, as a whole, be the translation of this feeling contained in All Nights, where the great Presence is the great Absence. Perhaps that’s why the museum has kept the proposal in stand-by. After all, how the place designed to store the memory of time would house emptiness?

Marcio Doctors – I would like to know if your interventions in public buildings keep any relation with the political and social concerns present in the beginning of your career as an artist. If these works, by reaching a larger public, would have a social function.

Regina Silveira – Interventions in buildings with extensive visitation of non-specialized public are a great challenge for artistic communication, since it is important to make

oneself understood without lowering the level of one’s repertoire. While I was setting up Lumen in the Crystal Palace in Madrid I though that my task was to make the exhibition understandable by the kind of people that visits the Retiro: a large middle-class public that systematically visits the interior of the Crystal Palace no matter what’s inside, for sheer pleasure, as if in a promenade, more than anything because the Palace is beautiful… My intention was to create a trap that would capture their perception and transform their understanding of that architecture.

From a political point of view, these larger audiences are quite different from the sharp- minded micro audiences of the beginning of my career, when the works were distributed as political exchanges, almost from hand to hand. Nevertheless, in the case of the political and social meaning of public works, whether ephemeral or not, I think the urban interventions – and the relationship they establish with the people at the streets, an anonymous and more or less numbed mass – are more demanding than the interventions in public buildings.

I was never able to evaluate how the intervention of the large shadow of the Super Hero, covering 12 stores of a façade in Paulista Avenue in São Paulo, worked. Was it perceived as the presence of our protecting hero, the mythological Superman of comic books? Or as a kind of a giant bat, the protecting hero of the corporations established at the Avenue? I was also never able to measure the effects that an image projected during the night on dark façades may have on the passengers of a bus that may pass by it.

Outside the protected spaces of art, what must be put into motion – with redoubled vigor – is art’s transforming power: to provide new experiences of reality and to replace an indifferent regard by a more curious and participative attitude. This should be enough.

Marcio Doctors –Uncommonness and wonderment are found in the works of this exhibition, and this reminds me of the Greek concept of thauma, which is the moment of perplexity before the forces of nature, which awakens the logos and the desire for philosophy. I believe such potency is kept in your work. How do you see this?

Regina Silveira – Wonderment and descontextualization were already my favorite indicators when I created Anamorphous / Anamorfas and other projective distortions in the beginning of the 1980’s. But the wonderful of the works of those years was not a correspondent to astonishment. It was a more conceptual effect, derived from the artifice and ingeniousness contained in the inventions and fantastic ‘maneirist’ imaginary – ironically resumed by Duchamp in his opticeries, doubtless an other indicators for my works. The maneirist wonder that interested me had a halucinogenous side and was connected to several optical mechanisms of the cabinets and chambers equipped to produce magical visions, apparitions and anamorphosis.

This imaginary – imprinted with irony (like in Anamorphous) or impregnated with political meanings (in the series Dilatable) – was at the basis of my re-creations of those years. In the works of this exhibition, wonderment certainly has another ‘tonality’, the one of spiritual illumination (enlightment) and the search of a wonder that one could experience through beauty and magic. This kind of effect was doubtless the connecting link between the pieces of Clearlight. When I conceived the broken light of the installation Lumen, in CCBB-SP and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of Memoryblue, in

the Crystal Palace, I also wanted to generate in the spectator a perception/interpretation of an uncommon and illuminated beauty.

I think that the nocturnal projection NOOR/LIGHT I recently did within the context of the Performing Arts Festival of Lahore, Pakistan, was also based on the search of these effects, with the distinction that its meaning was divided between the poetical and the political. The illuminated calligraphy of the word LIGHT, written in urdu, made a reference to Nur Jahan – a poetess and notable woman, known as “Light of the World”, who was the Empress of India and Pakistan in the 17th Century – and, at the same time, to the idea of bringing more light, even if only metaphorically, to the darkest and most conflictuous night markets and urban environments of old Lahore, where the word was projected, as I said before, from a moving open car during three consecutive nights.

Marcio Doctors – Uncommonness, wonderment and perplexity are dimensions that the fragmented time of contemporary days have been engulfing in such a devastating way that perhaps we still aren’t able to evaluate the terrible consequences that it will bring to the future. These elements are the source of the poetical, the philosophical and the creative imagination of science. It’s hard to live without such dimension. I believe that the capital’s greatest (perverse) maneuver is to create an alliance between consumption and enchantment in order to generate a sensation of happiness, that occupies the place of plenitude that we can experience before the spectacle of nature, which is the source of the wonderment that makes space for indignation and creation within us. This is vitality, pulsation and life as a partner of life.

Your work touches me because it faces the physical struggle of this fight inside the enemy’s arena. With this I mean that more and more you have been taking possession of technological resources in a positive manner: as an arm capable to recover such lost dimension of nature. I don’t want my thoughts or my interpretation of your work to be understood in a wrong way, as if I am against technology. That’s not the point; on the contrary, it is all about the appropriation of effects. Effects generate affections, and badly dealt affections bring barbarism. My fear is the trivialization of Evil.

Rio,  August  5,  2016 Dear  Regina, Exactly  ten  years  ago,  in  2006,  I  did  an  annotated interview  with  you  for  the  “Luz  Zul”  exhibition  we  did at  Centro  Cultural  Telemar,  now  Oi  Futuro.  In  it,  I made  the  following  observation  about  your  reply  to  my question  about  how  you  saw  the  issue  of  the  unexpected [“insólito”  in  Portuguese]  and  wonderment  I  had identified  in  your  work: The  unexpected,  wonderment,  and  perplexity  are dimensions  that  the  fragmented  time  of  contemporaneity has  eaten  up  so  completely  that  perhaps  we  haven’t  yet assessed  the  harmful  consequences  it  will  represent  in the  future.  These  elements  are  the  font  of  poetry, philosophy,  and  the  creative  imagination  of  science. It’s  a  dimension  that  it’s  hard  to  live  without. Ten  years  on,  I  am  surprised  by  the  title  you  have given  to  your  intervention  for  the  21st    edition  of  the Breathing  project:  Insolitus.  You  have  made  me  realize that  that  2006  exhibition  is  in  some  way  connected  to this  intervention,  that  it  has  been  permeating  under the  surface  for  years  and  has  been  manifested  in  our conversations  and  has  in  some  way  led  to  your  primary insight  /  decision  to  turn  the  table  and  chairs  in  the dining  room  into  a  black  furry  object  –  an  unexpected object  –  in  Mutant  l.  This  idea  gradually  took  shape and  helped  me  to  realize  more  clearly  the  black  side  of your  body  of  work.  I  am  thinking  here  of  the  works  with shadows  as  poetically  and  metaphorically  offsetting  the works  that  deal  with  light,  identifying  the  void  that all  bodies  project  outside  themselves. In  the  text  for  the  catalogue  in  2006,  I  referred  to  a Jewish  parable  that  speaks  of  the  two  fires  that  wrote the  tables  of  the  law:  black  fire,  which  drew  the letters  that  we  read,  and  white  fire,  which  created  the space  between  the  letters,  necessary  for  us  to  read them.  And  I  went  on  to  say  that  today  we  read  the  black

fire,  but  that  one  day  we  would  manage  to  read  the white  fire  and  our  perception  of  reality  would  change completely.  Similarly,  I  think  that  shadow  in  your  body of  work  could  be  seen  as  an  intangible  presence  that  is projected  beyond  the  material  body,  and  also  a  presence that  projects  the  subterranean  void  of  this  very  body. For  me,  Insolitus  can  be  interpreted  in  two  different ways:  as  a  paradox  that  challenges  us,  like  the  fires and  shadow,  an  expression  of  the  subterranean  void  in society  today,  directionless,  which  brings  forth  the negative  drives  of  an  uncertain,  insecure  world;  and  as a  spark  of  hope,  a  calling,  which  says  to  us:  be surprised  by  the  unexpected!  The  sense  of  uncanny  and perplexity  it  triggers  are  a  cry  for  hope.  Beware  and be  mindful  of  the  insidious  forces  that  our  choices  are leading  us  to;  we  will  have  to  find  ways  out  because the  feeling  of  unease  and  disquiet  today  is  intense. Far  be  it  for  me  to  give  your  intervention  a  political or  pamphleteering  overtone  –  I  know  it  is  not  and  has never  been  your  intention;  in  fact,  I  see  a  spiritual dimension  in  it.  A  generous  dimension.  Mundus admirabilis  is  an  infestation  of  giant  insects  that take  over  the  façade  of  the  Eva  Klabin  house  museum like  Dark  Swamp  (nest),  in  the  Renaissance  Room,  where a  black  egg  180cm  in  height  sprouts  from  a  crocodile swamp,  conjuring  up  a  sense  of  unexpected  wonderment that  baffles  us  and  makes  us  ponder  what  might  emerge from  it.  All  of  this  with  the  sound  of  helicopters  and mosquitoes  in  the  background,  issuing  from  Fable  ll,  at the  top  of  the  stairs  in  the  main  hall,  like  a disconcerting  reference  to  the  world  of  insects  and Francis  Ford  Coppola’s  film  Apocalypse  Now,  and  its last  words,  “the  horror,  the  horror,  the  horror.”  In this  way,  you  create  a  soundscape  that  permeates  the whole  house,  lending  your  intervention  poetic coherence. Conserving  our  capacity  to  reflect  at  this  time  of uncertainty  in  the  world,  lost  as  we  are  between  a

familiar  territory,  but  one  which  we  know  to  be  without future,  and  a  desire  for  something  new,  yet apprehensive  about  the  unknown;  letting  ourselves interrupt  the  flow  of  daily  life  and  through  your intervention  reflect  upon  our  wayward  paths:  this,  for me,  is  what  hope  is. Hope  in  the  sense  that  we  are  at  a  crossroads  between two  worlds,  between  two  writings,  between  two  fires, and  we  must  make  our  choices  fearlessly:  cling  onto what  we  know  and  repeat  the  same  mistakes  of  the  past, or  cling  onto  hope,  even  though  we  do  not  rightly  know where  it  will  lead  us,  and  take  a  chance  on  the certainty  that  we  no  longer  want  what  we  have  and  that the  unknown  will  open  up  new  paths.  We  long  for  some spiritual  change.  Insolitus  brings  us  the  rawness  of  a substantive  reality,  which  your  work  has  the  power  to do,  by  laying  bare,  by  materializing  on  the  surface  of the  world,  the  anguish  of  our  society  today. Only  art  and  philosophy  are  capable  of  such  a  feat because  they  have  the  spiritual  means  to  do  so;  they  do not  fear  the  unknown,  nor  are  they  afraid  of  pointing out  issues  that  bother  us.  I  hope  that  the  people  who experience  this  new  intervention  in  the  Eva  Klabin house  museum  collection  realize  that  what  this curatorial  project  has  proposed  from  the  outset,  which you,  Regina,  have  managed  to  express  so  aptly  by  taking the  idea  of  intervention  contained  in  the  original Breathing  project  proposition  to  the  extreme,  is  the need  to  destabilize  in  order  to  find  a  new  balance. Your  destabilization  of  the  codes  of  a  residence, upsetting  its  domestic  peace  and  quiet  with  your imaginary,  creates  a  striking  metaphor  for  contemporary times. Dearest  Regina,  only  artists  are  capable  of  seeing  into the  future,  not  that  this  has  any  merit  of  itself, since  the  future  will  come  one  way  or  another.  But  as bearers  of  this  potential,  they  conserve  the  only certainty  possible,  which  is  clarity  of  perception.

What  do  I  mean  by  this?  It  is  that  the  artist’s  body  is a  kind  of  vehicle  for  times  in  metamorphosis  expressed through  artworks.  The  work  is  more  important  than  the artist;  it  is  an  x-­‐ray  of  its  time;  it  is  capable  of creating  a  perception  of  evidence,  a  block  of sensations  (Deleuze),  through  the  senses  of identification/empathy  (Worringer),  making  the  mystery of  each  epoch  transparent. Mutant  ll,  which  you  have  created  especially  for  the Breathing  project,  lays  bare  the  process  of  art  as  a metamorphosis  of  time,  which  is  what  I  am  talking about.  Through  this  work  we  are  surprised  with  crystal clarity  at  how  the  metamorphosis  of  form  comes  about:  a commonplace  tea  trolley  is  presented  in  mid-­‐ transformation  into  a  furry  tea  trolley,  revealing  the process  in  an  almost  cartoon-­‐like  way. The  artwork  bears  testament  to  its  own  time  and provides  the  transparency  we  need  to  understand  the diagram  that  constitutes  its  contemporary  nature.  I  am convinced  this  is  what  you  have  managed  to  do.  That  is why,  Regina,  I  so  admire  your  intervention,  Insolitus, and  your  substantive  language,  and  I  am  grateful  for the  happy  encounter  we  have  had,  putting  new  works alongside  existing  ones,  reinforcing  the  greater meaning  of  your  work  and  the  original  purpose  of  the Breathing  project,  which  is  to  prompt  reflections  about what  is  established,  frozen  by  time  –  precisely  the state  the  house  museum  imposes  on  the  objects  and collection  it  harbors. With  my  warmest  regards, Marcio

The two fires

There is a Jewish parable I like very much that has been guiding my thoughts on aesthetical issues. This parable deals with how the divine scriptures were written and reveals to us they were written with two kinds of fire: a black fire, that drawn the letters we think we are reading, and a white fire, that created the space between the letters, thus allowing us to read them. The parable continues saying we are going through a seven- thousand year cycle in which we know how to read the black fire and that, now, we are approaching a new cycle in which we will learn to read the white fire.

The idea that human reality is conceived by pairs of opposites – inner and outer, full and empty, object and subject, body and spirit, figure and background, presence and absence, light and shade and so many others – offers us a tool to perceive the fabric of a reality we know is not exhaustible in a unidirectional perspective. Merleau-Ponty dissolved the antagonistic logic implicit in such pairs when he made us see that they do not exist in spite of each other, but thanks to each other. The artifice of phenomelogical perception allowed for a softer field of passage and a more generous range of reality apprehension, while the frontier between things were no longer perceived as absolutes – as Heraclitus had already pointed out – but as a flow: exchanging fields of forces and intensities. In the color green, for instance, blue allows space for yellow and vice-versa, depending on the intensity of the shade of green. Both colors are present in green, but they alternate or balance each other in their intensities in order to become another color. Or, as well, they can turn into their opposite pole, in which blue can turn green and green yellow. Each one of the poles of a pair is contained in the other. Like in a Moebius strip, there is continuity between front and back.

Beyond the fact it raises our awareness of the importance of the interdependence of apparently opposite poles, what interests me in this parable is that it introduces the idea that, even though, there is a predominance of a field over the other. Today we are able to read from the perspective of the black fire, but there will be a day when we will learn to read the white fire. What does it mean to learn to read from the perspective of the white fire? What does it mean to make such turn and pass into “the other side”? I believe we are not yet ready to answer such question, that, for me, belongs to the same level of knowing what lies beyond the black holes. We can of course speculate and suppose other possibilities, but, certainly, we will need to have another mental and reality perception structures.

A great deal of my interest for visual arts comes from the fact that from Impressionism to the most recent experiences of contemporary art – so I believe – the main purpose of art has been to inquire into the white fire. Renascence and the general theory of perspective are the visual translation of men’s capacity of reading the black fire. With Impressionism and the systematic demolition of the classical naturalistic representation, a process begun of a displacement of the regard from a centralized stance to a more malleable one (more plastic) in which the visual arts renounced being a faithful reproduction of the outer world. Searching what is true – whose expression was no longer possible with the use of a measurement for appearance precision, but with a measurement of that which is not necessarily apparent – instead of searching verisimilitude as a guarantee of truth. No longer covered by reality, mystery (metaphysics) turned into reality’s transparence. For me, such movement represents a displacement toward the white fire.

Regina Silveira has given a unique contribution to this process. Since she is gifted with an absolutely objective and precise intelligence, instead of destructuralizing classical representation from the outside to the inside (as it has been done throughout the last 150 years of art history and the consequential succession of “isms”), her proposal is to face right at it and deconstruct it from the inside out. In other words, her process was to challenge perspective with its own laws. She took advantage of these laws to demonstrate that in its limits – at the borders of representation –, perspective creates distortions (anamorphosis) that distance it from a faithful reproduction of an outer object. Such strategy demolished the mystery of perspective and transformed it into something apparent: Regina Silveira’s work hurts perspective with the very appearance.

What came into being from this process of implosion? A broken world, filled with vertigos. This is not a metaphor. Throughout the development of her work we can observe that an exaggerated perspective creates a spatial relation where the world seems to fall and break into pieces. Many of her works are radical perspective experiences that show us that in its limit perspective disfigures reality and distorts certainties. Before full of certainties, the world is now presented to us as a mined field where the greatest presence is absence.

Regina, then, seeks to grant shape to this absence through light and shade. These two elements constitute the appearance of the visible, but do not hold material density – the same as perspective lines – but, contrary to them, they are not mental constructs but a direct apprehension of reality as apparition. Vision perceives outer reality not through a play of lines but through a play of light and shade. The artist indicates that we lack the experience – or, better saying, we must to re-experience – this direct relation with the real, in which the world is drawn before our eyes by masses of light and shade. In reality, Regina makes us perceive that they are the structures that allow us to see. This fact frees us from the need to find a truth (aimed by central perspective) and takes us closer to an experience of that which is true. If perspective supplies us with a concept of truth, light and shades allow us to experience the vision of reality as the true throb of life.

The “logos” that emerges from this process is not the fruit of an authoritarian and centralizing reason, but of poetics. And this is the point of departure from which the exhibition LUZ ZUL was constituted. Pieces that allow the public to come into contact with the current phase of the artist – in which she utilizes technological means as a vehicle to convey the same perplexity we experience before the forces of nature and makes us wonder about the mystery of the world – were chosen. Imagine the sensation of a sunset and the moment when we are taken by the power of its presence. The silence, the involvement and the radical experience of displacement from the fragmented structure of time immediatism and the urban order of contemporary scene. This feeling of wonder was meant to be kept. All works chosen for this exhibition were guided by this perception. Working at the junction of art and technology that Regina controls so well with outstanding delicacy and accuracy, we aimed to privilege works that translate the poetic dimension, that remit us to the moment of philosophy’s birth, when such questions throbbed intensely.

The key element of all works in display is light. Each one in its own way.* Lunar is a cosmic ballet where a ball moves in deep space, magnetizing our glance. This work

makes us lose awareness of plane dimension and invite us to dive into the profundity of the cosmos, creating moments of concentration on ourselves. Pulsar is a simple matchbox that creates a witty connection between the most banal daily activity and the wonderment of a star that magically escapes from the little box. Double tricks us, questioning us about the limits between material and immaterial realities and between real and virtual realities. This is the only work that makes use of shade – which is part of Regina’s visual repertoire – and that, in this piece, is meant to connect these two realities of present day’s man. LUZ ZUL interferes in the architecture, bathing the space with a blue light, announcing in the entrance the word ‘luz’ [light], whose inverted projection (‘zul’) can be read inside the building. LUZ ZUL deals with tautology. It refers to that that is because it is. This is the place of conviction and not of the truth. It is the place of art. With this work Regina Silveira metaphorically closes the cycle we mentioned when we referred to the two fires. The word LUZ written with light carries a power that is equal to itself and invites us to expand reality’s appearance as the surface of the profundity of that which is real. With LUZ ZUL both kinds of fires can be understood as the structure of the unity in which one is extensive to the other: the full emptiness.

Marcio Doctors

*All questions about the works of this exhibition, the history and the concept of Regina Silveira’s work can be better answered by the commented interview published in this catalog.

Kommentar

Regina Silveira: Gancho de Rede (Série Eclipses). (2003). Digitally printed backlit.

Andreas Kaminski Friendly to grotesque. Qualities of the Uncanny in the Art of Regina Silveira The uncanny, which itself has been seen as the collision of two irreconcilable im‐ pressions1, has connected two unusual partners: the psychology and skepticism of the 20th century. This implies that science and this way of thinking are elective in the way that they discover doubt, bottomlessness, and restlessness in the highly fa‐ miliar. Despite existing differences between them, what they have in common is that they regard the uncanny as a comparatively uniform phenomenon. It’s just that – scary. This lack of contours may be due to the fact that as the uncanny it seems to elude further determination or that it reveals the abysmal side of attempts to grasp it: »A difference in which everything and nothing differs is uncanny.«2 In the oeuvre of the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira we also encounter collisions in which differences fade away in their collision. Silveira deals again and again in her works with the »uncanniness of the ordinary« (Cavell) as, for example, the peop‐ le walking across the abyss show in Abyssal (see p. 260 in this volume), the public squares and buildings that are walked on by giant insects in Mundus Admirabilis (p. 304), or the parking lots occupied by rockets, insects and helicopters as in Phantas‐ mata. But what distinguishes her works are the manifold forms in which the uncanny appears in everyday life. A first step would therefore be to distinguish be‐ tween the absent, which should be present, and the present, which should be absent, as the philosopher Gordon C.F. Bearn proposes.3 The mirage in Quime‐ ra (p. 10) which shows a light 1 See for example Bruno Gransche’s contribution here in the volume. 2 Stanley Cavell: The Uncanniness of the Ordinary, Chicago/London 1988, p. 101. 3 Gordon C. F. Bearn: »Wittgenstein and the Uncanny«. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76 (1993) 1, p. 29–58. Bearn describes the first as »eerie«, the second as »uncanny«. It should be emphasized that use of normative expressions for characterization of the uncanny. See also Gransche’s contribution in the volume. 291

bulb that radiates shadows plays with this reversal; although it resonates with Be‐ arn’s suggestion, his distinction still swallows up too much of the diversity of uncan‐ ny qualities that we experience in Silveira’s work. Measured against the relative uni‐ formity of the uncanny in psychology and skepticism of the 20th century, Silveira’s works seem to me to open up the experience of different qualities of the uncanny. There are, for example, the cozy dining table and the inviting chairs that have fur (Mutante I); or the tea table that seems to grow a fur along with its porce‐ lain service (Mutante II, p. 18). The chairs and the table are tempting, as they were friendly uncanny. But perhaps the mutati‐ on is to be understood in reverse – and the furry something turns into a table. Would this be less or more strange? In any case, as my thesis will be in the following, Silveira plays with the fact that we believe that we have resolved an uncanny situation – whereby the supposed resolution proves to be a graduation. The play with scales, which is important in Silveira’s work in general, contributes to this in particular. Furthermore, Silveira’s art-historical irony is following this strategy (here it is Meret Oppenheimer’s Breakfast in Fur). The dissolution of historical iro‐ ny is usually accompanied by intellectual satisfaction. In Silveira’s oeuvre, it plun‐ ges us into uncertainty. We believe that we have recognized something uncanny as something trivial or that we have solved the historic allusion – before it happens to us that the trivial or the irony is in itself uncanny. A multilayered example of this is offered by Paradoxo do Santo (p. 138). It presents us with something grotesquely un‐ canny. The installation shows the intimidating silhouette of a he‐ roic knight, who seems to be projected by a small, seemingly harmless wooden figure. It seems strange that this poorly appearing rider is the origin of that disturbing knight. »Grotes‐ que,« as Foucault points out, is »the fact that, by virtue of their status, a discourse or an individual can have effects 292

of power that their intrinsic qualities should disqualify them from having.«4 The he‐ roic horseman is grotesque in that sense. However, this work by Silvei‐ ra establishes manifold historical references. On the one hand, the heroic shadow cites a monument to the Duke of Caxias that stands in São Paulo. He is considered the greatest Brazilian military leader. On the other hand, the small horseman figure in the fo‐ reground alludes to the Apostle James the Great, whose import‐ ance in the Spanish military grew steadily over the centuries. According to legend, he ap‐ peared on a white horse in the war against the Moors and led the Christians to victory, which is why the Spanish battle cry la‐ ter was: »¡Santiago, y cierra, Es‐ paña!« The military significance of James and this battle cry are not only discussed in Don Qui‐ xote of Cervantes, but Silveira’s installation seems to show us Don Quixote’s image of himself and how others perceived him. The grotesqueness of O Paradoxo do Santo, however, does not consist in simply showing us an erro‐ neous error. It is rather grotesque that the military power effect is real despite all this. Snake (p. 178, 202), on the other hand, demonstrates the uncanny of the resolute. From a distance, the graphic appears on the wall like a snake. However, as the view‐ er approaches it, he realizes that it is the tracks of a motorcyclist who has fiercely resolutely gone into his self-created labyrinth. Again, the different scales play a de‐ cisive role for the collision that happens to us: It is again the miniature, namely the toy motorcyclist (as above the little poor James), that marks the turning point at which the terrible snake tilts into uncanny determination. 4 Michel Foucault: Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France (1974–1975), London, New York 2003, p. 11. 293

Silveira’s works offer us even more experiences with figures of the uncanny. Howe‐ ver, it always appears to her in a certain quality, whereby it remains a movement. A fright turns into something uncanny just when we think we have dissolved it. The same may apply to systems whose apparent autonomy we experience as uncannily ›autonomous‹. If there are malfunctions, this autonomy seems to collapse like a house of cards. Until we realize they are showing an autonomous eeriness in the slip. The yearbook contains further works by Regina Silveira, whose movements we invite the readers of the yearbook to follow. 294

FICTION SCIENCE At the very outset, we must make it clear that we are not talking about science fiction, but precisely the opposite. Science fiction is a freely constructed tale by a writer or filmmaker, seeking to imagine futuristic utopian scenes, without the need for any scientific basis. On the other hand, fiction science is an absolutely rigorous work, strictly based on logical or mathematical models, but which, instead of seeking some supposed truth about the world, puts itself at the service of delirium, makes the impossible emerge and, above all, parodies science itself. We think about something like Cantatrix sopranica L. (1991), by French writer Georges Perec, a collection of extremely rigorous “scientific” articles, with an abstract, key words, graphs, mathematical equations and everything, but which concerns absurd or hilarious themes, such as a ballistic study analyzing the trajectory of a tomato from a given point in the audience to the left side of a soprano’s face, or a statistical survey about the concentration of black flies (Coscinoscera) on a desert island, cubic meter by cubic meter, during all the days of the year. Having worked nearly his entire life as a university librarian, Perec became well-versed in the formalisms, conventions, sterility and even the deception of a good part of scientific texts, deciding to create something like a fake science, a tragicomic science as rigorous as it is absurd, as theoretically well-founded as it is deliriously gratuitous. Like Lewis Carroll, a mathematician who adored inexplicable paradoxes and brought logic to the limits of utter unreason. There is something of fiction science in the work of artist Regina Silveira, and this is perhaps a way of perceiving a thoroughgoing coherence extending through her oeuvre. First of all, it is necessary to recognize that this entire oeuvre is extremely informed – in the sense that it evinces a far-ranging knowledge about the history of art and its key figures, perhaps an outcome of the artist’s background as an art professor – and that it furthermore has a basis in mathematics, physical and biological sciences, philosophy, literature, architecture, cultural theory, political and social sciences, etc. Silveira can be characterized as an artist of uncompromising rigor; everything she does is studied, researched, designed, referenced in history, millimetrically calculated, tested in scale models and so on. It is a show of its own to see her working with her assistants and collaborators. Her projections of shadows, the distortions of images, the dizzying perspectives that give us the impression that we are falling into an abyss, the effects of tridimensionality and monumentality are all rigorously based in geometry, in optics, and above all in Renaissance perspective and its anamorphic distortions. The classic book by Jurgis Baltrusaitis Anamorphic Art figures prominently in her working library, as though it were a constant reference. But in Silveira’s work all of this is used to produce hallucinations, nightmares, visual paradoxes and every sort of aberration that can challenge reason and reality. In Quimera [Chimera] (2003), a switched-on light bulb emits a black shadow instead of light. Similarly, Solombra [Sunshadow] (1990) shows a large window exposed to the sunlight which, paradoxically, projects a black shadow into the

building’s interior. Unflaggingly questioning perspective and its illusionist models, the artist works with inexistent objects and beings, constructs absurd and frightening bestiaries, simulates false labyrinths or abysses in dizzying “bird’s-eye views.” It is as though all the wisdom accumulated by humanity could be used to produce insanity: a geometry of panic.

We see the case of Teorema da Gaveta [The Drawer Theorem] (2002), a work realized for the Institute of Mathematics and Computation of the Universidade de São Paulo, in São Carlos. The title involves something of a parody, especially considering that the work is on the wall of a mathematics school, but actually refers to a theorem that was demonstrated by Prof. Achille Bassi, the school’s founder, and which, according to statements by students, required such a long demonstration that it did not fit on the blackboard, or even on the desk, so the professor concluded his proof by opening the drawer and writing it there. In this panel, we have a complex problem of projective geometry that consists in fractionating the image into various planes, but in such a way that the eye can reconstitute the image’s unity, provided that it (the eye) is positioned at a precise point in space. In this specific case, the shadow of a drawer is projected simultaneously on the frontal surface, on the ground and on the side wall of the building. It can only be seen entirely and in the same plane when the observer stands at a single, specific point, next to a tree. Once he/she finds the correct vantage point, the observer can see the parts of the drawer’s shadow come together. From any other point, the figure is enigmatic, configuring an aberrant and impossible geometry. The drawer that projects the shadow is a replica of the real drawer where Prof. Bassi finished the demonstration of his theorem.

A central logical and philosophical question in Regina Silveira’s work is that of the indexical sign. This question was dealt with in a systematic way by North American philosopher and logician Charles Peirce, especially in his writings on semiotics. The indexical sign is the mark or trace that something or someone leaves when passing, that is, it is an image that refers to its object by a physical connection, unlike the iconic sign, which is an image imagined by a painter, or the symbol, which is an image resulting from a collective convention (like a traffic sign). Typical examples of indexical signs are the tracks left on the ground by an animal, the fingerprints used by police, and the old technique of funeral masks. The shadow can also be considered an indexical sign, as long as we are not seeing the being or object that is producing it. For Peirce, the photograph can also be considered an indexical sign, since it registers the mark or trace of something that posed for the camera at the moment the photo was taken. But what marks the indexical sign, paradoxically, is the absence of the object to which the image refers. The animal track only exists after the animal is gone, since when it is standing on it, the track has not yet formed. Therefore, the indexical sign is a proof that the thing existed, but it is a proof by absence. Silveira knows very well how to use the characteristic of absence

involved in the indexical sign. In In Absentia: MD (1983), we have various objects used by Marcel Duchamp in his sculptures, but they are present only in the form of shadows. Actually, they are ghosts of sculptures. The trace or indexical sign always poses a question of time and ephemerality. It is always something from the past, something that was there, but which is there no more. This is how many thinkers (Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, André Bazin) have defined photography: as the trace of something that has gone away, the sign of death.

A large part of Regina Silveira’s oeuvre is constituted by tracks, marks, shadows, indexical signs of every sort, but these signs are in impossible places, such as walls and ceilings. Tropel [Pell-Mell] (1998) and Tropel (Invertido) [Pell-Mell (Reversed)] (2009) are works that use one of the artist’s favorite techniques: adhesive vinyl based on patterns generated in the computer and printed or cut using a plotter. In both these interventions in public buildings, she applied a large quantity of cut vinyl, first on the building of the Bienal de São Paulo and later on Koege Art Museum (Denmark). These consisted of oversized animal tracks, arranged in such a way that the pattern expands dramatically toward the ceiling. It is as though a band of animals of different species, in panic or confusion, had climbed the walls of the building, leaving their black tracks there (tropel is the name given to the noise of many hooves or paws of running animals, as in the phrase “the tropel of the horses”). In both cases, the animals seem to be fleeing in panic from some tragedy. The exaggeratedly enlarged perspective and the gigantism of the tracks lend incredible dramaticity to the façades of the buildings, in such a way that it is impossible to remain indifferent to these images. In Derrapando [Skidding] (2004), Silveira decorated the walls of the Centro Cultural España, in Montevideo, with tire tracks, as though the traffic of the city had contaminated the building and projected the urban streets onto it (there are other versions made for the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and for the Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan). But mammals and cars do not go up walls or move upside down along ceilings. Thus the absurdity of these images and their fictional character.

A variation on this theme of indexical signs is the insects represented only by their black silhouettes. These works have everything to do with shadow plays and Chinese shadows, an age-old tradition in the history of human culture. In Mundus Admirabilis (2007), for example, she “tattooed” the cubic glass building of the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil de Brasília with terrifying silhouettes of these giant insects. Silveira often works on an architectural, or even urban scale. She transforms insipid buildings into oneiric mirages, with a frightening gigantism, in terms of their extension, amplitude and importance. But even in her more minimalist works, the perversion is not far away. A common feature in Silveira’s work is fine porcelain ware full of silhouettes of insects, as though infected by them. Works such as these

realize the essence of what we call the sublime: they are, at one and the same time, incredibly beautiful and apocalyptically frightening.

If we are talking about fiction science, an indispensable variant is applied science, that is, technology. As a worldwide phenomenon in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of exhibitions, festivals, meetings, museums and cultural centers dedicated exclusively to experiments that deal with the point of intersection between art, science and technology, a field that some have denominated technological poetics. It is difficult to resist the temptation to look at Regina Silveira’s very large-scale artistic work through this lens and to analyze the particular trend she has adopted to confront the challenge posed by this complex intersection. Nevertheless, contrary to what many might suppose, in the case of Regina Silveira, this is not about a recent engagement in a field that suddenly started to become hegemonic in the art world during the 21st century. Ever since the 1970s and ’80s, alongside her work in printmaking, silkscreen and drawing, Regina Silveira has also been dedicating herself to experiments with a wide range of media and technologies, such as photography, microfilm, electronic panels, video, video text and, a little later (1991), the computer. She was, therefore, already active in this area when the technological poetics still had a marginal or nearly underground character in the overall field of contemporary art. In 1982, she organized and participated in the first show of microfilm art, Artemicro, at the Museu da Imagem e do Som de São Paulo. Her extremely original work at that exhibition already anticipated, more than 20 years avant la lettre, all of the current discussion about database art, collectionism and the registry of information, as is also the case with the pioneering The file room (1994), by Muntadas.

Silveira was also one of the pioneers of video art in Brazil: her first three finished videographic works date to 1977, but she had already been experimenting with this technology since 1974. With technological resources of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC) – at that time directed by Walter Zanini, from the Centro de Estudos e Artes Visuais (Aster), which she herself had created together with other artists – and of the Cockpit studio, created by artist Roberto Sandoval, all in São Paulo, she realized a consistent body of videographic works, characterized by extreme economy of media, by hyperminimalism, and a precise conceptual support. In Campo [Field] (1977), for example, she traces imaginary geometric figures with her own finger, which moves throughout the camera’s field of view, without ever going outside it, constructing quadrilaterals and transversal lines, but all virtually, since her finger does not leave any mark along the paths it traces. A good part of Silveira’s work, as we have seen, is constituted by absent objects, with only their mark or shadow remaining. Here, it is the image itself which is absent. The screen is white and empty the whole time, and the viewer must imagine the drawing that the finger would be creating if

it were leaving some trace on the screen. Artifício [Artifice] (1977) is another experiment in the erasing of the image. The video shows only the word “artifício” written on the screen. But this word is written on transparent strips. A hand repeatedly enters the field and pulls away these strips one by one, so that the word disappears from the screen and only an empty field is left. A third experiment in erasure is Objetoculto [Hidden Object] (1977): a black mask hides nearly the entire image, leaving only a small central gap, through which the viewer can guess the presence of a nearly invisible face. This same technique was to be used systematically by German video artist Marcel Odenbach, many years later. At the height of the military dictatorship and during the sway of federal censorship, Silveira also made A Arte de Desenhar [The Art of Drawing] (1981), a repertoire of offenses and obscenities represented by way of manual gestures of aggression well known to the Brazilian public. In Morfas [Morphs] (1981), everyday kitchen or bathroom objects, captured in big close-up or traveling shots, are transformed into aberrant creatures, like monsters pulled from some sordid bestiary.

The computer has always been present in the artist’s life, ever since her semidigital and semicyberspatial debut with video text, but in general she uses the computer as one more tool in her work, rather than as a presentation medium. Even so, Silveira has ventured into telematic networks and artificial reality in some circumstances. A good example is Descendo a Escada [Descending the Stairs] (2002), a work realized for an event of art and technology in São Paulo, called Emoção Art.ficial [Art.ficial Emotion]. The theme of the labyrinthine and dizzying stairway, constructed through distortions in perspective, suggesting abysses beneath the floor, has been a constant in the artist’s work. This theme of stairs going down to nowhere was already present, for example, in Escada Inexplicável [Inexplicable Staircase] (1999) as well as in The Other Staircases (2003), in which Silveira “continues” the stairway of the New York Public Library by means of a fake, absurd and scary set of stairs, à la Escher or Piranesi. In the digital version, the staircase is interactive, and turns as the visitor ventures in the direction of the dark space below. What was already dizzying here becomes acrophobic (from acrophobia, the fear of heights). This spiraling staircase has four hair-raising “landings” and, as though this were not enough, a soundtrack simulates the “footsteps” of absent walkers lost in the labyrinth.

Rosalind Krauss, in her book Art in the age of the post-medium condition (2000), observes that many contemporary artists (but she is referring mainly to Marcel Broodthaers) no longer define themselves by specific media or artistic fields, that is, they are no longer simply visual artists, photographers, filmmakers or video artists. Rather, they work with concepts or projects that involve all the specialties, in such a way that the media used vary in accordance with the demands of each project and are always multiples or associated with each other. This is what Krauss calls the “post-medium condition”: the works are no longer media specific –

they are larger than the media, they cross through them and surpass them. In some cases, they create their own media and supports, as in some works by Regina Silveira, which have used the city of São Paulo itself as the “screen” – with a projector mounted on a truck, it is possible to “tattoo” the city with enigmatic images in movement. This is the case with Super-herói (Night and Day) [Superhero Night and Day] (1997), which consists of the projection of a Superman flying over the city; Transit (2001), a projection of flies on the buildings, as though the city were contaminated by a plague; and UFO (2006), which simulates the descent of a flying saucer.

In all these examples, we have the performance of an artist who practices a strange form of science, closer to alchemy than chemistry, with more affinity to myths than to history, more ideographic than ideological, halfway between astronomy and astrology. Fiction science.

Arlindo Machado In Regina Silveira, Editora Charta, Milano/New York, 2011

shadow line And they were just a single large shadow And they were just a single large shadow And they were just a single large shadow… José Asunción Silva, Nocturno III (1889)

A search in a dictionary always surprises: the definitions of words that we think we know include much more than the explanation of their conventional meaning and propose other unexpected meanings while making us see the multiple metaphorical displacements of the words into other usage, whose connection to the original term we were not aware of. And the dictionary does this by sending us always to other words, usually similar but sometimes quite different. The definition of the word always has traces of what came before it; each word is the shadow of many others. || This exhibition proposes a particular journey into the work of the very prolific artist Regina Silveira. Despite what the title, Shadow Line, might suggest, this trip is neither chronological nor linear, but rather labyrinthine. The exhibition is structured like a labyrinth whose purpose is ambiguous: it leads but also confuses; there is no single way out, but rather many possible ones; and the main motivation when one enters it is not to seek how to get out but, rather, to experience the adventure of going through it. It is a puzzle that needs to be solved, a game of discoveries. || Linha de sombra [Shadow line] proposes a number of ways of understanding the wide and complex concept of the shadow, whose most common definition is that of partial absence of light caused by an illuminated body. Nevertheless, perhaps few words as shadow contain meanings that are so diverse, literal or figuratively speaking: attenuated clarity; sign or marking; ghost or phantom; screen, trace or vestige; dream or apparition; vague idea or a notion that subtly insinuates something; secret, mystery. The exhibition also is a dictionary, in the sense that it offers clues and at the same time confuses the reader. Like a dictionary, that tries to define a concept but at the same time opens it up to other possible interpretations, this exhibition intends to show different lines of action in Regina’s oeuvre: the use of projection systems and perspective representation; the interest in anamorphosis, a method of geometric deformation that produces enigmatic and strange images; the extension of the concept of shadow to that of vestige, showing that a trace is an index, determined by the real relationship that it maintains with the object that generates it – but bringing this indexical relationship always to its limit; the ironic treatment of the subjects, withdrawing the referents in order to break the relationship between an object and its shadow and inviting the spectator to decipher what is suggested in the presence of that ghost in the space. || In “Regina Silveira: the revelation of the shadow,” the article that Teixeira Coelho wrote to present the Enigmas exhibition in 1981 – where shadows appeared for the first time in a literal manner in the artist’s work – the author used the word ideographs (a neologism analogous to ideograms) to describe the works: the sum or juxtaposition of two or more signs, whose meaning is not clearly defined nor intends to be: “collisions of signs of an unsuspected proximity.” Coelho argues that what Regina’s work wanted to make evident is the matter itself of the artistic act, a result of the confluence of form and content, but situated beyond a simple symbolic juxtaposition between these two elements. “It is not the content that is in play, there is no interest in an eventual describable message in conventional logical terms; nor is there interest in exterior form. The proposal is to evidence the matter of the poetic act: the moment of direct contact with something that is merely virtual: the poetic discovery, now, of a possibility. This something is not here, but its presence is palpable: it is a game of discovery.” Regina’s works behave like an enigma: they have multiple meanings so they evidence that there is never a final and definitive meaning, or that maybe there is no meaning at all, one that we might someday understand. || In her first works, Regina overlays shadows on other images (a fork on top of a telephone, a saw on a briefcase), creating signs – ideographs – that are paradoxical and undecipherable. Later, she uses architecture itself as a support of the sign (projecting the shadow of absent objects on the walls of the museum, leaving traces of broken glass on the floor of the Crystal Palace), removing its neutral character and imbuing it with a new, significant force. A third element in

this game is the role of the viewer. By generating multiple perspectives and several vanishing points, the artist is able to destabilize privileged points of view, inviting the spectator to enter the work and introducing a temporal dimension into the experience, in which perception varies depending upon the viewer’s position with respect to the image. There is always tension in Regina’s work, a contrast between apparently incongruous elements. In it coincides a rational desire to understand reality through classical systems of representation, and a surrealist impulse, leading us to the genealogical line that connects her through her master teacher Iberê Camargo to Giorgio De Chirico, who for his part was the mentor of the Porto Alegre painter. Maneirist grids, surreal paradoxes, conceptual strategies and poetic reflections about technology are conjugated together into ambiguous, seductive and intriguing works of art, which never cease to surprise. || We cite Coelho again: “The function of the shadow: to reveal, to deeply show what there is to see (actually, the shadow reveals and then re-veils, conceals again...)”. The Surrealist artist Hans Arp, De Chirico’s contemporary, affirmed that if a tri-dimensional object projects a two dimensional shadow, we should be capable of finding that object in four dimensions, of which we are the shadow. Regina Silveira’s games with signs may be thought of as an attempt to understand this multidimensional object, in which we recognize ourselves as a shadow.

Alejandro Martín and José Roca Bogotá/Philadelphia, 2009 In Linha de Sombra:Regina Silveira, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 12 de outubro de 2009 a 13 de janeiro de 2010

1 ARS CRITICA (or Regina Silveira’s “plagues revisited” )

Adolfo Montejo Navas

Latin plaga -ae, blow, wound, affliction, harm, lesion. Historically 14th century plagues. Synonyms catastrophe and curse. (adapted from the Brazilian Portuguese dictionary edited by A. Houaiss)

Rather than ciphering a collective evil, a plague substantively points to disequilibrium.1 Manuel Antônio de Castro

Although the genealogy of plagues leads directly to Ancient Egypt and a historic imaginary with cultural intersections that include biblical narratives fueled by the literary metaphors of ancient Egyptian legends, their own allegorical descent goes beyond this diachronism and its apparent reluctance to belong to our own period, as if it were the semantics of another age far removed from our own more or less civilized contemporaneity. Wound, affliction, imprecation, curse, overwhelming collective misfortune, calamity, scourge, a great quantity of inopportune or harmful things; or in the figurative sense, something that causes great evils, that prejudices peace and harmony. Such are the charged definitions dictionaries usually provide, as if they related to a single trip into the past, except for animals or insects taken from their ecosystem and becoming pests or plagues. In other words, dangers whose extent is recognized. But in the case of calamities caused by natural events - the other legacy variant - they are always treated as events, or even as spectacles in their very misfortune, traumatic regressions to the “real” but corresponding to isolated circumstances, and never for teleological causes of course.

1 "This is extensively studied by ecology and has many facets, but relates particular to breaking the equilibrium of an ecosystem. A plague is not done away with by eliminating the causative element or agent. It must be redirected to its place in the life-chain and reinserted in productive tension, since eliminating it would affect - sometimes with irreversible and incalculable losses - an entire tautly integrated system of differences. Therefore, the point is to maintain an identity as tension for differences.” (trans.) In “As três pragas do século XXI”, Revista Confraria do Vento, Rio de Janeiro, 2007, p.17.

2 In any event, there is a whole compendium of evils is unveiled by the word plague. It has its own resonances, reverberations that affect us, though perhaps not so immediately or closely. Indeed, all the imagistic background around these biblical abysses turns on similar iconography, an archaic visual repertoire already named and crystallized largely from a religious angle, and ultimately derived from a narrow list known as God sending the "ten plagues against Egypt" as part of historical mythology.2 However it is the allegorical descent that is of real weight, and another wider ranging "real” that has broader sites of action than one might think, and much closer to us. Just as the categories of “first world” and “third world” tend to become impaired, the historical rancor of the plagues itself may become obsolete, in light of some of our more everyday ecumenical problems. In this respect, it can hardly be denied that some of our most validated paradigms are plagues in dispute or covert. This is the case of the IMF or AIDS. Or the absolute rule of advertising in the visuality of our period, or the imposed reign of economics as the exclusive ideology of history or life itself. Perhaps our mere survival bereft of historical meaning or mission is just another inoculated plague, such as the pursuit of subjective happiness at any price? May not global warming and its foretold disasters, or fundamentalisms of all sorts, be ciphered as plagues? Is not the constant inflation of information, rumors, and truths in a state of fallaciousness competing in the same universal category?3 A minimum and more exhaustive contemporary inventory would be frightening in its diversity, richness and classifications. Unlike the legendary instances, our contemporary plagues are spreading and interchanging and metamorphosing in the image and likeness of the world we live in; they are more porous and permeable, and less defined as such. Being much more correlated and interdependent, they are part of our apocalyptic and integrated everyday existence. Thus their presence is more subtle and

2 “Reality: the plagues in the Bible are ordinary events described in the typical Egyptian literary metaphors" (Myth 75), Gary Greenberg, 100 Mitos de la Biblia, Ed. Océano Âmbar, Barcelona, 2002, p. 241.

3 Antonio Manuel de Castro recognizes these three plagues as new century ills: information / knowledge, speech, and truth, in all cases as manifestations against poiesis, "the possibility of onto-poetic fulfillment " of the human being, in As três pragas do século XXI, op. cit., p. 17/20.

3 more incorporated, as internalized violence would be.4 Hence, Silveira's “plagues revisited” proposal is situated not merely in the ambit of fabulation, nor is it so decontextualized. Its analogical roots are metaphorical and cross any historical redoubt to be projected as part of our lives today smitten by violence, environmental deterioration, systemic corruption, contamination of everyday life and other such plagues. The conceptual and visual feedback posed and constructed by Silviera goes beyond our historical coordinates, since it enables new critical content - a contemporary ars critica not often found on the art scene, in which even the use of titles in Latin does not fail to augment the intra-historical condition of this exhibition-situation, of its gravitational verve. Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas poses an irony of shuttling back and forth, a nomination or naming as poignant as it is patent (in a choice both significant and timely, that reconnects to the field of culture as a semantic force). It becomes the title of a heritage, now contemporary, that is guided by awe, by synonyms of wonder, since it is almost an invitation to a "cabinet of curiosities" that barely conceals its venom in possible innocence. Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas acts as a rare aesthetic treatise, whose visual negativity - its dark side of shadow, darkness, graveness, threats5– synchronizes with the critical concern of a poetics that is often political in several of its signs and configurations [see the 1980s series Dilatáveis, or installations such as Enigma do Duque (project) 1995, O Paradoxo do Santo, 1994, To Be Continued (Latin American Puzzle) 1998, among many others], and also with this reflective plunging into the nature of image to reveal its other side, its underlying adjacencies, directed toward a different, more profound and graver informative and cognitive perplexity. A different spatial-sensory experience. The new plagues are put together as fables - image fables - and this is because Silveira's work has always featured analysis of representation as a

4 Symptomatic in this aspect is José Saramago's Ensaio sobre a Cegueira [Essay on Blindness], Editorial Caminho, Lisbon, 1995, and its renewed relevance in the 2008 Fernando Meirelles film based on the same work. 5 It is not hard to imagine Iberê Camargo, Silveira's professor in her Porto Alegre period, showing interest in the ethical density of this exhibition, and such a tense association between imagetic background and constructivist rigor.

4 whole to be dismantled, paying attention to the hidden imagetic iceberg, exposed through constantly critical visual simulacra, in a humanistic deconstruction of inherited visual substrates and genealogies. Like a fictional situation that aspired to a different narrative and interpretation. For a long time, the cartography of shadows was predominant, its analysis and projection in distorted perspectives produced an entire metalinguistic discourse on the object of art, which affected its visual and cultural roots. In this case, her most recent works make this fabled condition even more explicit through the allegorical power posed, and through their major referential substrate as point of departure.6 Although fable usually contains a moral, it may be paradoxical in as far as it operates through contrast, through displacing figures, and through the partly disguised contents of its story. This may relate to the allegorical function recovered by contemporary art, particular after the seminal Craig-Owens piece7, which involves the high visual gravitas ingrained in art history itself (something Silveira always insists on highlighting throughout her work8). Indeed, the interventions, translations, and metamorphoses caused by plagues - in the territory of nature or in our humanity - are highly visual transformations and closely attuned with Silveira's operations and strategies shunning discursive limits and aesthetic reification. Hence the exhibition being emphatic, dense and architected on the basis of its diversity and recognition, or its relevance and critical power as a great allegory that reconnects all its pieces in an open constellation of meanings. For all these reasons, Silveira's encounter with the imaginary of plagues seemed predestined. Silveira's “plagues revisited” are also attuned with the extraordinary side of the world they represent, with the strange nature they signify: in every case a disruption of something, change of state, metamorphosis, a field of deformation and divertions that her new works are able to interpret and

6 The artistic practice of Liliana Porter, Nelson Leirner or Anna Bella Geiger, for example, includes allegorical contributions in different degrees. 7 “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, October 12 -13 (New York, spring and summer, 1980). 8 "All my work refers to the history of art, past and recent. But this is done through concepts, never by direct citation," Regina Silveira, 1996, (interview), in “Pedagogia do traço”, in Cartografias da sombra, organized by Angélica de Moraes, Ed. Edusp, São Paulo, p.15.

5 take beyond the millennial repertoire. In plagues, in addition to a radical visual change in the state of things, we see there is always devastating multiplication, disguise or camouflage, contamination of elements. Curiously, a scholar such as Annick de Souzenelle notes that "in the Hebrew text, the nine trials were not called 'plagues' 'but 'signs, wonders, proof of divine power".9 Thus the use of the term “interventions” (divine ones in this case) for plagues is not unfounded. Perhaps Silveira’s set of studies explaining eruption poses an aesthetic statement related to this exhibition. This the case of Gone Wild, 1996, Intro (Re: Fresh Widow, RS), 1997, Irruption, 2005, Irruption Series (Saga), 2006, Tropel, 1998 or Transit, 2001. This would already suffice for a minimum genealogy of her artistic trajectory illustrating this aspect. Moreover, her revisited plagues are part of a compendium of her work that goes beyond the present contents. Their specific and scaled appearance - and the consequent surprise - is not just a recent development, since this has been insinuated for a long time. To see their visual etymology, one may go to the paradigmatic works that preceded this collection. Although in passing, one cannot but note the long inventory connecting them to other works that are almost advances or glimpses or pre-plague works: Nightmare, 2000, De Repente, 2000, Moscaglia, 1995, Wild Book, 1997, Inside/Out, 1996, Tropel, 1998-2007, Mundus Admirabilis, 2007 (the latter at Jardim do Poder, in Brasília, a seat of government, as a metaphor for long-range criticism). There are not only visually recognizable links of this critical angle, but also augur a key role for the presence of animals (the Brazil Today series of 1977, Corredores para Abutres 1982), so a veritable bestiary could be composed from Silveira's opus, as well as works hosting some level of threat. The Dilatáveis series from the 80s may be seen as emblematic, as are in addition to the works already mentioned, the series In Absentia – Masterpieces10, from the 1980s, or Quimera, 2003-2005, or to move onto forms that are more markedly geometric or architectonic, Solombra, 1990, Todas las Noches (project),

9 El Egipto interior o las diez plagas del alma, Ed. Kier, Buenos Aires, 1999, p. 165. 10 In particular, Meret Openheim and Man Ray, who pose a more ambiguous and threatening objectuality.

6 1999, and Lumen, 2003. In this respect, the polarity of the works in Silveira's history ought to be brought out: on the one hand an opus fed by this critical bias, on the other the presence of a more poetic essence - although both are always speculative. This balance is due to belonging to a single axis of the sublime (which deals alternately with a an awe-ful or fearful sublime, and then a more poetic one) but also by operating an equilibrium in the monopolizing excess of each side, perhaps to contradict any nearby border, or with the escapism of the ethereal, or with aesthetic functionalism, two formal aesthetic and semantic reductionisms that are always avoided. Despite the fact that new plagues may be partly related to those recognized as the ten plagues of Egypt (a sacred heritage that did not seek to disguise, in addition to drama and moral, a certain inner emancipation, in this case of the Jewish people in the land of the Pharaohs, at the time of Ramesses the Great (II), and after 430 years of captivity), here there is no correlation mediated between the historical imaginary of plagues and Silveira's assembled visuality. Far from mimesis and remakes, or from any ideological flash-back, correspondences are never denotative, since they are shifted to our ambit, to a different perceptive and visual function. However, as lateral information, some plagues are identified or rather connected with Silveira's new works: Infernus with plague number 1: water turned to blood; Corruptio with plague number 2: rain of toads or frogs; Fabula with plague number 3: parasites attacking people and cattle; Mundus Admirabilis and Rerum Naturae with plague number 4: invasion of insects, and plague number 8: invasion of locusts; Per Capita with plague number 7: hailstorm; Macula with plague number 10: the death of firstborn children and firstlings. In any event, the whole combines to express the idea of collective plague, which contaminates the entire space of the exhibiting gallery. Indeed, the sensory meaning of the physical invasion, the rain of images, is the determining factor on which the works are based in their reverberation and resonance. In particular their omnipresent bestiary and disproportionate and strong visuality. In the overall poetics of each work is a pointer to an aesthetic semantics, that connects worlds (ancient and modern) in a problematization

7 of the "real" and historical appearances. Silveira's aesthetic proposal has hints of plagues associated with our own period, such as corruption, usury, violence and militarization. Moreover at the principal core of these concerns one must recognize an humanist aspect that seeks to provide critical images, an ars magna of the other side of the image, the darker side. It is not secondary that at the time all metaphors for plagues were inscribed in the realm of nature, in malevolent changes affecting the earth ( vegetation, or its fruits), or animals, the climate or the human body, in clear correspondence with the rural world and agricultural economy of the period, so too in Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas, metropolitan latency is heard, although the number of animals appearing is decisive, combined with other urban signs (sound-images of firefights, helicopters, missiles or objects from our everyday life). There is the highlighted presence of several multimedia works: Per Capita, a score with various firearms - Wilson Sukorski's acoustic contribution to the piece, becomes a two-minute shower of hail bullets, and there is a game of light-sound essential to our understanding of the piece. The cone - almost a cannon - protruding from the wall also features a flashing light synchronized with the shots, in a small fissure. And remember here too that stray bullets are a real plague in some Brazilian cities in permanent conflict, as is dengue fever. In Fabula, a large half-egg with the distorted shadow of a mosquito, incorporates the noise of helicopters combined with the hum of insects, alluding to the plague of parasites. In the video animation Infernus we can "see" how the sound of blood dropping through a light breeze flowing underneath in a porous sensory synergy between our eye, the ear, the drop and the wind. The work is almost tautological in its visuality, given the correspondence of the movement of the drop of blood and our accomplice-view.11. If Rerum Naturae is shown as an impossible last supper (with a certain surreal echo), this is because it associates everyday existence of food with the strange circumstances represented, the plague of insects on dishes and tables. The installation at the entrance, Mundus Admirabilis, opens onto the

11 On the same visual frequency are the previous works Observatório (2005) and Mirante (2006), although their aims are diametrically opposite.

8 spatial void of the gallery for a visit that may be frightening. Both the sinks of Mea Culpa and the urinal of In Memoriam, like the plate covered with Per Diem's handprints, while reflecting on impossible innocence, also show an undisguised echo of Duchamp. The shadows in some plagues -and Silveira has has worked on how so many shadows to reach this point! -appear two more works (besides the above noted Fabula), with a projection that is also threatening, though not making an explicit connection with plague number 9: the coming of darkness. Bestiarium, like Pandora's box that projected animals from East and West entangled (being peaceful and belligerent, respectively), is a work that combines various of various Silveira's strategies with the image of animals in perspective, coming from stone, coming out of a virtual distorted box but with real physical features. This is another borderline work showing combination of resources and a new meta-language, as do Per Capita or Fabula. As the true genesis of this collection, Bestiarium opens (In Limine was a previous title), and Post Scriptum (Armageddon was mulled as title) may close this narrative exhibition, with its Templar's sword cleaving the wall, a hybrid work, descendant of the Dilatáveis series, whose gigantic shadow on a missile is a projection of all weapons and periods, almost a perpetual engine of war. Both works may work as symbolic entry and exit from this constellation of plagues: being in turn, visual genesis and final confrontation (or epitaph), since there is no sequence to the exhibition.

There are three issues to finalize this critical approach that are inherent in Silveira's poetics, but revive her plagues. The first has to do with the real, with the dimensions of this ambiguous concept, the inclusion of appearance as an inevitable component, the second with the strategy of camouflage, its function of masking and play with visibility / invisibility, and the third with the vocation of criticism, with a certain ethical and aesthetic attitude. In the first case, the works, like fissures, demarcate boundaries between real and reality, on the sharp weakness in which we always move between these two extremes, since the real is neither nature nor culture - it would be an intermediate dimension - and is therefore constantly in a state of

9 negotiation (the most valuable contemporary art has plunged into this range with a power of ontological effects), and symbolization. According to Slavoj Zizek, "reality needs appearance, reality itself is not-whole". In this position not at all absolutist, "the Real persists in so much as failure or inconsistency of reality that must be filled. Appearance is not secondary, or rather, it emerges through the space of that which is missing in reality"12. This view, which argues that reality is not enough, and that the Real opens a fissure in reality, is in attuned to the trajectory of Regina Silveira, and in particular with this exhibition, since it explains how the spectral and phantasmagoric side is part of the "real". Moreover, this is also the case of distortion, also constituent, as if it were an inevitable part of our Nietzschean heritage (interpretation / distortion). Here, if the plagues represent a true deviation from the laws of nature, her free rereading mobilizes all this problematic of the nature of Real-Reality, and fuels the value of the interventions and new perspectives. Thus, Silveira's plagues are like breakaways from uniform reality, radicalism of the real that feeds this "more real than reality" that instates art..

The second aspect relates to camouflage, and is particulalry attuned to the spirit of a period in which financial capitalism is called "fiction" (Vicente Verdú), and the universe of information, commercial advertising, politics, economics disguises its real data. An example of this is that for decades the 1968 slogan of “imagination to power” has been appropriated by the technocrats to be used instrumentally in tactics of simulation, deception, etc. However, camouflage, as "sophisticated strategy of invisibility"13, may harbor a subversive character in bringing out mechanisms and substrates, precisely due to its power to reveal depths and superficial intentions. Faced with the systematic degradation of the citizen, "current art has articulated as one of its customary practices a dismantling of the mechanisms producing the social image or the image of reality, to analyze them and so enable us to see the social construction of our period more clearly. For some, this is most certainly

12 Slavoj Zizek, Arriesgar lo imposible – Conversaciones com Glyn Daly, Ed. Trotta, Madrid, 2006, pp. 92 – 93. 13 Maite Méndez Baiges, Camuflaje, Ed. Siruela, Madrid, 2007, p.100.

10 a means of cultural resistance and disobedience, or, in any case, a more lucid, and thus more critical way of being in the world".14 In the case of Silveira's plagues, camouflage functions through the high level of contamination of visual signs, the formation of graphic, objectual, virtual or projected stains, which distort the literalness or linearity of mythical predictions. The semantic camouflage is in the displacement of visual meanings to our contemporareity, and the use of coded elements of distinct character (in pieces ranging from multimedia to craft) to an almost parodic situation, were it not for the critical high tone deployed in all the interventions and constructions.. This brings us to the third point, to the initial reference to the title of ars critica, which involves identifying not only problems beyond the field of art, but also a wager on a kind of "relational art" (Nicolas Bourriaud), in which these plagues revisited are inscribed, through their political enunciation in the broad sense of the word rather than its impaired meaning so familiar in apparently democratic societies. This is the level of critical enunciation posed in these plagues revisited, in the position of seeking understanding of the ordinary world, as space (and time) that has to be rehabilitated, reconquered. The entire exhibition is a work of inclusion and discussion rather than exclusion. The coincidence of communal sharing, constrained public space, faults in social relations, under the rule of the consensual economicistic and instrumentalist logic of the world, are wide ranging needs that a certain art feels driven to fill. And in this requirements, its answers are new questions, a manifestation that fulfills the "function of dispensable politics".15 Therefore, Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas poses an exhibition situation that goes beyond objects, or the substantivation of works. As Jacques Rancière rightly notes, the game may be in the interchanges initiated between art and non- art, and not in their opposition. At bottom, as Silveira says, the motivation for questioning the mythical universe "emerges from a need I have always felt to use art forms to talk about the world. Working on the contemporary context of plagues may

14 Maite Méndez Baiges, op. cit. p. 103. 15 Jacques Rancière, Sobre políticas estéticas, Ed. Macba, Barcelona, 2005, p. 54.

11 derive as much from experience of living the present as from looking at the threats to our future on a planetary level."16 Clear recognition of the dissonance of a world divided, which has taken on contours that are sometimes dazzling, worthy of trans-historical fable.17 Just as this exhibition contains hints of vigilance and expectation, there is also watchfulness - here the important part of the plague metaphor is its warning or even premonition (its futuristic side), or its close attunement to the present day, rather than its past or stagnant outcome in illo tempore. As if it had quite a different level of "fire power", or developed thought, even in its dialectical articulation with the community, which is a community of perception. The plagues revisited of Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas drive the replacement of an ancient mythology by new and sensitive ideas. The work offers a sensitive fabulation aesthetic worthy of being deciphered without any possibility of mimetic inflation. At the same time, it reflects the way contemporary art does not need so much merely sociological data, or data from statistics, with their "objective" or "consensual" interpretations, since it has its own means of conveying its own signs, that other form of sensitive data.

Rio de Janeiro, September 2008

16 Regina Silveira, e-mail 19/09/2008. 17 After writing this piece, resorting to an end-note, I would mention Arnaldo Jabor's highly sarcastic and luicid article on the book organized by Adauto Novaes, Mutações–Ensaios sobre as novas configurações do mundo (Ed. SESC, São Paulo / Ed. Agir, Rio de Janeiro, 2008). The article is also attuned to the period, which is posed in terms of plagues as ironic prophecies ( "when we will be happy as 'things'"), for its singular refinement and portrait of what may be ahead. O futuro não será mais o que era, O Estado de São Paulo, Insert 2 - Culture, 23/09/2008.

BEYOND THE WHITE CUBE

Regina Silveira’s Interventions

The intense relationship between art and architecture is not new. Just consider the way different media were incorporated through history: sculpture, for instance, found in Greek temples, Romanic churches and Gothic cathedrals, or paintings inscribed in internal and external areas of palaces, chapels, etc, in the context of Western history.

Somehow it could be said that up to approximately the 15th century, not only architecture and all other arts coexisted, but also the former enjoyed privileged relevance. Architecture stood as place and destination, the reason of the work as a whole. This chimeric fusion of arts becomes unbearable around the 19th century, and all expressions become increasingly independent over time. However, the functionality relation of this discipline (spaces of use, lodging, etc.) withdraws from the proclaimed linguistic autonomy of visual arts - thus the significance of the trend among contemporary artists of working jointly with architecture, the spaces beyond the white cube – its visual purity -, so mythified by modernity.

The multiple art experiences over the 20th century, more concretely from the 1960s on, have allowed the reacquisition of spaces, places of action and other spaces, which take into consideration the exhibition itself as place and artwork. The semantic fields of happenings, performances, environments and installations explore these new dimensions, away from the white, neutral ideology of classical rooms and normative limits separating art and the world’s reality, and closer to a greater porosity with our lives, communications, spaces and times. If the “eternity of exhibition” (quoting Brian O’Doherty) proclaimed within the gallery or museum space does not allow such contamination and lies untouched in some sort of half world of temporal circumstance, most of the critical interventions sought by contemporary art are about how to think space and its power relations, how to constitute a new expositive topology and, based on such de-territorialization, draft less bipolar space-time coordinates. Collaborating for the transition from an art of space to a more time-based art of becoming is an instigating current practice, mostly when we are aware that our habitat has changed as much as our perceptions. This is a new visuality regime.

Regina Silveira’s poetics finds itself inserted in this mutant context, as she possibly is the artist who brings such aesthetic problematic into their work most assertively and frequently nowadays. “Outside art’s protected spaces, it is the transforming power of art which has been into function with double strength, whenever it provides new experiences into reality and is able to replace an indifferent gaze with a more curious, participative attitude”, says the artist. This change encompasses a whole trend of her works, which is linked to architectonic spaces (inner spaces first, followed by threshold places and then unequivocally outside spaces, interchanged over time as if they were different researches). In the passing of these decades in which her production of images has been embodied by a variety of architectures, we find works that already bear a spatial reading with much precedence, such as Símile: Office 2 [1992], Apartamento ou Graphos [1996] or Auditorium [2002]. All of them present distorted furniture designs, producing imaginaries and not less vertiginous images that play with an imploded bi-dimensionality. Works like Solombra [1990], Behind the Glass [1991], Vórtice [1994], Equinócio [2001], and Captura [2001] emphasize such work in the boundaries of internal/external space, resulting in passages-works. Interventions in the realm of Arte/Cidade (São Paulo) also reinforce this limitrophe concern about the urban space, the city locus: Cor Cordis [2002], especially, or the environment interaction through the outdoor projections of Super-herói (Night and day)[1997], or Transit [2001]. For it is the inclusion of that city-born,

contaminated flow of plural contacts and records into the artwork that enables a great deal of the aesthetic situations presented. As defined by the artist herself, “over the last years, some works and interventions have been interacting with architecture in an urban scale level, in which the city itself supports the visualization”. In fact, most of her works in this field are space-time in situ meditations, as well as the triggering for the non-passive experience of artwork.

A transition towards exploring the counterpart of shadows is part of her latest production more and more manifestly – the artist has already built an actual cartography of works, an extensive repertoire -: that is, light. In that sense, her three large exhibitions, Claraluz [2003] at CCBB in São Paulo (Brazil), Lúmen [2005] at the Palacio de Cristal/Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (Spain), and Ficções [2007] at Museu Estação Vale do Rio Doce in Vitória (Brazil) make up a trilogy as they render a cohesion that is not required by other interventions presented by the artist in other continents. Light, as an event and as structure, offers high density effects and reflexes in them, regardless of its true nature or its luminous source (either existing or imaginary). In fact, such trilogy shares a concern about visually exploring light, about recording/inscribing light in spatial structures, about linking the immaterial to a strong physicality (buildings of strong presence), and turning its appearance on architecture into a situation, a new construction imbued with some mystery or magic having invasion and fragmentation as operating strategies. And there is always a cognitive mirage in it, the quest for a state of poiesis (invention), of visual genesis.

If by Renaissance it was demanded by Vitruvius (in De Architectura, Liber primus) that among other knowledges, one should “know how to read the stars and be familiar with the heavenly system”, it is coincidental that over the last years the artist has been mapping a visual cosmology where we are inserted as dwellers, yet bewildered by what we see. The increasing presence of the sky, the heavenly universe, of light as a horizon – from Equinócio [2000] or Lunar [2002-03] to the aforementioned trilogy – is not exempted from an allegoric component (vast in significance).

Concurrently to that circumstance, the game of linking virtual visuality as fiction, sometimes bodiless, to spatial contexts of vast materiality grows in Regina Silveira’s poetics, thus causing a feeling of lightness and dense sensorial vibration at the same time. It is a paradoxical reality that lies on the images paradox itself, its always expanded effects, even more when the device of replicating reality (doubly dubious) creates an explicit illusionism and, consequently, a suspended visuality.

Nonetheless, her catalog of works over the past five years reflects an international inventory pointing towards several planet corners (Mexico, Houston, Bogota, Lima, New Delhi), and exceeds this text. Yet, that itinerary comprises the Derrapando intervention [2004], a site specific piece at the Centro Cultural España (Montevideu, Uruguay) that shows an invasive assemblage of tyre tracks on the building’s façade, Irruption Series (Saga) [2006], at the 6th Taipei Biennial, which covered the building’s external area with peculiar human prints, or Mundus Admirabilis [2007], at Brasília’s CCBB, where a nightmarish, transparent architectural box was composed with large scale insect prints. Urban interventions produced in the architectural context, with motion projection, should not be forgotten. Perhaps Noorluz [2005], presented in the World Performing Arts Festival in Lahore, Pakistan, best reflects the essence of moving images, the time-based image that, like a chameleon, metamorphoses itself wherever it may pass by: the word light in Urdu calligraphy projected over popular places in town.

Within the same challenge, all the artist’s interventions contain some de-construction of space and de-contextualization of its physical requirements, expressed in the most recurring aspects of her work, whether it is the reading of external areas and architectures through analyzing luminous

sources with distinguished imagetic amazement and poetic, perceptive puzzlement, or the thrust of chosen images (insects, tracks, footprints, etc) that manages to dismantle the established sense of a place, nonexempt of some critical irony. In any case, the wide range of visual simulations executed compose a (constructive/de-constructive) language poetics that is aided by the visual industry technology (dichroic gobos, projections and digitalized making) in order to concoct enchanting works, emancipatory visualities.

The remarkable presence of architecture in art, particularly in Regina Silveira’s works, is a symbol of approaching the art-life flow, closer to the visual impurity in which we find ourselves every day, which also represents the reconquest of places as context, away from earlier decoration or mural ornaments, where another aesthetic perspective and repositioning is achieved. It is also a large scale spatial appropriation, a bet on hybrid works whose linguistic modifications alter spatial signs. Such reading of places is undoubtedly focused on the interrelation of every space requirements (either architectonic, environmental or socio-political ones) in order to attain another aesthetic, mixed, multidirectional experience (not in vain, architecture as a means is intrinsically impure: it admits seeing, living and dwelling). In fact, all site-specific works and space interventions – the so-called public works by the artist – are related to the inhabitancy of the world promoted by art on the path for a new visuality.

Adolfo Montejo Navas Dardo Magazine, Santiago de Compostela, n. 13, / fev.-mai. 2010

Interview Regina Silveira _ Kevin Power

K.P.: You are now working on a project for the Palácio de Cristal a complex and dramatic space. What made you take this project on? What concepts did you toy with?

R.S.: The Palácio de Cristal is an ethereal building that feels like enormous receptacle of natural light, an enormous, transparent box penetrated by the luminosity of the sky, with no opaque elements other than the fine, open grid of the framework supporting the panes of glass. Creating works for this building was an incredible challenge not so much because the dimensions, for I have been working with projects for large spaces for a long time, but because it does not provide the opacity or fundamental supports for my usual type of propositions. During my different visits to the Palácio de Cristal to understand and get the feel of its spaces, I have measured architectural elements and have drawn on photocopies of the many photos I have taken of the building. One of my most frequent strategies to tame a building that is larger than life and overwhelmingly present, in terms of either its dimensions or other characteristics, consists of the simple tactic of drawing on photos in order to understand the scale and the presence necessary for my likely creations and avoid them being neutralised by the context. I knew from the outset that the project should focus on creations arising from the Palácio de Cristal experience itself, the product of its spaces and luminosity: specific works that can be interpreted as being inseparable from the building and yet able to transform the architecture by grafts that alter its visuality and meanings. At first I toyed with the possibility of conveying some earlier items that I thought were compatible with my exhibition plans to the spaces inside the Palácio de Cristal. I thought about works conceived of as polarities between light and shade, about projected images and the effects of duplicating reality visually. Some of them had been produced for “Claraluz”(Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre, 2003), an exhibition in wich I also used the building- or rather its skylight- as a subject, and employed light and projections to construct a poetic discourse attempting to impregnate the entire building with its intangible images. I soon realised that is was not simply a matter of moving works from that exhibition to a new location but of revising the concepts, operating principles and strategies involved in the search for new solutions stemming directly from the architecture of the Palacio de Cristal. Before finally setting out along this path, I explored the possibilities of a particular project, an ambient installation provisionally entitled El Sueño de Velázquez. This project was to occupy virtually all the horizontal axis of the floorplan of the Palácio, endowing an earlier series of installations – the Desaparencias begun in the 1990s – with continuity and expansion. The new version for the Palácio de Cristal was to be a large-scale scenoghaphic image with which I hoped to transform the empty, transparent spaces in the building into an ideal – and idealised – place in wich to house the illusionist image of an immense painting studio. Spread out across the floor and upon several tall, white canvas supports stretched right out at an obtuse angle towards the sides of the building, the scene would consist of easels and other basic items of furniture typical of an artist’s studio. Whereas I would situate shadows cut out of the image behind the stretched out canvas, any viewer entering the premises would be faced with a large drawing consisting of dotted lines (the geometric code for invisible things) with a highly accentuated perspective converging on the viewpoint situated a few metres from the entrance to the premises. In a manner almost imperceptible to the eye, due to the extention and anamorphic stretching of the image, this work sought the visuality of an apparition, almost as transparent as the building itself. I made simulations of this studio image and constructed digital models and a small cardboard mock-up. Of the three items that finally comprised the project, Quimera is the one stemming most directly from its homonym in the “Claraluz” exhibition. This new Quimera casts a more all-enveloping shadow: it consists of a sort of black skin covering the complex structure of the Palace portico, including its panes of glass, balconies, columns and reliefs. After moving it around several times, I discovered that the location which reinforced the intrinsic meaning of this work best was the actual façade of the Palace, above the portico with columns. There are shadow could also feature a dark interval between the columns and create a link between the external and inside spaces alongside the entrance door. Quimera is a visual paradox consisting of the image of a switched-on light bulb projecting not light but a vast shadow in the form of a black drop. In place on the façade of the Palace this paradox could only duplicate its complexity since here it acts as an inverted logo, an out-of-place presence revealing itself to be impossible in the context of a building completely in the grasp of natural light. The intention was for Quimera to be built upon the perfect conjunction of two very large back lights – one hung inside and the other outside the building – complemented by a shadow consisting of one fine, black film of vinyl to cover the panes of glass and another of silicon to cover the part of the portico made of cement and lime.

Transluz is an enormous image of the word LUZ (light), written in perspective. It consists of a cut-out cast of dark blue, adhesive filter to be applied to the panes of glass in the vault on the apse of the building. The technical and poetic solution of using a transparent cut-out is in response to the possibility and the desire for the outside light to go through the actual word designating it, thereby creating a circular equivalence between the word and the phenomenon that can make itself felt as a luminous accentuation of the transparent letters casto n the deep blue filter. Although the blue filter might also have been expected to cause a bluish atmosphere inside the apse, the most spacific visuality I intended for Transluz was not so much this colour-light effect as that of the transparent cut-out itself. I intended this cut-out to work as a sort of immaterial frame within which, at an unfathomable depth, the luminous quality of the sky, clouds, birds and anything that might cross that transparent interval can be seen. It is as if the gap for external space were a stage curtain revealing occasional aerial events above the Retiro Park in Madrid.

Memoriazul is the largest of the three works and is also the one needing the most trials and samples between conception and execution in order to confer the effectiveness of the envisaged configuration, its colours, tones and, above all, its effects. Memoriazul is the visual narrative of an imaginary happening in which all the panes of glass and iron framework of the vaults the full lenght of the horizontal axis of the Palacio de Cristal are broken. This fiction, frozen in two moments in time, was to poetically link what happened in the glass vaults to the splinters and fragments shown as photos in the image stuck on the concrete floor. The image in Memoriazul was created on the basis of photos of the vaults which were in turn the raw material used to make a large-scale, digital collage in which the fragmented photos appear. This matrix/image is the “motif” of Memoriazul. I was able to make transparent images of it to stick onto the vaults and also the ones cut out of thick, opaque vinyl stuck to the floor. In order to make this “motif” fit the dimensions and characteristics of the building, particularly when calculating how to apply it to the vaults, it was essential to study all the available layouts in depth and to analyse the maps and plans of the panes, counting them over and over again. In Memoriazul it will be just as important to look upward to see the imitation stained-glass window made of broken panes, as to stroll about over the “tapestry’ and experience the virtuality of the many, many fragments including bits of skies and clouds, apparently situated beneath the surface of the ground. My aim here is for the ground to act as a mirror and recollection of what has happened overhead. I have called the entire project Lumen in order to emphasise that light is once again the axis of my poetic reflection and the very key to all language operations involved in my dialogue with the Palácio de Cristal architecture. The association with light is also both an explanation and an anchor for the ephemeral nature of the intervention, because Lumen addresses the universe of meanings contributed by the ethereal properties of a building and the changing light passing though its spaces. The changing and temporary effects stemming from the interaction between this architecture and this light are replicated in the ephemeral nature of the works, which do not aspire to any permanence, despite my intention to make them seem irremediably inseparable from the building. It is also important to note that in this type of project all the images are photographic and digital and designed for a type of execution that extrapolates the more conventional resources used in producing and assembling exhibitions. The Lumen execution technique belongs to the enlarged field of new means of producing images adapted to the large formats currently requires for a variety of applications and in extra- artistic spaces.

K.P.:The Palacio de Cristal project was created using a computer but then you have to transfer the images you get out of it to an extremely complex space. Are other design concept phases involved?

R.S.: Not everything in the project is strictly numerical and digital. In other words, the properties of light, colour and scale perceived by the eye cannot be controlled by the computer. There are real facets that look real, such as the back lights in Quimera, but there is also a visual perception involved that is affected by expectations and suppositions stemming from psychological and optical factors that are difficult to measure and quantify. To cite just one example, the floor section in Memoriazul will need scale and colour adjustments related more to subjective spheres than to basic computer operations. That is why so many trials were necessary. Those adjustments would never be possible without using just you eye and your own experience to work out the subtle differences in size required between the upper and lower sections. The same occurs with the different tones and intensities that must be attributed to the printed images on the floor in order to compare the ones that are simply illuminated with the transparent ones that the outdoor light goes

through, as if they were stained-glass windows, in the roof. How do you make them look similar? How do you capture the optical size or the same effect that panes in the roof apparently have by relying on guestimates made at ground level? Is it possible for the representation on the ground to give an impression of floating because the image of the sky and clouds can be seen behind the photographed panes of glass and frameworks appearing in the tapestry beneath our feet? All these questions need to be assessed sensitively and perceptively because they encompass concepts and interpretations beyond the computer’s control. It should also be said that no computer simulations, even though they were indispensable to this project, can convey what can only be seen once the works are actually installed. The project includes a considerable unforeseeable factor arising from the effects of adding and overlapping lights and reflections. These effects will also include time and movement issues that may affect how the works are perceived because the light penetrating the building changes and shifts according to the time of day.

On Irruption Series (SAGA), 2006

Footprints and tracks have constituted a significant part of the indexical imagery whose meaning I have been investigating over the past few years. Their accumulation particularly interests me for its allegorical potential to allude to a “ghost” event that took place and left a mark.

In my several architectural interventions in façades and interior designs since the mid 1990s, the images of tracks are featured as a sort of graffiti that I bring into play as an invasive “blotch” of implied temporal dimensions. The time suggested by these phantasmagorias is usually that of a voracious, vertiginous and nightmarishly symbolical occupation of a wall, building, or territory. (1)

Yet, the origin of the enlarged human footprints in this work presented in Taipei is quite diverse from previous marks and tracks. Whereas the animal footprints come from pictures used to identify different animal tracks, and the images of chaotic tire tracks are taken from commercial websites, the human footprints are actual impressions in ink taken from children’s feet. (2)

Later on these marks -- enlarged, reproduced, and serving as digital matrixes for multiplication -- made possible the visualities of recent installations in architectural interiors. (3) Now they swarm the external walls of the MFA Taipei, seemingly pouring out from the front doors and the first-floor galleries.

In the early conception of a visual narrative that could express the museum’s architecture and add meaning to this building, shaped as a gigantic ideogram for “well”, I thought of the original spring that flowed from that very spot. When developing the relations between my work and this architecture/well, I imagined extracting this flow from its entrails, possibly by rendering it as thousands of footprints that seemingly “ooze out” from – and at the same time, “penetrate” -- certain openings.

Furthermore, the volumes attached to the sides of the building have helped me interpret the architectural design of MFA Taipei as a sort of jug or great vessel, with many recesses – something I poetically associated to this island and the modern-day “saga” of its population. For this reason I have added “Saga” to the title of this work.

Regina Silveira

Notes

1. Animal footprints in Gone Wild (1996), shown at the MCA San Diego hall and in Tropel (1998), on the façade of the São Paulo Biennial building. Tire tracks in Derrapagens, exhibited at MAM-SP (2004); in Derrapadas, at CCE in Montevideo (2004), and in Frenazos, at the Antiguo Arsenal, during the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial (2004).

2. In 1998, while creating a series of works with children’s footprints, I conducted a workshop titled O Artista e Eu at SESC Itaquera, in São Paulo. With the collaboration of a large group of children, I built numerous tracks with footmarks printed on paper sheets, which I then arranged inside and outside that cultural center.

3. Human footprints in the installations Intro, presented at the La Mediatine Cultural Center, in Brussels (2005) and Irruption, shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005).

THE IRRUPTION SERIES: A GENEALOGY Regina Silveira

My first interventions in specific architectures took place in the 1980s. These initial works were strongly linked to strategies aimed at graphically representing, in situ, projected shadows that were nearly always imaginary, bringing them into a relation with the chosen architectural elements of the place offered for my intervention. Some examples are Símile (1988), at Centro Galileo in Madrid, Solombra [Sunshadow] (1990) at SESC Pompéia, in SP, and Behind the Glass (1991), in the showcase of Grey Art Gallery, in NY. They nearly all respond to a threshold situation, a passage between the inside and the outside, that I imagined as a paradoxical encounter between light (imagined or real) and the projected cast shadows (always fictional). This was certainly the conceptual platform I also used for Todas las Noches (All Nights), a never realized project that I proposed in 1998 to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) in which imaginary light sources projected approximately 1800 square meters of shadows made in vinyl, over the walls, the furniture and showcases of four entirely empty rooms, in the spaces created by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for that museum’s temporary exhibitions. THE IRRUPTION SERIES: A GENEALOGY Regina Silveira SÍMILE, 1988. Latex, 8m2. Centro Galileo Galileo, Madrid. Spain.

It was in the mid-1990s that another type of indexical image began to form another repertoire for my dialogues with architecture: the marks, trails and animal tracks. Even though they belonged to the same indexical nature of photographic images and projected shadows –already recurring resources in my works – these traces, tracks and paw prints provided me with another sort of approach for intervening on architectures. With them I was able to create images with characteristics of aggregation and accumulation, with the power to cover surfaces and to function as graphic invasions or contaminations- which could radically transform the meanings of the façades and architectural spaces where they were placed.

The first marks were coyote tracks, which in Gone Wild (1996) I arranged and painted painstakingly, with the help of several assistants, along the walls of the entrance hall at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in San Diego, in response to the pattern of Dalmatian dog tracks made with inlaid techniques on the granite flooring designed by architect Robert Venturi for the remodeling of that museum. In that work the relation between the museum’s geographic region (on the border of San Diego with Tijuana) and the “coyotes” (people involved in the illegal entrance of immigrants along this border) responded to my explicit intention. Data related to time (traces of a past event: the coyotes went by), and to absence, as is the nature of indexical images, were important for the conception of this work. GONE WILD, 1996. Latex painting on wall, 140 m2. Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in San Diego.

In 1998 I produced Tropel [Stampede] (already as a digital image cut out of adhesive vinyl) on the lateral wall of the building designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, at the Ibirapuera Park, which currently houses the Bienal de SP and other exhibitions. In Portuguese, the word tropel evokes a stampede of many animals, and that image, made in perspective, included tracks made by various species of predators and preys from different latitudes, to deal with the theme of cultural devouring, as took place in Anthropophagy (the historical Modernist Brazilian trend, during the 20’s), which was the theme proposed by curator Paulo Herkenhoff for that 24th edition of the São Paulo Bienal. More recently (2009) I made Tropel Reversed, where the same band of animal tracks, in perspective, is inverted, moving inward to invade and cover the entire architectural interior of the attic of the Køge Museum of Art in Public Spaces, in Denmark. TROPEL, 1998. Adhesive vinyl, 600 m2. XXIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Brazil.

TROPEL (Reversed), 2009. Adhesive vinyl, 700 m2. Koge Art Museum, Denmark.

In the 2000s I enlarged this paradigm of traces to include urban marks as well, moving from the animal tracks to automobile tire tracks, as in the Derrapagem Series [Skid Marks] sand from there to human footprints, as in the Irruption series.

The tracks of car tires moving through internal and external spaces of buildings, like urban trails, supposedly noisy and at high velocity, were often simulated as having been left, paradoxically, by small toy cars, as in Derrapagem (2004) inside the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. In Montevideo, the tracks of Derrapando [Skidding] (2004) vertically occupied the façade of the Centro Cultural de Espanha (CCE), located in an area recently freed from the circulation of cars. In that same year, they were the motif of the intervention Frenazos [Hitting the Brakes], a sort of expanded print winding around the portail of the Antiguo Arsenal that led to the exhibition spaces of the Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan. In 2010, in Munich, I made Wrap (Expanded) as an unexpected and invasive image inside and outside the building hall, at street level, in collaboration with the architectural firm O.S.A., at Maximilianstrasse 35. DERRAPANDO [SKIDDING] , 2004. Adhesive vinyl and paint. 117 m2. Centro Cultural de Espanha. Montevideo.

DERRAPAGEM, 2004. Adhesive vinyl and wooden toys. 110m2. Museo de Arte Moderno de São Paulo. Brazil.

WRAP (Expanded), 2011. Adhesive vinyl. In colaboration with architects Fabian Ochs and Florian Schmidhuber. Archon Group Deutschland GMBH Building, Munich, Germany.

Human footprints – arranged in agglomerations, like the marks of an insistent occupation, with the potential to cover practically any sort of surface – were the theme of the Irruption Series. Interacting with specific architectures I can cite Intro (2005) at La Médiatine Cultural Center in Brussels, and Irruption (2005), in the large internal hallway of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, for the group exhibition Indelible Images. The last version – the largest of that series (1,800 m2) – was Saga (2006), designed especially for the Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei and made during the 6th Taipei Biennial. INTRO, 2005. Adhesive vinyl. 94 m2. Centre Culturel Woluve Saint-Lambert. Brussels.

The exploration, with variants, of this semantic universe of graphic patterns made up of marks followed and corresponded poetically with the projected shadows that had previously characterized my work. Altogether, they are part of the same polarity that the shadows maintain, by opposition, with another group of more recent interventions: those that emphasize light as a basis of poetic reflection. These latter works began for practical purposes at the beginning of the new millennium and gradually became a strong topic in the current relations of my work with architecture. The conceptual support for all of these works has been the philosophical nature of light, and the effect of enlightenment, linked to the sublime, and opposed to the universe of shadows, always understood as its dark, paradoxical side, the perturbing and phantasmagoric “other.” Nevertheless, in the works that have light as their support, generally carried out in imposing or even excessively beautiful architectures, I should underscore a new datum: the visual narrative derived from a sort of imaginary event – sometimes catastrophic and sometimes cosmological – that I have sought to allegorically instate in various spaces, seeking to resemanticize that architecture. In the set of architectural interventions based on light and its projections, the initial manifestations were the works I did for the exhibition Claraluz [Clearlight] (2003), at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo. The work Lumen [Light] and Luminancia [Luminancy] simulated a freefall of fragments from the building’s skylight, which was fictionally broken and later projected as a luminous camouflage on the walls of the building – or as the deposit of splinters that coated the inner space of the security vault and safes in that building that was used before as a bank (Banco do Brasil). After this came the exhibition Lumen (at the Palácio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2005), at which I repeated, with differences, the resource of the two-step narrative. This is true for the work Memoriazul [Bluememory], a visual fiction in which the imaginary catastrophic event is the shattering of hundreds of windowpanes of the transparent ceiling. The virtual catastrophe appears both in the printed transparent vinyl overlaid to the real glass ceiling, as well as in the extensive digital print adhered to the floor as a sort of carpet, where the shards falling from above seem to be strewn about. Associated to the light that penetrates through the building’s transparence, Memoriazul aimed to offer a “dazzling” experience, which could be simultaneously destabilizing and dizzying.

LUMINÂNCIA, 2003. Backlights and adhesive vinyl, 54 m2. “Claraluz”. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo. Brazil.

In Ficções [Fictions] an exhibition at the Museu Vale do Rio Doce, the catastrophic event is the virtual demolishing of the massive walls of the large sheds of that museum located alongside a maritime canal (in Vila Velha, Espirito Santo, Brazil, 2007) to pave the way to the simulation of a celestial space that seems to have penetrated the building’s interior. My central idea for the work Entreceu (Intersky) was to create a gap in the architecture, as though the building were breaking into two parts (before and after the gap) supported only by the vertebral, wooden rafters at the ceiling, in order to provide an effect of suspension, for whoever wanders through this simulacrum: a false sky without an horizon.

In Observatório [Observatory], made in the Octógono space of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2009), a small, octagonal wooden well contained within it a blue planet rotating in the cosmic infinite (made as a video animation), virtually far below the marble floor of that octagonal space of the Pinacoteca, but in direct correspondence with the immense, totally fictional and celestial body observed above, printed on vinyl and placed on the glass ceiling - whose blue color flooded the walls of the architectural space.

OBSERVATÓRIO, 2006. Digital print and adhesive vinyl, wood and light box, 330m2. Projeto Octógono Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil.

ATRACTOR, 2011. Mirrored adhesive vinyl. Variable dimensions. Fundação Iberê Camargo. Porto Alegre, Brazil. Among these works I include Atractor, 2011, with the word LUZ [LIGHT] in giant format, tautologically illuminated by the sunlight and the sky reflected in the mirror type vinyl that was adhered, ephemerally, to the façade of the Fundação Iberê Camargo, a building designed by Portugese architect Álvaro Siza, along the banks of the Guaíba River, in Porto Alegre, the city of my birth.

(Naturally, this presentation is a summary that leaves aside other constellations of my work related to architecture, like that of the works projected anonymously at night, in different urban contexts -Super Heroi (1997), Transit (2001)-as well as other works with more incisive content (Mundus Admirabilis (2007), Dark Swamp (2011), or even within the perceptual paradigm of the distortions of perspective, such as Abyssal (2010), the virtual abyss that I constructed at Atlas Sztuki, in Lodz, Poland or the simulations such as the large intervention Tramazul [Blueweave], measuring 2,400 m2, which occupied all the windows of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 2011, with the image of an embroidered sky. MUNDUS ADMIRABILIS, 2007. Adhesive vinyl, 960m2. Jardim do Poder. Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil. Brasília, Brazil.

ABYSSAL, 2010. Adhesive vinyl, painted walls and light filters. 10,41 x 13,57 m. Atlas Sztuki, Lodz, Polonia.

I would like to conclude by speaking briefly on the genealogy of Irruption Series (Round), which motivated this presentation. The first reference is to say that the tracks of its configuration were originally taken directly from the feet of dozens of children who participated in a workshop I conducted in 1998 (O Artista e Eu [The Artist and Me], at SESC Itaquera, SP). At the park at SESC they printed the feet with various colors of paint on paper and constructed colored trails outdoors. The children knew that I needed a black footprint from each of them to construct the image to do a large woolen tapestry that would be part of a very ambitious international exhibition, with the title Listen to the Children of the World, headed up by the artist duo Christo and Jean Claude, which wound up not being held. I kept these footprints on file and only used them many years later as a pattern to form an image of accumulation, that would function as a graphic element with which I covered various architectures, always in situations that could bring about a de-familiarization of perception. This was the case of Intro in Brussels and Irruption in the Museum of Houston, as previously mentioned. Only its last version, Saga in Taipei, responded specifically to a concept derived from the museum building itself, which was conceived by architect Kao – Er Pan as a giant three-dimensional ideogram to signify “well” – for having been constructed in the original area of the village’s immemorial well. For this IRRUPTION SERIE (SAGA), 2006. Adhesive vinyl, 1500m2. Taipei Biennal, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

reason I interpreted the building as the equivalent of a water jug and poetically imagined the tracks as fluids that poured from its openings. I also metaphorically referred to islands and boats that together with the title refer to the modern saga of the Taiwanese people.

A projected version of Irruption was shown in 2009, in my exhibition Linha de Sombra (Shadow Line), at CCBB- Rio de Janeiro and in the exhibition Limits, at the Rubin Center of the University of Texas at El Paso (2011).

It was only between 2005 and 2006 that I applied this pattern of accumulated tracks to three pieces independent of any architecture. One of them is a handmade wool tapestry Macula (Spot), another is the Irruption Series (Oval), which belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the third is the Irruption Series (Round), now included in a private collection. Regina Silveira, August 30th, 2012.

IRRUPTION, 2009. Projected image, 1070 m2 (approx). “Linha de Som- bra”. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro. +info: www.reginasilveira.com

DARK SWAMP (NEST), 2011. Adhesive vinyl, fiber glass, industrial painting, object-1,80x1,25 m and graphic pattern 9,50 diameter. “Extranjerías”. Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. México City. México.

SPAIN galeria@vilasecohauser.com www.vilasecohauser.com Galería Vilaseco Hauser (+34) 981 216 252 C/ Padre Feijoó, 5, 1º 15004. A Coruña GERMANY stuttgart@vilasecohauser.de www.vilasecohauser.de Matthias Hauser (+49) 0176 32392441 Alexander Stöckle (+49) 0163 6697532 Senefelderstraße 3 A. 70178. Stuttgart

Odyssey

The invitation to create an immersive virtual reality environment derived from the partnership between Itaú Cultural and the HLRS- High Performance Computing Center, University of Stuttgart, in the beginning of 2016. Technically, the challenge implied in this invitation was to go beyond local possibilities, with the extended resources supplied by this top international computer center in scientific research involving high technology. In the Art field the challenge was to propose an invention that could be more radical, supported by these resources in a piece that should be, before anything else, a more reflexive and poetical experience. Long imagined and carefully composed in collaboration with other minds, sensibilities and knowledge- a shared circumstance in pieces like that- the proposed virtuality is Odyssey, developed within a tied technical-creative collaboration with Itaú Cultural. Odyssey proposes a non-return journey, placed in a day light sky, open and infinite, where a house/cube operates as a transparent spacecraft. Entrances and exits in each face and an alternate disposition of internal routes, Odyssey provide the experience of a passageway - physical and subjective – inside a glassy and labyrinthine space, where we could walk with no gravity towards the possible exits of the cube/spacecraft. Since the first sketches and 3D models, elaborated to investigate the possibilities to virtually wander inside a hyper cube, until reach the current narrative, the technical project gradually showed the need to use the processing provided by the Stuttgart connection. The own definition of the labyrinths, their location and scale – an aesthetical choice - was in charge of Genetic Algorithms executed by the supercomputer Cray XC-40 from HLRS. In Odyssey, the application of these algorithms to the possibilities of a narrative that constantly changes the entrances and the set of corridors of the cube/spacecraft, respond to characteristics that are in themselves questions about the conscience and autonomy of computers. The condition of not being able to return to the already crossed spaces is caused by the own participants, whose steps merciless crush, smash and break the transparent surfaces that subdivide the inner spaces of the labyrinths already crossed, in search of an exit that could bring them back to the sky, always seen through the grid that shapes everything.

There is no other choice than follow ahead, because coming back would mean to be in a disturbing suspension inside the big transparent involucre formed by the cube, broken and empty. The game is simple but difficult: to enter the sky, cross the labyrinth and go back to the sky...

A Path In Transit

Over the course of my artistic career, I had not focused on a single medium; I was a painter, engraver, video and multimedia artist, went on to make books, objects and installations. Recently I have produced graphic interventions in interior spaces and on façades, video animations and graffiti alongside urban projections. In terms of the poetic and technical operations involved in the work, all this activity has always oscillated between hand-made and low-tech methods. My interest in different mediums and the recurrent use of new means of image production goes back to the 1970s. However, I have never been intensely engaged with any of the more radical trends that heavily rely on the use of technology.

Since my productions from the 1970s, my everlasting task has been to balance my constant curiosity for new material with an awareness that the medium cannot take over my ideas. My overriding goal has always been the search for meaning in any medium, with more emphasis on the politics of representation than on the means of production.

Shifts and complexities aside, over the last two decades my work has gradually developed a close relationship between architecture, its surrounding space, and its public dimension. This has paralleled my gradual migration from artisanal to digital productions, a natural step in light of the geometric operations that were cornerstones in my previous work.

Perspective drawings on graph paper have been a key stage when generating installations such as In Absentia M.D. (1983) and Vortex (1994), two large- format works that were entirely drawn on-site and painted by hand. This category of installations, based on enlarged perspective drawings, also includes the original version of Paradoxo do Santo [Saint’s Paradox], realized in the project room of Museo del Barrio, New York in 1994. Gone Wild done in 1996 was the first commission I received to occupy a specific space in the interior of a museum, in this case, the entrance hall of the Museum of

Contemporary Art of San Diego, which had been recently remodeled by architect Robert Venturi.

The following decade, these same works and their different iterations— including Paradoxo do Santo in a vinyl version (2001), Tropel Reversed (2009), Abyssal (2010) and Gone Wild Reversed (2011)—were made based on plans generated with computer software. This enabled interesting transformations in my work, such as: substituting ephemerality for permanence, increased control over the scale of a project, greater flexibility for altering configurations and adapting them to different spaces, and broadened possibilities to create site-specific installations, both in Brazil and around the world.

The conditions that led me to use these new digital resources originally began with Encuentro (1991), a graphic work first conceived as a largescale billboard, and produced using an industrial silkscreen process. The linearity and the outlines of the central image required a degree of precision that was only possible through the use of drawing software to ensure the rigorous sharpness I envisioned for that image. This could not have been achieved through hand-drawn enlargements.

Escada Inexplicável (1998) was among the first experiments during my transition from drawing into digital territories. This piece was followed by a more technologically driven work: the interactive video animation Descendo a Escada (2004). Both works are emblematic of how my previous explorations in projective spatiality grew to include larger possibilities and deeper meanings that were only possible by relying on more complex technical operations that always aimed to be poetically analogous.

Recently, I have produced works that rely on graphic patterns and images to cover the interiors and façades of various buildings and even commuter buses. My current production is marked by a growing interest in public spaces and in the development of ephemeral or permanent works, as projects that can exist outside the confines of art spaces. The long and complex

negotiation process that is inevitably involved in these projects does not make them less stimulating–on the contrary, they enhance my interest, because they engage different audiences and invite an exchange of ideas between a significant number of collaborators and studio assistants, enabling partnerships with people from different fields.

Paradoxically, the production of many of these projects, even if planned digitally, has involved an even more intense use of artisanal techniques that requires the participation of different teams and a collective and concerted effort. Two of the most recent works I have done under this organizational structure have been Paraler (2015), installed permanently on the sidewalk of the Biblioteca Mario de Andrade in São Paulo, and Phantasmata (2015), a project done for the 12 Bienal de la Havana, Cuba that included images painted directly on the pavement in the tradition of street graffiti using large stencils. Paraler is a huge, handmade mosaic, that required the placement by hand of nearly two million small pieces, along a length of sidewalk in 4 5 keeping with the size of the building and the large urban scale of the city’s downtown district. Phantasmata, the extensive ephemeral painting made in a public area of Havana is even more artisanal in nature since the final image resulted from digital traces that were printed as outlines of cars, war tanks, and insects that were made using stencils and spray paint.

My current practice is quite different from the future that I once envisioned for myself decades ago. Back when I first began to work on large scale work, after all that time spent clambering around on scaffolding to detail those giant and ephemeral paintings. I imagined that after many years of this intense labor I would be inclined to focus on something comfortable like drawing or making watercolors on fine papers, in a protected environment, to the tune of good background music. Decades later, unlike that future I imagined, I continue to be increasingly engaged in many sorts of projects that outsize my own individual capacity to the point where I have become the artist collective that I am today.

Regina Silveira, São Paulo, Brazil, 2015

Reviewing the Saint’s Paradox, Ten Years Later Regina Silveira

Even before I had come up with the idea for The Saint’s Paradox in 1994, my imagination had already been sparked by the equestrian monument to the Duke of Caxias, the official protector of the Brazilian Army. Pedestrians heading in the direction of the Luz subway station and passing by Princesa Isabel Square in downtown São Paulo are struck by the statue’s tall and impressive silhouette, a kind of huge shadow with very simplified interior volumes. Atop the high stone pedestal the military hero sits on a robust horse with a wavy tail, his right arm holding aloft a sword pointing skyward.1

What aroused my interest was not any aesthetic concern. This sculpture was a latter production of Victor Brecheret’s (1894–1955), who had emigrated from Italy to Brazil at the age of ten to become an artist celebrated by the younger group of Brazilian Modernist artists and the author of various monuments in the city of São Paulo. However, this monument to the Duke of Caxias, executed between 1941 and 1945 during the patriotic fervor of the Second World War, is a statue with a decidedly traditional stamp, out of keeping with the distinctive strong lines of Brecheret’s best production.

It was in fact precisely the traditional and substantive character of this official monument that led me to appropriate this artwork in order to develop ideas in which the image of the duke on his horse was a fitting representative for any “generic” equestrian monument.2

Nevertheless, the photographs I took of the monument as raw material for later developments were guided by a clear purpose, since I wanted to capture the image of this strong symbol of Brazilian military power. Even before it became clear to me how to act poetically to accentuate this effect of power, my still-unfocused desire

was to associate this equestrian image to other references and to make the monument’s looming outline even more perturbing, by means of distortions in perspective. These operations on the image were intended to explore meanings as well as to investigate the ambiguity of the relations between the shadows and the elements that cast them. In this period my overriding interest was especially concerned with elements absent from the field of vision but which, in some way, would be implied in the shadow.

The Saint’s Paradox, the artwork where I finally applied the stretched and overlarge silhouette of the equestrian monument, was created especially for the 1994 exhibition Recovering Popular Culture, held at the Museo del Barrio, in New York, in celebration of the institution’s 25th anniversary.

At this exhibition the artists were asked to show works that dialoged with an artwork of their own choosing in the museum’s collection. A small painted wooden sculpture representing San Tiago Apóstolo on his white horse, by an anonymous artist and cataloged as popular art from Guatemala, was the perfect pair that I found to associate with the shadow of the other horseman.

My installation was designed for the museum’s Project Room and consisted of a black silhouette painted on three of the walls and part of the floor, with the small sculpture of the saint sitting on a wooden pedestal, integrated with these shadows as the central point that seemed to project them.

In this juxtaposition of the silhouette with its false origin, the Duke of Caxias became a paradoxical and oversized shadow (the perverse Other) of the tiny, ingenuous and crude figure of San Tiago Apóstolo. This junction was brought about through displacement and a play of double absence, since each of the representations was lacking its complement. The shadow projected by the wooden saint is not there, while for its part the shadow of the Duke of Caxias is disconnected from its origin, that is, the monument that would normally project it.

Another paradoxical difference is the sword. Absent in the wooden figure (removed? lost?), whose hand appears to have been made to hold a sword, it appears only in the shadow, gripped by the Brazilian military leader. The black silhouette has its arm lowered and with a warlike gesture is pointing forward with its long and pointed sword.

The greatest paradox built into the installation’s visuality, however, results from the “cut-and-paste” operation by which I brought together two radically different histories and geographies of Latin America, with complete disregard to time and space as well as possible or fictional events.

The paradoxical linking of the wooden sculpture with the painted shadow in this case is supported by analogies, albeit rough ones, that can be set up between the saint and the military monument.

The ingenuous San Tiago is in fact Santiago Matamoros, the patron saint of the Spanish Army during the wars to expulse the Arabs from their centuries-long occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. Matamoros is also represented in the images of fighting and beheadings in the context of the colonial domination that occupied territories and massacred cultures of Spanish America in the times of its “discovery.”

For his part, the Duke of Caxias, the official protector of the Brazilian Army, was the commander of the Triple Alliance during the controversial Paraguay War, which from 1864 to 1870 united Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay against the dictator Solano Lopez of Paraguay, whose independent or expansionist actions were threatening the territorial interests of the other countries involved as well as their shared commercial interests with England.4 The historical accounts of this long and cruel war, which killed one-half of the Paraguayan population and ruined the country to such a degree that its consequences are felt there even today, have

been the subject of critical historical revision in recent years in South America, which has also reexamined the role and the heroism of General Caxias.

In Saint’s Paradox the spatial collage that juxtaposes the saint and his phantasmagoric shadow also serves my overriding intention of commenting on the relations of affinity that have historically existed between militarism, religion and power, and which served as a support for the struggle for domination in Latin America.

In this artwork the distortions of perspective and the gigantic proportions given to the shadow are poetic devices to bring this universe of meanings to light, allegorically, in purely visual terms.

NOTES

(1) Among the most interesting historical accounts of this sculpture is that of a commemorative dinner held in the horse’s belly, when the sculpture was still in the workshop where the metal was cast. A photo documenting this dinner shows the artist with political and cultural figures of the city, in the 1940s.

Another account has it that the monument’s placement near the edge of the square, with the horse’s big backside facing a group of buildings – and at the same level as the windows and balconies bordering the square – resulted in an almost immediate devaluation of the real-estate values of the adjoining properties.

(2) The sculpture was only installed in Princesa Isabel Square in 1960, after Brecheret’s death. As a symbol that exalted military heroism, which was certainly not the artist’s aim, the construction of the monument was in keeping with the era of political crises and strengthening military power during the following years, which

grew in tension and plunged the country into 20 years of military dictatorship beginning in 1964.

(3) During the two months I spent as a resident artist at Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, in the fall of 1993, the photographs of Brecheret’s monument were stuck to the wall near my work table, offering possibilities open for intervention. They hung there like “magnets” to attract my ideas, but they were certainly quite distinct from anything I produced during my residence there.

Nevertheless, still in Banff, when I received the invitation to participate in an exhibition designed to reflect on the history and culture of Latin America, in the Museo del Barrio of New York, I knew instantly that the equestrian monument would be part of the theme that I wanted to explore with my installation.

(4) Other interpretations hold that the reasons that led to the War of the Triple Alliance involved the conflicts between the nations over positions of dominance and control of access to the sea, which Paraguay lacked, driven by concerns for navigation and the free expansion of international trade.

Marks of the Real, Marks of the Phantasmagorical. Tomasz Załuski talks to Regina Silveira.

Tomasz Załuski: Do you think there is something like “the Latin Condition”? What is it for you? How would you define it – in existential, political and artistic terms?

Regina Silveira: In 1997 I made an artwork about Latin America, Quebra Cabeça da América Latina (Continua)... [Latin American Puzzle (To be Continued)…] which is an ironic commentary on the knowledge of Latin America, what is known or not known about it.

It is a kind of “touristic” piece, a commentary on the view of Latin America from the outside, but also from the inside, because even as neighbors we know very little about the other countries on this continent. My puzzle was formed by more than one hundred stereotypical icons of Latin America, present as fragments of black-and-white images. The iconography is vast and could continue indefinitely: from soccer to mariachis, from Carlos Gardel to guerrillas, from cannibalistic Indians to military chiefs, llamas, Sugarloaf Mountain, Machu Picchu, tango and much more. It came out of encyclopedias, tour guides, embassy coffee- table books, historical prints by travelers, magazines, books and newspapers, and everything I could gather and apply, in a true “predatory” operation of images. Unlike in normal jigsaw puzzles, where the pieces fit together to form larger, coherent figures, in my work this never happens. No piece has continuity, the junctions mix fragments of distinct geographies and histories, times and spaces, fictional images and documents, to form nothing but mixed, totally arbitrary and open narratives.

The intention was to create a paradoxical cartography for this Latin America that does not exist. Reflecting on the social, political, economic, cultural and artistic scene of Latin America as a whole implies not having any perception of the immense differences of our histories, art and culture.

T.Z.: How would you describe the development of your art up to date? What periods or tendencies can we talk about in your artistic career?

R.G.: For an artist like myself, who at the beginning of her career, back in the ’60s, left the path of painting to take up other conceptual directions, it is very difficult to make a synthesis of this course, after fifty years of intense work.

In poetic terms the response could even be synthetic, since my consistent interest, in any medium, has been the nature of the image and the politics of representation, with a focus on the modes of perception and intermediation between the images and the world.

In terms of media and supports, the summary could be more extensive. But briefly I can state that throughout all these decades, a constant has been my curiosity for the means of production, from the most artisanal to the technologically most advanced, making me resort to a wide range of resources, according to the needs of the artworks, aims and meanings.

To go into some detail, I would say that during the ’70s I was operating mainly with new graphic media, making video art, artist’s books and mail art, while in the ’80s I made objects and large-scale installations, which were generally ephemeral and painted directly on panels and walls of architectural interiors. In the mid-1990s, I began using digital resources to construct artworks and installations, thus lending them characteristics of permanence and repeatability. In the same period, I began my continued interest in the urban context as an unprotected and anonymous space, for ephemeral laser-generated projections of images and animations. The ability to dialog with increasingly extensive architectural spaces and the opportunities for conceiving and realizing interventions in specific architectures is a trend in my work that began in the 1990s and has continued until today.

T.Z.: Let's go back to the '70s. In what configuration of Brazilian artists, tendencies, interests, issues, strategies and practices of the ’70s would you situate yourself and your work?

R.G.: In January 2009 Gloria Ferreira published a bold and careful critical study on the ’70s in Brazil, entitled “Anos 70, Arte como Questão” [The ’70s, Art As a Question], in the exhibition catalog for the anthological exhibition on this decade, which she curated at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo. My participation at this exhibition was related to the artistic practices of the ’70s, with graphic works, artist’s books, and publications in alternative magazines, as well as being a member of a small group of pioneers of video art in Brazil. This multimedia phase as well as some realizations of a more technological nature that I did soon thereafter led to my work’s being also considered among the first manifestations of art and technology in Brazil. But actually, my course ranged far outside these configurations and classifications, when I began to make environmental installations and to invest in other poetic possibilities, as early as the mid-1980s. This happened with me and with other artists of my generation, when we left the ’70s behind. We were left without a classification, which I thought was just fine, but certainly we continued taking the language in other directions.

The expansions of my work into specific architectures, which began in the ’90s, after I’d lived for a longer time abroad (in New York, on a fellowship from the Guggenheim

Foundation and afterwards from Pollock Krasner), coincided with my decision to close my long career as a professor in order to become a full-time artist. In recent years my work has located me in a sort of transgenerational situation, in which I am almost always associated with younger artists, to whose training I contributed, and who wound up forming very open genealogies due to a purely conceptual affinity...

T.Z.: You were also a part of the Brazilian alternative culture movement in the ’70s. The movement formed a part of a bigger, international, if not global phenomenon. But what was it like in Brazil, what was specific about it there and then? Why did you decide to engage in it?

R.G.: In Brazil, the counterculture years coincided with the worst times of the military dictatorship. It would be complex and excessive to narrate attitudes and events of an alternative culture that kept dynamic pace with the international scene, in theater, music and the visual arts, despite the repression, the tortures and the exiles. The specifically Brazilian character was perhaps the intense voltage of the poetics, which remained high without slipping into pamphleteering or the merely factual.

These are also years during which I left Brazil for an extended time, living first in Spain with an academic fellowship and afterwards in Puerto Rico, to teach at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Altogether, I spent more than five years outside the country. It was not an exile, but rather a time of being in the world to get to know and experience new media and languages, as a training in art and for professional growth. Setting off down more conceptual paths was more a question of poetic cross-influence and the experience of life than a deliberate engagement. At this time, I was already traveling a lot in the United States and Europe, and could experience and participate in countless alternative manifestations, which a little later I myself was helping to promote and produce – when I returned to Brazil in the early ’70s.

T.Z.: You mentioned the military dictatorship. In Brazil it lasted from 1964 until 1984. In what way did the experience of living under the dictatorship mark Brazilian art, especially the Brazilian avant-garde of the period? How did it mark your art?

R.G.: In my answer to the previous question, when I spoke of the characteristics of the alternative culture in Brazil, in the ’60s and ’70s, in the context of conceptualism, I already advanced some information on that period, since it fully coincided with the military dictatorship.

Vitality, imagination and poetics is what I mentioned, and I reaffirm these as political and creative responses of our most radical vanguard of that period: poetics/politics, in the best sense. Living under a dictatorship, with censorship of the press, tortures, persecutions, arrests and informants on all sides is always a very bad and violent experience at any latitude on this planet.

In my own case, the political mark of the ’70s appears in a more incisive way in graphic works like those of the series Executivas [Executives, 1977], Destruturas Urbanas [Urban Destructures, 1975–76] and Dilataveis [Expandables,1981]. In these series I worked with images appropriated from the press, in order to construct virtual metaphors meant to function as ironic commentaries on the various forms of power present in the politics of images and of representations disseminated in the mass media and the political world at that time.

T.Z.: In one of your texts you wrote: “When I returned to Brazil in 1973, constitutional rights were still suspended and denunciations, arrests, torture and a general sense of vulnerability continued to corrupt the realms of public and private life and work. Popular music, the theatre and the visual arts constantly responded to this situation with politically charged messages, although their content could not manifest itself freely but only in the form of subtle or highly poetic metaphors that often managed to avoid being censored. I think that the first pieces of mine to be really influenced by the political and social events of that period were the series of works made with the new graphic media of the 1970s. The images they feature were almost always critical representations, some focusing on political power and others on the media and urban deterioration. Even so, there is virtually nothing overtly political in these series because I always preferred to filter my images with irony. Once, I even converted a bland recipe for coconut pudding into an ironic comment about the most politically commented Brazilian painting of the period, which never aspired to anything more than adorning the walls behind the bourgeoisies’ most expensive sofas”. Now, is the allusion, the metaphor and the irony always a better way than the literal and the explicit, or does it depend on a situation and a local context? Is such “indirectly” political art less prone to appropriation than the thematically political painting? What is the function of the art that engages in the political – I mean its political and artistic function?

R.G.: I would never refer to this type of approach as “indirectly” political, I only wanted to say that it was not literal. From my point of view, irony and allusion can be more refined tools for advancing political meanings than the excessive rhetoric of “engaged” images, which rarely have all the layers of signification necessarily implicated in the ambiguity of art. They wind up being “shallow,” with little ability to provoke a political reflection, and they

don’t manage to change the world... However, everything depends on degrees and on context – how was I not going to admire a good art, even one “dripping” in rhetoric, when quality and meaning are joined? The function of art tout court is its use function, with a philosophical and phenomenological foundation, which has to do with its capacity to transform the perceptions of our relation with the world. This includes political art.

T.Z.: Could you briefly describe some works of yours with a political import?

R.G.: Paradoxo do Santo [Paradox of the Saint, 1994] is a paradoxical combination of the giganticized shadow of an equestrian monument and of a small wooden popular saint, riding a horse and set atop a small wooden pedestal, from which part of the large shadow is projected, toward the walls. The shadow is a distortion of the silhouette of the equestrian monument by modernist Victor Brecheret, located in a public square in downtown São Paulo, depicting the mounted Brazilian military hero Duque de Caxias, the commander-in- chief of the armies of the Triple Alliance, which in the 19th century united Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay against Paraguay, whose crushing defeat left immense impacts on the country, until today. For its part, the little wooden saint, a popular sculpture from Guatemala, represents Santiago Apostolo, until today the patron of Spain’s military, also known as Santiago Matamoros, invoked for centuries in the expulsion of the Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula, and patron of Spanish America as well, having also been invoked in the colonial wars that decimated indigenous populations and their cultures. In the work, the difference between the shadow and its origins as well as the paradox of the double absence (the monument that generates the shadow is not present, nor is the shadow present that should be cast by the wooden saint) aims to emphasize the shadow as the dark and perverse “other” of the apparently ingenuous wooden saint. By approximating the two figures trans-historically and paradoxically, I sought to comment on the recurrent and always renewed relations between power, militarism and religion in Latin America.

In the installation Mundus Admirabilis (2007, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brasília) I used giganticized images of insect pests to occupy the interior of a large glass box, in the exhibition Jardim do Poder [Garden of Power]. The giant insects compose a double site-specific work: one for the glass box, another in the relation with the city, the headquarters of the government and center of political power in Brazil. Transformed into a garden pavilion shot through by light, the 20 x 20 x 7m (h) glass box became the dwelling of conflicting species as well as the place of their devouring; in Brasília, the insect pests had their connotation more focused, as a deliberate allusion to the political world. The scale of the insects is the phantasmagoric datum that makes the glass box perceptible as a giant cage, where images of incompatible species, out of proportion in relation to each other, seem to live in magnificent isolation. When the spectator is either looking at or

actually inside the lighted box, he or she is provided with not only the exercise of observing the species, but also the “marvelous” effect of seeing the hyperbolic pests finally caged.

Rerum Naturae participated in the exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas, (Galeria Brito Cimino SP, 2008), whose theme was the updating of the old biblical, historical and mythical plagues, based on the hypothesis of their possible transposition to other territories of signification.

In Rerum Naturae, to comment on the deterioration of day-to-day life, I took numerous images of insect pests taken from treatises on natural history and applied them by means of third-firing techniques to pieces of white porcelain for everyday use. The porcelain pieces were arranged on a dinner table, ritually covered by a linen tablecloth on which the same insects, on a much larger scale, were embroidered in cross-stitch, in great detail using black thread.

Per Capita, at the same exhibition, is an audio work that considers urban violence as a contemporary pest. In the form of a tubular object placed on the wall as a listening device, it allows the viewer to hear a gunfight, similar to the sound of stray bullets, accompanied by a small flash of light that escapes from the wall, through a thin crack.

T.Z.: You said that in the ’70s you had taken interest in conceptual art. During the last two decades it was often pointed out that conceptual art was a diverse, heterogenic phenomenon, with its different “versions” in different regions and local cultural and socio-political contexts. There was also a “re-discovery” of Latin American conceptual art, which was praised for its early critical involvement into social and political issues, prior to an analogical interest on the part of USA and Western Europe conceptualism. Do you agree, as an insider at the time, with this view? What was conceptual art in Brazil? What did it mean to you? What chances and opportunities did it seem to offer you at the time?

R.G.: In this part of the world the different forms of conceptual art and new modes of artistic communication certainly carried more of a political charge, everywhere from Mexico to Argentina, including the contingent of “Latin” artists in the United States, all of them adherents to a less “cool” conceptualism. Perhaps because in that period the artists of these latitudes responded to a more heavily charged and conflictive social scene.

On the other hand, the forms and modalities of conceptual art, especially in Argentina and Brazil, were very much informed by the manifestations of the Fluxus group and other dadaist legacies, which greatly influenced not only the visual arts, but also music, performance and poetry. It must be remembered that, mainly in Brazil, the trends of art

and technology that derived from the concretism of the ’50s were blended in an extremely fertile way with the conceptual trends and investigations into new media, imparting a desirable interdisciplinarity to the more radical scene of the ’70s.

I always rejected the label of “conceptual artist,” along with that of painter or printmaker. I preferred to be classified as a “multimedia artist,” believing that it gave me greater freedom of action and movement in alternative means of production, circulation and exhibition of my work, almost always a difficult-to-classify “hybrid.”

T.Z.: Conceptual art has often aimed to reflect on and criticize artistic institutions as well as the institution of art as such. Is there an aspect of institutional reflection or even critique in your art?

R.G.: There is no institutional criticism in the direct political sense. But I could cite works from the conceptual years that discuss the system of art as a whole – like Pudim Arte Brasileira [Brazilian Art Pudding], a very politicized recipe that I distributed anonymously at an exit from the São Paulo subway system in the late ’70s, and a questionnaire about the art system elaborated and distributed by myself and Julio Plaza to the participants of the performative event Mitos Vadios, in an abandoned parking lot in São Paulo, in 1981. As a criticism on the art in the museums as well as of the museums themselves, especially those that allow architecture to play a key role, I planned the (unrealized) project Todas las Noches [Every Night], for the Museo de Monterrey, New Mexico, in a building designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta. In that project, which provided the basis for many of my later works, I aimed to cover the entire interior of five rooms offered for an exhibition with extensive black shadows, projected by the furniture, exhibit cases, and benches already existing in those rooms, which I would have left totally empty. In short, totally empty yet with shadows of the interior architecture being cast on itself. I wanted to critically lower the shadow and the night on the museums. This work has remained alive until today, awaiting its realization...

T.Z.: It’s been said that Brazilian art of the ’60s through the ’80s seems to look like an alternative version of the Western art world: all the latter’s elements are present in it but in diverging configurations, with other functions, meanings and evaluations. How would you comment on that – is it a plausible view? Do you think this “local divergence” is still present in your work? Or did you have to – and to what degree? – suppress it in order to make your art enter the Western art world and be appreciated there?

R.G.: You should know that it was after the ’80s, with the more affirmative presence of the curators from outside Brazil and the intensification of international travel and exchange

that the Brazilian art of the ’60s and the new generations of the ’80s began to gain an international presence, at exhibitions and in publications. This took place slowly and has been growing ever since, initially in the context of practically no knowledge about what one was seeing, based on simplified reviews concerning languages and artistic filiations which until today run counter to the view held by those who really know our history, from the inside.

In relation to the world of Western art, and the entrance of Brazilian art – or my own – in this world, I should say that to me the argument seems at least a little strange, since there is no way to confuse the quality and originality of Brazilian art (our “local divergence,” as it were!) with an opportunity or strategy to be inside or outside of a mainstream that was already giving signs of decreased vitality in the ’80s... It should be remembered that since 1951 the Bienal de São Paulo, without a doubt the world’s second most important international art biennial after the Venice Biennale, has been our most important “window” for exchange with the exterior, and a precise instrument for the professional training of our artists, art theorists, educators and art historians – as well as having provided, over the years, a relative improvement in the repertoire and proximity of a public already more open to the manifestations of contemporary art.

T.Z.: Among other things, your work since the ’80s, at least, has been about transforming the Western conventions of visual representation – first of all, geometrical perspective with its correlative system of light and shadow. You seem to convert what passes as the mechanism of “natural” perception into a means of creating highly artificial, strange, enigmatic, uncanny and paradoxical effects – both in perceptual and conceptual terms. Now, what configuration of aspects – as I am sure it is not a single aspect that counts – is important for you in this enterprise? Which aspects get stressed?

R.G.: That’s a long story, but I can go into it briefly. The questioning of perspective as an optically-based system able to produce “correct” and “normal” representations of the visual field is a doubt that arose in the West almost simultaneously with the establishment and apogee of the conventions of geometric perspective as a scientific instrument for representing the world. This was before Leonardo made that small anamorphic drawing and discussed the marginal aberrations of perspective and his well-known diagram of the columns, in which he denounces the limits of the system’s applicability and of the use of a single vantage point. Now, centuries later, there is no longer any question about the “naturalness” of this system of representation. However, an important consideration today is the genealogy that this system of perspective shares with photography, with cinema, with virtual reality, simulations and other categories of digital illusionism.

As for me, I discovered the optical phantasmagoria and the visual enigmas of Mannerism, which very clearly affirmed art as magic and invention, when I became interested in Duchamp, in the early ’70s, but more specifically in his ironic Opticeries that the artist himself often referred to as perspectivist essays, which not only fed his imagination but also underpin many of his most notable works. I was always interested in this difference between the perception of the real and its representation, intermediated by codes and conventions of similarity. But I always opted for the deconstruction of these codes, from within, to tension the limits of both perception and representation. Certainly I embraced art as artifice and language.

T.Z.: When did you take up the issue of geometrical perspective understood as a conventional means of representing, or rather constructing a “normal”, commonsense vision of reality? Why did it attract your interest?

R.G.: My first reflections in regard to the conventionality of representation in perspective were manifested in the series Anamorfas [Anamorphs], consisting of prints and drawings, concluded in 1980. This was when I began to explore the possibilities of reverting the understanding of perspective considered as “normal” visuality and a supposedly scientific way of looking at the world, and I entered the realm of phantasmagorias and metamorphoses allowed for by this shift. In Anamorfas my favorite tools were the distortions that I produced in geometric grids. They invariably included the photographic contours of common, small-format objects. In this first questioning of the conventionality of the means of representation, I believe my posture was above all metalinguistic, the focus was on the nature of representation and the modes of depiction, which gave rise to the extensive sequence of the series A Arte de Desenhar [The Art of Drawing], done practically simultaneously with the Anamorfas, as well as videos, prints and artist’s books. But perception was also a question, coupled with my urge to probe the limits of the recognition of these representations, when shown in radically perspectivized or topologically distorted ways.

T.Z.: Now, let's go to the very roots of your artistic practice. From January to April this year, in Philadelphia, you took part in the artistic festival Philografika. The idea of the venue was best stated, I think, by the title of the main exhibition, namely, “The Graphic Unconscious”. The curators wished to examine the more or less hidden, underlying workings of “the graphic” in contemporary art – in terms of concepts, practices, ways of thinking and operating that can be somehow traced back or associated with the graphic or even with printmaking in a broad sense. Now, printmaking was one of your primary artistic preoccupations and points of departure, and watching your “errant grafias” I think that something like “the graphic unconscious” has been continually informing your art since the beginning

till now. Or maybe it is not an unconscious drive or impulse? Maybe it has been a conscious strategy all the way? Can your art be described – on a certain level, of course – as “the graphic” in the “extended” or “transmedial” field?

R.G.: This classification is very possible for a large part of my work, but I wouldn’t say that it has been a planned strategy – I only think that producing graphic marks, in the wide sense, was the best instrument that my imagination ever had for realizing intentions, creating new configurations, and inventing visual paradoxes. “Producing graphic marks,” which includes drawing and marking, on any support, whether paper, porcelain, tapestry, architecture interiors, extensive façades or even the urban fabric, for me is always the initial operation for any work. This is followed by the stage in which I am able to plan the steps of the work’s realization – practically as is done in traditional printmaking, with which I was connected for many years, in my work as a professor.

But beyond this graphic aspect I would also mention another very important source for my work, which is the photographic image and its nature as an index for the real. Since the ’70s, photography has impregnated my imaginary, in many ways, but I have decidedly never done photography as an end in itself or as art. I only make extensive use of this type of image, which I have appropriated and transformed since I made a series of silkscreens entitled Middle Class & Co, in 1971.

T.Z.: Yes, it’s easy to see that you have been often working with what is called “the indexical signs”, signs that are traces, imprints or vestiges left in different ways by the “touch” of the real itself. What aspects, associations, meanings of this kind of signs are important for you, what visual and semantic energies count for you most in this case?

R.G.: Clearly I fully understand the nature of the images I have been preferentially using – photos, marks, shadows – they are images that live in the paradigm of indexes and vestiges, and refer to the real as a nearly physical mark – a posited or fictional real.

Some associations are known: the indices are linked with ideas of absence, the marks reveal an event that took place in time. Other associations that interest me are the totally magical ones or those involving artifices, which allow for the phantasmagorias and visual enigmas. I confess that I have a frank connection with the “marvelous,” this manneristic mark that extends through Duchamp, which provided the foundation for cinema and which currently lives in the many virtual realities of the digital universe.

T.Z.: Let's go back to “the graphic in the extended/transmedial field” What different forms of it could be found in your art at different moments of its development? What made you move out from the traditional printmaking towards where you are today?

R.G.: It was when I made my first silkscreens (in Puerto Rico, 1970), and I simultaneously learned some simple photomechanical operations, that I was able to undertake this movement toward a nontraditional printmaking, open to new procedures and attitudes. From silkscreen I moved to lithography with photographic resources, and from that to offset, to photocopying, blueprint, microfilm and video; in short, I entered the wide world of “other” de-artistified graphic procedures that were the “exchange currency” of those years...

At that time the photomechanical procedures were applied almost exclusively to industrial graphics and were repudiated – together with photography – by traditional printmaking. But for me they offered just what I wanted: a dry syntax that eschewed autographic aspects, that allowed for photographic appropriations of images from the printed media and much more. I did not reserve this opening only for myself; these potentials of the graphic image were always part of my program of teaching in the area of printmaking at the university.

Currently, this entire field has become greatly enlarged through the use of digital resources and through various ways that the image has moved into printing or cutouts.

Outside of paper or film, other usual supports throughout the course of my work have been white porcelain, tapestry, glass skylights, the walls themselves, façades, and later the city itself – other graphic media include videos, projections, laser...

T.Z.: I’ve come across the term “ideographs”, which is your coinage. How is one to understand it, what does it refer to?

R.G.: I frankly don’t remember when I said that nor what the meaning might have been for this term, evidently invented in another context. However, I could think that “ideographs” is a good word-assembly, which speaks of written signs and ideograms. Ideographs have to do with graphic marks but also with the nature of the ideograms, insofar as a quality or meaning is born in the junction, sometimes completely unexpected, of two other terms.

Maybe I applied the term “ideographs” to what is apparently verified when a graphic intervention covers a building and irremediably semanticizes it, to the point where it can hardly be remembered how the building use to be before the intervention, and this for a long time... as though the intervention became “glued” to the building and to the memory.

Or it would describe the result of a shadow or track drawn on white porcelain: it will be very hard for us to imagine it being only “white” after we see it as a “porcelain-with-a-shadow.”

T.Z.: When did you start going “architectural” and site-specific with your work? Why did you decide to embrace the site and the monumental scale?

R.G.: The “architectural” started first, in the ’90s, as a graphic-objectual approach by which I produced works that were large-scale but still contained within the interiors and environments of art. The motifs of these works constructed as cutouts made of plastic or ceramic tiles were conventional architectural designs, taken from building blueprints, which I transformed into ambiguous and distorted configurations, by applying deformed perspectives and unsuitable points of view to the original drawings.

The site-specific work grew naturally, in quantity and size, nearly invariably in response to invitations for requests made for determined spaces, by institutions or curators, who very often imagined on their own how I would be able to intervene. On rare occasions I myself proposed the site-specific work and when I could choose the place and make the proposal, my plans have always been large and risky – but there is also a risk of their never leaving the drawing table... Actually it is just as complicated to plan works for small spaces as for large ones, but I like the large-scale challenges.

T.Z.: What is your point of departure when you’re about to prepare a monumental- scale project or “go architectural” with your art? In what terms do you think, on what basis do you approach architectural and urban spaces?

R.G.: First of all, I have to visit the place, see the context, get to know the story of the building and its environment, the points of view, the use, the flow – in short, the universe of characteristics and meanings I can ally my art with. A type of puzzle is placed before the imagination, with many elements to decipher and compose, often including a curatorial project to bear in mind.

In operational terms, what I always do is to photograph and afterwards draw on the photos, to discover the scale, the possible presence.

In the case of urban projects, such as the one with luminous projections in movement, I also take trips by car or on foot through the possible areas of the projection, which I afterwards note down, in order to form small indicative maps for the interventions.

Invariably I need to study maps and architectural plans, and sometimes I have to return several times to the place or building, before the work’s execution, to test data such as

scales, configurations, situations, colors. For distant architectures, I can work if I have a lot of information about the place, but it is nearly always necessary to visit the building, to understand it fully or to test elements, almost always in regard to the scale. For the intervention in Taipei I went there just once before the project’s preparation and execution, to examine the surface of the building and test what would be the average size that I should give to those human footprints that I applied in a vast area outside the museum (Taipei Fine Arts Museum). Instead, for installation at Palácio de Cristal I had to go four times to Madrid, to perceive and experience the building’s interior in order to solve very difficult problems in relation to scale, lighting and the transparence of the materials, as well as techniques/media compatible with the preservation of that architectural monument.

T.Z.: I noticed an interesting feature of your site-specific installations. Namely, your strategy is often to repeat some element of an architectural space and reproduce it within this very space but with a degree of dislocation, fragmentation and transformation. Instead of confirming the piece of architecture’s identity and its narrative self-reflection, you seem to offer the place’s confrontation with and exposition to its “ghostly” other, surprisingly materialised in your work. You seem to offer another perception, another way of navigating and narrating through the given place and space. Is it a good intuition on my part?

R.G.: I think that you perceived this strategy very well. There are various examples, but it became evident in the “catastrophic” installations I made in 2003 and 2005, respectively, at the exhibition Claraluz [Bright Light], at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, in São Paulo, and at the exhibition Lumen, at the Palácio de Cristal, at Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid. They were “catastrophic” because they both involved an imaginary happening that was a rupture and splintering of the glass skylights, virtually falling as a luminous cascade and afterwards deposited on the floor.

Both installations were related, to the point where the title of the installation Lumen, which was part of the exhibition Claraluz, provided the title for the entire exhibition at the Palácio de Cristal where I called the artwork with the skylight Memoriazul [Memoriblue] to make the connection and reference clear.

In my view, these two pieces have an allegorical quality, due to the narrative that is unfolded in a fictional time, frozen in the fixed visuality of the fragments and splinters of the “broken” skylights.

At the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo the gold color I gave to the projection of the splintered skylight set up a relation between art and gold and wealth, in the context of that building which was formerly a banking institution. The artwork continued on the floor

below, in the spaces where the institution’s old safes were located. There, the pattern of fragments of the “splintered” skylight covered the walls and the interior of the safes, cabally reaffirming the intended meanings.

At the Palácio de Cristal, an ethereal building shot through by light and with great – and I would say even excessive – beauty and transparency, my intention in fragmenting the glass roof and depositing its splinters on the floor was to bathe the interior of the building with blue light. In Memoriazul I sought to deal with the transcendental meanings of light, which I related with enlightenment and the consideration of off-the-scale sublimity.

T.Z.: What is the general concept of the project you’re preparing for Atlas Sztuki? Could you tell me what the points of departure were for working it out?

R.G.: Since my first direct intervention on architecture (Simile, 1988, at the old Centro Galileo, in Madrid) I have concentrated on the ambiguous and mysterious nature of thresholds. Windows, doors and arches are passages between, into and out of constructed spaces, which function as openings or thin skins that physically connect the spaces and allow for the passage of light, wind, and – more metaphorically – also shadow. I have often inverted this relation, using the shadows to instill uncanny situations or to create projections of totally out-of-place shadows. I have always been able to imagine thresholds as places for improbable and extraordinary happenings, as well as openings for the territory which can give rise to invasions and irruptions of every sort. They are also spaces of flow, and in this condition they can also allude to time and memory.

The works I am developing for the exhibition spaces at Atlas Sztuki pertain to this line of thresholds, and as a motif resort to the windows that circle the entire building and give it its unique look. In these spaces I aim to carry out a perceptive and poetic incursion into space/time and the memory of the building itself, based on two site-specific installations, couched in technical and conceptual polarities.

Abyssal is an image of an abyss constructed in vertical anamorphosis, in which successive lines of windows in great perspectival compression provoke the perception of a space in depth, which will function as a virtual hole able to provide uncanny spatial distortions. This large-format digital image also involves a temporal dimension – since through it I sought to recover, almost archaeologically, the memory of the old-fashioned windows of the market that used to operate in this building.

In 1001 Dias [1001 Days], a digital animation projected as a video loop on a group of windows in another room, reaching the floor and walls of neighboring rooms, I resort to other strategies. The closed and sealed windows that paradoxically allow the entrance of

the world and time into the room should make the walls and everything solid vanish in the areas of the projection. As an overall effect, the infinite sequences of days and nights that infiltrate the room through the windows should displace the perception of space within it – and the viewer him/herself – to an open-air, limitless space. In this imaginary space/time, the days and nights in succession will be accompanied by the sounds of a strong wind, voices of children and various nocturnal noises, which are other vestiges of time, coming from my memory.

T.Z.: Shadow, absence, void, abyss, trace... – why have you privileged these very notions, which seem to form a systematic configuration, in your art, say, since the beginning of the ’80s? Why promote these very notions? Is there a diagnosis of the contemporary culture implied in it?

R.G.: As I mentioned earlier, all of these terms (or nearly all) that together configure the more shadowy and mysterious side of the art/world relation in my work, participate in the nature of indices, this Peircean category of the signs of absence/presence and time. They always had the capacity to provoke my ideas and creations, and not only up to the ’80s – this actually extends past the ’90s.

I think that the tendency, the direction for the index is an almost magical question, or one of understanding art as magic or an enigma...

Whether or not cooperating with them responds to the successive – and for some, catastrophic – changes in the paradigm of culture over the last decades is an interesting topic for critically considering the whole of my production. Actually, not only mine, in light of the large quantity of works and artists who could be included, and the importance of indices in contemporary art.

For their part, the abysses and paradoxes certainly belong to another type of attitude, linked more to the fantastic, to games and to irony, among other data recurrent in my work. But please do not forget that in the last years the paradigm of the shadow has swung toward the other extreme, where its polarity “lives,” always being present: light, in its greatest intensity. Many recent artworks have taken light as a conceptual and semantic axis, a subject and a cause – in order to approach meanings linked to a sort of transcendence that only images can allow to the imagination.

T.Z.: You were a teacher in art school for several decades. What’s your philosophy of art teaching? In what way is there a connection between your artistic and didactic work? Did you try to somehow transpose one into the other?

R.G.: I began teaching when I was about 25 years old, first at the Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul, and after that in Puerto Rico, and since 1973 consistently, in Brazil and sometimes abroad, at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. I did this until the year 2000, when I wished to get away from this “double life” to be the full-time artist that I wanted to be for as long as I had the energy for it.

Actually I had many hundreds of art students, a nearly uncountable total, and I remain in contact with many of them – professional as well as friendly contact – especially with those who evolved into the art scene; and I believe that our exchanges were and continue to be constant – I keep “connected” with the productions and careers of those whom I perceived right at the outset as being good artists. It is perhaps important to say what they think of me as a professor who was involved in their training: for them what I did was to make them develop their personal poetics, I returned their own questions to them so they could learn to seek answers and to go after ideas and modes of operating, even if very different from my own. On my side, I always considered the students as young artists of generations that would come after mine. As a professor I taught language, modes of operating, techniques and attitudes, seeking to keep all my cards on the table, when transferring professional experience. All with the greatest respect for the generational differences that we should maintain.

My students were not only artists, because they also included those who later went into other areas of the art system. Many of them today are educators, art historians, curators or even museum directors, in Brazil and abroad.

A sort of big, open and very liberal “family.”

Regina Silveira Almost 10 years of exploration of illusionist perspectives passed before Regina Silveira's works reached their moment of international insertion. This reveals the difficulties of a career made in Brazil, increassed by the distance from the art market and from the ideology of the official selections. Nevertheless, we can already find her readiness for a cosmopolitan interchange in the phase prior to the present objectives, that is the artistic language of the multimedia artist of the 1970's. At that time she concentrated on graphic processes of image reproduction, essentially working with drawings. Using silkscreen-her favorite- plus offset, blueprint, xerox and microfilm, she developed a thematic of significations that transited between humor and critical messages. This material, which widely and creatively used the potential of technological resources, became known through exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. The artist's active involvement with mail-art-the movement that opposed the cult of the artistic object-is worth mentioning. This period, which included experience with video art, is linked by its conceptual elements to the future evolution of her work. In the 1960's, Regina Silveira began to paint, draw and make prints, showing empathy with figurative expressionism, a tendency with strong roots in the modernism of the country. This inclination quickly changed under abstract informal influences and more radical political changes. In Europe, at the end of the decade, she was awakened to the possibilities of spaces elaborated through geometric forms. The direct consequences of this rationalist absorption could be seen on reliefs and objects that she built with industrial materials. When she moved to Puerto Rico in 1969, a rupture occurred between the artist-as-craftsman and the one that began to be interested in the modern means of reproductivity. The right atmosphere existed on the island for her to get enthusiastically involved in the transgressing phenomenon of dematerialization. The iconography that inaugurated this new dimension with geometric grids in perspective, called the Labirintos was soon destined to a specific semantic function; that is, she decided to put people inside the labyrinths. In order to accomplish this, she used photographs from printed media interacting with boxes in perspective. This resulted in solutions filled with humor and derision, as is evident in the enclosed crowds in Middie Class & Co. Hear goal was well planned: to produce a feeling of strangeness or "decontextualisation." Returning to Brazil in 1973, she settled down in São Paulo where she continued with her prints and multimedia, interposing the geometrical drawings in perspective over stereotyped photographic images like city views from post cards. From this resulted Destruturas Urganas, Executivas and Brazil Today, artist's books, albums and other publications that reflect power, bureaucracy and environmental issues. The irreverent interest of the artist did not allow the art and its system to pass unnoticed. Her performances mark her incisive participation in the alternative cultural movement of the country in the 1970's. Regina Silveira next became involved in speculating about distortions of perspective, and produced Anamorfas (1979-81), a complex of prints and drawings that opened a new horizon for her. Contributing to this definition were her former works where she made explicit the projection lines to vanishing points, and the drawings of a series of works full of critical verve which she called Jogos de Arte. Photographing everyday objects like a pair of scissors or glasses from a certain angle and height, and overlaying several reticulars in perspective, the artist could recreate them through compressions, dilations and folds, making them an enigmatic reality. But this morphology of distortions, whose procedures were enriched in a series called Simulacros (1982-84), was also the result of interpretations of artificial systems of spatial constructions based on Leonardo and Duchamp's speculations, and writings by contemporary authors like Panofsky. She was impressed in particular with the deformations of the photographic images and the forms produced by the computer which were demonstrated and studied by Pirenne. The Simulacros, which followed Anamorfas, completed the main points of reference in her work. It is a constellation of photographic works, installations and objects, always monochromatic (black over white), reverberating with each other, which she considers as "a reflection of projected shadows, materialized as visual parody of the projective codes of the linear perspective, of the theory of

shadows, of photography and of the topographic drawings." In the establishment of visual structures, based on the infraction of laws of the projection system of classical perspective, she was mostly interested in the use of viewpoints and visual angles, as she still is today. Despite the homogeneity of all her work, which has turned to the ambiguity of perspective (little does it matter the "motives" or objects that serve as models), we should highlight along with Simulacros the work in Absentia (MD), built in a 10x20m space for the XVII Bienal de São Paulo in 1983. It was composed of monumental silhouettes from Bottlerack and Bicycle Wheel extended in oblique opposition over the floor and raised panels which enclosed the area. They were fictitious shadows that elusively parted from two absolutely empty sculpture bases. dostorting and challenging the perception according to the location and distance of the viewer. Following the Simulacros, Silveira produced Inflexões (1985-7), a series of painted cutouts used as single pieces or as elements of installation. Her elaborated drawings were transferred to tapestry and exhibited at the Gulbekian Foundation in Lisbon (1988). Mainly the conception of new and consecutive installations like Vertice (1988-89) and Simile (1988) at the Galileo Center of Madrid dynamically filled up her time. Auditorim (1990), presented at the Trienniale of India, in New Delhi (1991), consisted of simulated rows of seats built as a virtual tri-dimensionality, but flat on the floor. Among these works is the latest silhouette designed for The Queens Museum of Art. Her research has progressed in the sense of extracting stimulus from the aspects of the surroundings where she is invited to intervene, as it happened in Solombra (1990) at he SESC-Pompéia in São Paulo, and recently in Behind the Glass (1991) at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. If we could say that Regina's work reflects the "geometry of the absurd" and the shadows of De Chirico, it is also proper to say that elements of emotional and sensorial order, present like a memory of her past expressionism, significantly enter the hypertrophies and other alterations of her images. If she departs from geometrical grids to make parodies of the rules of perspective, she still has free choice to explore the ambiguities of perspective with a sense of humor. Withdrawing from the model, she exemplifiers what Sergio Benvenuto calls "reflexion du langage." Analogies can be made between Regina Silveira's visual configarations and those of other artists, such as Jan Dibbets and Justen Ladda; but there is no doubt about the deeply personal path that she follows is a very intense and consequent rhythm of work in the current art context. Walter Zanini Art Historian President of the Brazilian Committee of Art History (CBHA-C.I.H.A.)

Reviewed in 1997, originally published in the catalog for Regina Silveira: In Absentia (Stretched), in the "Contemporary Currents" series of The Queens Museum of Art. Nova York, July 25 to September 13,1 992