Meeting Points I. Pedro Barateiro
File
‘Amanhã não nasce ninguém', by Pedro Barateiro, is the first of five exhibitions that make up the PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO/ MEETING POINTS project, which will take place in 2009 in the Espazo Anexo. Pedro Barateiro, Manuel Eirís, Carlos Bunga, Nicolás Combarro and José Dávila will work on the concept of the contemporary city as a heterogeneous space, establishing a series of interconnected relationships between places and elements. The five artists share a common interest in the social and architectural context. Once the project has been completed, a catalogue will be published which will include documentation about the five exhibitions and be accompanied by critical texts.
Works being Exhibited
Interested in researching the construction of the gaze and of history, and photography and cinema's ability to construct and deconstruct meaning, Pedro Barateiro (Almada, Portugal, 1979) presents ‘Amanhã não nasce ninguém', a video installation that brings together many of the concerns that characterise his works. The collection includes a 16mm film transferred to DVD, a musical composition created specifically by Manuel Mota (Lisbon, Portugal, 1970), a poster and a sculptural piece -a cinema ‘constructed'- to accommodate the screening.
The film was made possible through the collaboration of the following companies: Margueira (the old Lisnave shipyard, Portugal) / Factorías Vulcano (Vigo), Metalships (Vigo), Astilleros Armón (Vigo), Astilleros Barreras (Vigo), Astilleros Francisco Cardama (Vigo), Astilleros Lagos (Vigo), Coterena (Vigo).
Artists
Pedro Barateiro
(Almada, Portugal, 1979)
In Pedro Barateiro's work (photographs, collages, drawings, films, objects, installations), there is an underlying interest in investigating the interpretation, appropriation and uses of the image and, although not in a purely literary manner, text is understood as an inseparable part of it. In the Sydney Biennial of 2008, he presented Eighty Two Poems, eighty-two videopoems to be exhibited one a day until the end of the exhibition. In Composição, presented in 2007 at the Pedro Cera Gallery in Lisbon, he begins with images of propaganda made during the Salazarism, in Portugal, to reflect on the use of cinema in the creation of totalitarian discourses.
Documentary material and fiction combine in his work, always on the basis of historical or literary references, on the loss of references or references to the author, as in the case of the altered photographs taken from the pages of the French magazines Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. Space and its representation (or construction) are dealt with in series such as Psychogeographical Maps or the film Travelogue (2006), which represents a continuation of the psychogeographical maps and includes fragments of documentaries on the development of cities in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. As the artist points out, ‘Part of my recent work has much to do with archaeology, through the appropriation I make of the images and montage methods I apply' [...] ‘I am interested in abstraction and in history-deconstruction processes.' At the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008), he presented The Naked City/A Cidade Núa, with a publication and two structures located in the street, which reproduced two bus stops that once existed in the Soviet Union, re-constructed on the basis of photographs and, in the context of the Biennial, they became sculptural. In Amanhã não nasce ninguén, the new production presented in the MARCO, the artist uses 16mm images filmed by himself during his visits to the old Lisnave (Lisbon) and Vigo shipyards.
Pedro Barateiro was born in Almada in 1979. He obtained an MFA in Visual Arts at the Mälmo Art Academy, Sweden (2006) and attended the Escola Mamaus in Lisbon (2002-2004) following his graduation from ESTGAD (Caldas da Rainha). Ensaios para uma Pintura Sonora was his first individual exhibition at the Pedro Cera Gallery in Lisbon (2003), where he later presented No Limite do Mundo (2005) and Composição (2007). The artist's other individual exhibitions are What are we doing here?, Spike Island, Bristol (2005), Estrutura Social, Sala do Veado, Lisbon (2007) and Domingo, Pavilhão Branco, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon (2008). The collective exhibitions in which he has taken part include, in particular, the 16th Sydney Biennial. Revolutions: Forms that turn, Sydney (2008), 5th Berlin Biennial. When things cast no shadow, Berlin (2008), Lugares comprometidos. Topografía y actualidad, Fundación ICO, PhotoEspaña, Madrid (2008), Art Premiere, (with Ricardo Valentim), Art 39 Basel, Basel (2008), STREAM, White Box, New York (2007), Por Entre as Linhas, Portuguesa das Comunicações, Lisbon (2007), Import/Export, Factory, Guimarães, Portugal (2007), Antimonumentos, Galeria AH Arte Contemporânea, Viseu, Portugal (2007), MORR, Projecto 270, Costa da Caparica, Portugal (2007), Some stories on paper, Pedro Cera Gallery, Lisbon (2007), Intro, Espace Photographique Contetype, Brussels (2007), Rasura, Avenida, Lisbon (2007), Art Nova, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami (2006), Busan Biennial 2006, Busan, South Korea, Arquivar Tormentas, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (2006), EDP Young Artists, Museu de Serralves, Oporto (2003), Expect the World, Kunstlerhaus Bethatnien, Berlin and Museu do Chiado, Lisbon (video programme), 2003, and Video Exchange, New York University, New York, 2002.
Curatorial text
‘PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO /MEETING POINTS'
At the beginning of 2009, the ‘PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO / MEETING POINTS' project was launched by the MARCO of Vigo and will be developed throughout the year in the Espazo Anexo. Five artists were selected for the project, with the aim of establishing a dialogue between the exhibition venue (the project room) and its environs (the city). The project will be inaugurated with an exhibition by Pedro Barateiro (Almada, Portugal, 1976), one of the young Portuguese artists with a strong international profile, as evidenced by his recent participation in the Sydney Biennial (2008) and the Berlin Biennial (2008).
The main thrust of the ‘MEETING POINTS' project is to convert the Anexo into a place of conclusion and formalisation of experiences, as opposed to the traditional view of the museum as an exhibition space for objects. The history of the room itself, opened in 2004 as a project space for Galician creators, encourages broadening of the meaning of an architecturally-located place ‘outside' the museum, to include a free public space that, through ‘contamination' and ‘connotation', eventually loses its distinguishing features and is transformed into the classic white cube that isolates the work from its immediate environment. The use of the term location is a way of referring to time and space, to the set of relationships that are found at an meeting point, in this case the relationship between the museum and the street, between the audience and the passer-by, between individual memory and retrieval and public exhibition, between the work of art and the daily structures the citizen co-exists with.
The contemporary city is a heterogenous place where a series of links are established and consolidated, resulting from the network of relationships between people and objects; places and relationships that interconnect. Intervening in the city and starting from there implies a reinvention, another shot juxtaposed with the changes that take place daily in urban life. The city, as analysed by Nicolas Bourriaud in his renowned essay Relational Aesthetics, ‘permits and generalises the experience of proximity' that leads to ‘collective elaboration of meaning'. It is precisely the analysis of the relationships between museum and city that serves as a point of departure for the project: a reflection on the places we inhabit and the history of our affinity with, and the rejection of, the physical and emotional environment. Each of the artists is asked to consider the analysis of the transformation of homes or the social context of cities, to carry out their intervention, with the aim of reconstructing meaning, to transform it or to ‘uncover' the first origin of our places of residence.
The invited artists present proposals that are born outside the confines of the museum, pieces intended to be interventions with a certain ‘social' character, in the sense that they modify the logical coordinates of perception. The Anexo, due to its unique location, has become an appropriate place for this reflection. Therefore, this project is not only about art in the urban context, or the limits of sculpture, ephemeral art or the logic of the monument, but also the relationships between museum and city, or between the artist and the work ‘carried out specifically for a place', in which the curatorial role is focused on the task of contributing new experiences to the public and the museum.
PEDRO BARATEIRO. ‘Amanhã não nasce ninguén'
In 1952, the young Guy Debord, who was to become the leading theorist of the Situationist International, presented the film ‘Hurlements en faveur de Sade" (Howls in favour of Sade), in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. The film consisted of eighty minutes of blank screen with a voice-over, reproducing lettrist and post-surrealist discourse. As well as attempting to create situations, Debord conveyed this absolute negation of cinema: since the world had been filmed, it was now up to him to transform it.
‘Lamentos en favor de Sade' was the first of a series of films that made up the filmography of a director who used the image, decontextualising it, to justify his seductive discourse. Specifically, the transformation of the message -together with the image-, the visual and textual appropriation that occurs in ‘The Society of the Spectacle' (1973) and in ‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni' (1978) (We spin around the night consumed by the fire), or the spectator's ‘merciless' critique, are some of the reasons why Debord has had the most direct influence on Pedro Barateiro's work.
Pedro Barateiro's films are inseparable from his exhibition career, in that they underlie an interest in researching the construction of overlapping meaning starting from the appropriation of images or texts. His photographs, collages and drawings are reconstructions of discourses and reflections on the representation of time and space, theorised by Debord, Gertrude Stein and Henri Lefebvre, some of the authors most cited by the artist. He seems to want to omit the author to speak the language, the images, and has already stated that the death of the author is linked to the birth of the reader/spectator.
For this exhibition at MARCO, Pedro Barateiro presents Amanhã não nasce ninguém, a video installation that brings together many of the concerns that characterise his work. The set includes a film in 16 mm transferred to DVD, a musical composition made specifically by Manuel Mota (Lisbon, 1970), a poster and a piece of sculpture - a 'constructed' cinema - to house the screening. In both the film and the statement that lends itself as the title for the intervention, Amanhã não nasce ninguém, which becomes visible in the poster that completes the project, a paradox can be seen between past and future, a debate linked to the modernity assumed in the wake of capitalism and the industrial revolution. The film shows one of the artist's strongest visual references, an inactive shipyard in the Lisnave area (Margueira), which was used as a starting point for the project.
The bond between that great void represented by the industrial cemetery of Lisnave and the Port of Vigo (one of the city's economic foundations) is made through the film construction, with a circular narrative that combines black and white images of both places. The viewer configures a new social and ethical space on the basis of the images, which ‘sculpt time' with the support of the musical composition.
The dead and deserted place (compared with the dynamic activity of a working shipyard) stands as a representation of the time, shown in the film and sound structure, which alternate moments of calm with moments of energy. The representation of the physical space by means of the sculpture is an allusion to the possibility of achieving that vital experience of space which, according to Henri Lefebvre (The production of space, 1974), is missing in films.
Agar Ledo Arias
Exhibition curator
Curator
Agar Ledo
Agar Ledo is Chief Curator of the MARCO Vigo, where she has directed and curated the museum exhibition program for the last decade. She has curated exhibitions by artists Ánxel Huete, Grace Schwindt, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Patricia Esquivias, Pedro Barateiro, Carlos Bunga and Diego Santomé, among other proposals focused on the analysis of the cultural production in Galicia and the social and political implications around artistic practices. Ledo has a Master’s Degree in Museology and training residencies at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK), Le Consortium (Dijon), Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and ICI-Independent Curators International (New York). Her professional career has lead her to work at CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 1998-2004), Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña, 2005) and at the first edition of BIACS (Seville, 2004-2005), in which she worked as exhibitions coordinator under the guidance of one of the most far-sighted curators and art historians on the 20th Century: Harald Szeemann. She regularly writes texts for specialised publications and is member of the Grial magazine editorial board. She collaborates as a teacher in some of the post-graduate courses at the University of Vigo (MD in Contemporary Art, Creation and Research, 2016-2017) and at the University of Santiago de Compostela (University Expert in Cultural Management, 2015-2017; MD in Art, Museology and Contemporary Critic, 2008-2012).
