‘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