Alexandra do Carmo by Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea

ALEXANDRA DO CARMO

ALEXANDRA DO CARMO Alexandra do Carmo nasceu em Portugal em 1966, vive e trabalha actualmente em Nova Iorque, estudou no AR.CO em Lisboa, no Pratt Institute em Brooklyn e frequêntou o Whitney Museum Independent Study Program em Nova Iorque, recentemente esteve em residência no Irish Museum of Modern Art em Dublin. Tem realizado exposições em Portugal e no estrangeiro; nos Estados Unidos da América, Alemanha, Espanha e Irlanda. O seu trabalho fáz parte de colecções privadas e publicas como por exemplo o Irish Museum of Modern Art em Dublin e a Fundação Ilidio Pinho no Porto. Em Nova Iorque é representada pela galeria Art projects International e em Lisboa pela Galeria Carlos Carvalho. A artista tem como principal objecto de estudo o atelier, utiliza desenho, instalação, video, fotografia, e performance numa investigação sobre a dinâmica da autoria. Quando analisado sob uma perspectiva geral, o seu trabalho em desenho, performance, vídeo e/ou áudio e instalação, tem vindo a ser desenvolvido em estreita relação com o papel do artista como agente cultural numa complexa relação com o público. Com base no espaço de ateliêr (o espaço de trabalho do artista; em termos conceptuais e prácticos é utilizado como recurso e espaço de apresentação) procura levantar questões relacionadas com a autoria. Cada projecto debruça-se sobre uma área diferente desta relação como campo de estudo, sendo que o projecto mais recente, Office/Commercial (2007), explora a transformação de espaços de negócios (manufactura) em ateliers de artista na cidade de Nova Iorque.

Alexandra do Carmo (b.1966) is a practicing Portuguese artist based in New York. She studied at AR.CO in Lisbon, Pratt institute in Brooklyn and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, recently she was in residence at The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. She has exhibited widely in Portugal and internationally in the USA, Germany, Spain and Ireland. Her work is part of private and public collections such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and Ilidio Pinho Foundation in Porto. She is afiliated with Art Projects International in New York and Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art in Lisbon. Alexandra do Carmo’s practice is focused on the studio as a conceptual field of study, she employs drawing, installation, video, photography and performance in an investigation of the dynamics of authorship.

TUDO FOI CAPTURADO (ATร OS MOVIMENTOS DO CABRITO)

2011 30 desenhos, grafite, lรกpis de cor e texto impresso sobre papel, 49 x 33 cm 30 drawings, pencil, color pencil and printed text on paper, 49 x 33 cm

REPRESENTAÇÕES DE UMA COMUNIDADE DE

experiência entre os artistas e o público, entendido este como o que se cruza intencionalmente com a arte – caso de The Steamshop (or the painter’s studio) ou de A willow (or without Godot), ambos de 2006 – ou casualmente – como em Office/Commercial, de 2009. Que significam hoje as memórias daqueles que Os meios empregues no projecto agora apresentado na passaram pela Galeria Quadrum ao longo dos seus Quadrum são comuns a vários outros seus trabalhos: vinte e três anos de existência? Como trabalhar as uma investigação de campo que procura auscultar condições prévias que envolvem a ideia “Galeria uma situação previamente eleita e que se suporta Quadrum”? Ignorá-las e construir algo através da em registos audiovisuais (neste caso apenas áudio) neutralização operativa do seu passado e da sua de carácter documental; uma prática de desenho, de história ou, pelo contrário, tomar o contexto como carácter intensivo e serial, que se baseia nos dados matéria e incorporá-lo no processo de criação de um entretanto recolhidos e trabalhados; e uma hipertrabalho a ser aí apresentado? Alexandra do Carmo optou pela consciência (auto-responsabilizadora) do artista enquanto espécie de “deslocador” dos modos de última hipótese, dado que o seu projecto se elabora percepção da situação inicialmente escolhida como justamente a partir do levantamento de memórias associadas ao lugar. No entanto, mais do que como, a matriz condutora de todo o projecto. Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito) primeira pergunta talvez deva ser porquê, e uma das primeiras respostas é esta: quando assumiu a direcção desenvolve-se, então, em dois momentos distintos: da Quadrum, em 2009, a Câmara Municipal de Lisboa uma gravação sonora que regista depoimentos recolhidos por Alexandra do Carmo a autores e – sua proprietária de sempre – decidiu revitalizá-la ou espectadores das actividades promovidas pela mantendo quer o seu programa funcional quer o Quadrum sob a direcção de Dulce d’Agro, que pode ser nome pelo qual escutada na pequena antecâmara de acesso à antiga ficou conhecida. Ambos, note-se, definidos na sala do acervo da Galeria, agora transformada em origem não pelo Município, mas sim por Dulce sala de estar para o efeito; e uma série de desenhos, d’Agro, a artista menor que se transformou numa realizados pela artista a partir dos elementos visuais das mais importantes galeristas do país quando, em e das ideias presentes nos depoimentos, afixados 1973, propôs à Câmara utilizar o (primeiramente directamente e em sequência linear na parede poente concebido como) restaurante de apoio ao conjunto do espaço expositivo principal. A aparência de todo dos Coruchéus para aí realizar exposições de «arte moderna». A condição da Galeria Quadrum enquanto o recinto é a de vazio: os desenhos estão dispostos espaço expositivo dos mais investidos de significados na parede que menos capta a atenção do espectador quando se acede à galeria, e os depoimentos no panorama nacional, ainda bem apenas podem ser escutados através de auriculares arreigados nas memórias de várias gerações de instalados na sala posterior preparada para o efeito. Os artistas, críticos, curadores, ou historiadores, parece depoimentos registam as impressões de pois ser um dado incontornável tanto na intencional várias pessoas sobre obras, performances ou outros revalorização (neste sentido, quase patrimonial) acontecimentos que tenham marcado presença preconizada pela nova gestão municipal, como na na Quadrum, sobretudo ao longo das décadas de capacidade de atracção que o “assunto” Quadrum é 1970 e de 1980. Do que nos é dado ouvir, realçam-se capaz de exercer hoje sobre uma nova geração de diferentes experiências perceptivas. Por exemplo, a artistas e investigadores. Tudo isto vem a propósito do interesse que Alexandra visualidade de algumas descrições: «[...] ela terminava do Carmo tem vindo a manifestar pelos modos através por, ao longo do seu braço, cravar espinhos de rosas, definindo por assim dizer uma linha que ia desde o dos quais se pode construir uma comunidade de EXPERIÊNCIA Catarina Rosendo

ombro, ou praticamente do ombro, até ao pulso.» Ou as reacções do público: «[...] de repente cria-se um estado de tensão na audiência...»; «[...] tudo foi captado, o olhar das pessoas, o interrogar, a forma como elas falavam sobre aquilo que estavam a ver [...]». Ou a sensação de novidade: «[...] era uma instalação e eu ainda não sabia que isso existia»; «[...] estar finalmente a ver uma pintura em dimensões grandes... foi das primeiras vezes que eu vi artistas meus conterrâneos a fazerem as dimensões que eu via no estrangeiro». Ou a consciência do corpo como medida de aferição: «[...] eles definiam um desenho abstracto no espaço, que iria um braço e tal para cima do olhar do espectador e outro braço e tal para baixo do olhar do espectador e abrangia dois braços abertos com grande largueza, portanto quem chegasse ao pé muito simplesmente sentia que fazia parte». O tom dos vários depoimentos é enunciativo e explicativo e, ao editar o material sonoro, Alexandra do Carmo procurou que as diferentes vozes se sucedessem numa cadência de pequenas narrativas separadas por silêncios espaçosos o suficiente para se manterem autonomizadas umas das outras e, ao mesmo tempo, interligadas no fio condutor do universo visual e das sensações que descrevem. Por sua vez, os desenhos apresentam, na parte inferior, frases impressas retiradas dos depoimentos e seleccionadas pela artista por condensarem, a seu ver, as ideias centrais desenvolvidas por cada um dos entrevistados. O resto do papel (exceptuando as raras ocasiões em que está vazio) é ocupado por desenhos elaborados a lápis (de grafite e cor) com uma leveza de traço que roça a invisibilidade, produzindo representações visuais de elementos (ideias ou objectos) retirados das narrativas e localizados, no desenho, nos olhos de figuras humanas que encaram directamente o espectador que, hoje, se posiciona fisicamente no espaço da Galeria Quadrum e observa os desenhos. Existem quatro momentos marcantes, transformadores dos dados iniciais eleitos pela artista, ao longo deste trabalho que parte de uma dada realidade (os acontecimentos passados da Quadrum) para uma construção simbólica que

retém as características de adensamento subjectivo presentes não apenas nas memórias em si mesmas como também no seu processo de comunicação: em primeiro lugar, a gravação sonora dos depoimentos, com o seu carácter documental de registo o mais neutro possível, não obstante a artista ter solicitado aos entrevistados lembranças específicas de obras concretas; depois, a selecção de excertos para a peça áudio, procurando maximizar a componente comunicativa das experiências vividas mas abstractizando ao limite os referentes mais imediatos (cada obra mencionada e o seu respectivo autor surgem-nos, na prática, “sem título” e “anónimo”); a seguir, um segundo afinamento selectivo que depurou os excertos em ideias, emoções, ou objectos que surgem nos desenhos através de frases impressas; finalmente, a recriação e presentificação visual desses elementos através do desenho. Apesar da série de desenhos se suceder no tempo à gravação sonora, no espaço expositivo ambas funcionam numa complementaridade circular e reenviam-se uma à outra numa constante transformação dos efeitos narrativos e imagéticos diferentemente explorados pelos códigos de percepção específicos ao som, à escrita e ao desenho, e também pelas suas formas próprias de inter-relacionamento e modos mais ou menos inatos de atenção. Duas características reforçam esta complementaridade entre os desenhos e o registo sonoro, das quais a mais evidente é a sequência espacial dos desenhos que repete a sucessão temporal da gravação. A outra é a assunção do «erro», como lhe chama Alexandra do Carmo, que surge de forma recorrente no seu trabalho. Neste caso, os diversos erros, explícitos nos desenhos através de linhas interrompidas e rasuradas, perspectivas enviesadas e proporções enganadas, etc., funcionam como prolongamentos do registo oral, com as suas interjeições, hesitações de pensamento, correcções de ideias e repetições de palavras que à artista interessou deixar presentes nas gravações. Até o título deste projecto, Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito), pretende deixar clara a margem de erro própria aos processos rememorativos e que extravasa para os desenhos no acto de os fazer. A frase é retirada de um dos depoimentos e o cabrito em questão é na realidade

a burra que fez parte da performance Caretos de João Vieira, apresentada com um conjunto de pinturas em 1984. Este engano nunca é clarificado no desenvolvimento da obra, bastando à artista evidenciar a contradição introduzida através de um segundo depoimento que menciona outro animal. A relevância do erro no trabalho de Alexandra do Carmo prende-se com uma ideia de experimentação directamente vinculada aos processos de comunicação e à imediatez do fazer. Neste caso, como em muitos outros na sua obra, o que está em causa é uma investigação sobre as modalidades (ou, ainda antes destas, sobre a possibilidade) de contacto das experiências artísticas com uma determinada audiência. Não é por acaso, com efeito, que não lhe interessaram as histórias, sempre frequentes quando se evoca o tema da Quadrum, sobre o papel e a personalidade da sua directora, Dulce d’Agro, mas sim as narrativas das experiências vividas por quem participou, assídua ou esporadicamente, nas actividades da galeria e, sobretudo, a possibilidade de transmissão dessas narrativas num lapso temporal que chega a cobrir mais de trinta anos. Um aspecto importante dos depoimentos recolhidos por Alexandra do Carmo é o facto de eles se reportarem a memórias que permaneceram vívidas por via dos seus efeitos de espanto, novidade, choque ou derrisão, todos eles índices do carácter experimental e participativo das propostas artísticas referidas por cada um dos entrevistados, fossem elas uma performance envolvendo sangue (A hot afternoon 3, de Gina Pane, em 1978), a condução do espectador ao interior da obra pela quase total obstrução do espaço de circulação da galeria (Corredor, de Ana Vieira, em 1982), uma pedra rolada pousada no chão (Trajecto dum corpo, de Alberto Carneiro, em 1977), a profanação do espaço da galeria por via da cultura popular (Caretos, de João Vieira, em 1984), ou a alteração das escalas comuns à pintura até então vista em salões portugueses (a exposição de António Sena, em 1975). Uma das questões que este projecto levanta (e que se relaciona intimamente com os sucessivos reptos que, ao longo dos

anos, a artista tem vindo a lançar aos modos de funcionamento da noção – comunitária – de audiência) é o de saber de que modo as opções estéticas de um determinado momento, moldadas como são por representações individuais e institucionais de diversa índole, interagem com outros aspectos de uma dada sociedade na criação do seu património cultural. As estórias captadas por Alexandra do Carmo reportam-se a alguns dos episódios mais intensos vividos pelo público da Quadrum. Cada uma das pequenas narrativas pessoais reflecte, pela contiguidade dos pormenores descritos e dos significados implícitos, um tipo mais abrangente de percepção e recepção da arte que constrói uma consciência partilhada, comunal, das experiências vividas. Entendidas na sua globalidade, as narrativas em causa testemunham uma fundamental alteração nos hábitos visuais introduzidos na época pela programação da galeria, se não tanto por via da sua radicalidade, seguramente pela regularidade. Mais do que contribuir para introduzir a renovação dos meios de produção artística, o estatuto diferenciado da Quadrum configura-se num rompimento com tipologias expositivas e críticas ainda demasiado dependentes, no nosso contexto, da pintura e da (até então quase inexistente) escultura portuguesas. Maria Nobre Franco, que nos anos 1980 viria a dirigir outra das galerias mais consequentes do nosso tecido institucional (a EMI – Valentim de Carvalho), transmite de forma lapidar no seu depoimento aquele que seria porventura o sentimento mais comum entre o público das exposições da Quadrum: «eu não estava habituada a ver uma exposição assim.» Outras galerias procuraram romper com a tradição artística, muito embora de forma mais errática ou, quando mais consistente (caso da Buchholz, dirigida por Rui Mário Gonçalves sensivelmente entre 1965 e 1974), sem beneficiarem da visibilidade em torno da experimentação e dos novos meios que o período pós-revolucionário veio a imprimir no contexto português. Nenhuma outra galeria comercial portuguesa pode ser tão legitimamente recordada como espaço de promoção dos mais diversos experimentalismos, sobretudo no tempo,

situado entre o pós-25 de Abril de 1974 e o início da década de 1980, em que surgiam associados a uma ideia de “vanguarda” que era, muito por via de alguns autores que em dado momento surgiram ligados à própria Quadrum (caso de Ernesto de Sousa), um conceito incontornável de aferição valorativa das práticas artísticas. Os depoimentos recolhidos por Alexandra do Carmo permitem entender hoje como um determinado tempo se pensou a si mesmo. Transcendem involuntariamente a experiência individual para construírem, no seu conjunto, uma experiência histórica das mais relevantes do contexto artístico português, expondo a sua estrutura de sentido de modo mais enfático do que uma qualquer “história oficial” da Quadrum (impossibilitada pela inexistência de um arquivo documental acessível à investigação) conseguiria fazer. Não admira, então, que nenhum entrevistado se tenha referido a obras ligadas à pintura informalista francesa ou à arte cinética que, nos três primeiros anos de existência da galeria, formaram o seu principal eixo programático e expositivo. São memórias que o tempo tornou irrelevantes para a actualidade da Quadrum e, sobretudo, para a criação dos novos modos de ver e de participar nas manifestações artísticas. Ao mesmo tempo, é sintomático que as descrições captadas pela artista se foquem ora em pormenores técnicos muito concretos (a altura de um papel de cenário suspenso, a quantidade de fardos de palha espalhados pelo chão, a extrema liquidez de uma tinta escorrente), ora nas emoções fortes e sensações viscerais causadas por alguns dos trabalhos. Ausente está a ambição, por um lado, de fornecer uma explicação detalhada e acabada das obras que se mencionam e, por outro, de elaboração sobre os significados do visto ou vivido. Esta interiorização da importância da experiência subjectiva, sinal de uma noção mais real do que académica acerca do papel do espectador na construção dos (múltiplos) sentidos das obras em causa, revela, finalmente, um tipo de percepção artística que as propostas expositivas da Quadrum ajudaram, decerto, a criar (ou pelo menos a consolidar) no contexto cultural português.

* A dado momento, Alexandra do Carmo escreve nas suas notas de trabalho: «[uma] galeria que serviu de palco à experimentação»; «esta galeria era quase um ateliê». Estas ideias esclarecem a dimensão experimental das várias actividades decorridas na Quadrum enquanto prolongamento do lugar de ensaio associado ao espaço tradicional do ateliê e enquanto elaboração da obra de arte numa condição de abertura a uma dada audiência, o público da galeria. Tal como a intenção de deixar explícitos os erros nos seus desenhos, também esta noção de ateliê enforma, para Alexandra do Carmo, uma interrogação em torno das práticas artísticas entendidas como zona franca capaz de gerar, mais do que um discurso, um processo de comunicação construído em tempo real, estabelecido entre o artista e o público, em redor das representações simbólicas. Trata-se, como muitas das práticas post-studio têm vindo a evidenciar, de trabalhar no interior de uma dada comunidade, mais do que trabalhar para ela. A elaboração e a instalação do projecto de Alexandra do Carmo são, a este respeito, elucidativas: a obra apresentada agora na Quadrum realiza um trajecto que parte dos locais de trabalho dos entrevistados (onde os depoimentos foram captados) e que «serviram de ateliê temporário» à artista (conforme ela regista nas suas anotações), para chegar ao próprio espaço expositivo a que esses depoimentos se referem, sob a forma de gravações e desenhos, ambos com um nível de rarefacção referencial e objectual que faz com que a galeria surja ocupada como se não houvesse nada para ver, apenas pistas para algo fazer. É este, justamente, o papel do público que hoje acede à Galeria Quadrum e encontra Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito). Referindose aoprimeiro da série de desenhos que ocupam a sala principal, Alexandra do Carmo escreveu nas suas notas: «começar pelo desenho de uma audiência, poderia ser no teatro». Está aqui aberto o caminho para uma encenação narrativa em que se procura trazer ao público de hoje, que visita uma exposição que se constrói a partir da memória de outras exposições que aí tiveram lugar no passado, a consciência de um determinado modo de ver e de perceber as práticas artísticas tal como elas aconteceram no decurso dos anos mais profícuos da Quadrum. Aqui,

em causa, está uma confrontação de dois tempos distintos quanto aos modos de recepção da arte (mais do que ao nível das suas formas de produção): como pode o espectador de hoje entender as experiências da diferença e da novidade vividas por essa audiência que Alexandra do Carmo procurou captar, familiarizado como está com a pesquisa dos meios, a construção discursiva, a desmaterialização, a indistinção disciplinar, os modelos de participação, os questionamentos identitários, etc., que enformam já, de certo modo, o repertório clássico que integra o mais vasto contexto actual de institucionalização da experimentação? Pode tratar-se, em suma, da tentativa de constituição de um novo espectador, historicamente consciente da sua função e, em boa medida, desperto para o facto de tanto os públicos de ontem como os de hoje se manterem largamente circunscritos a uma audiência especializada (quer dizer, detentora de uma determinada cultura visual), não obstante a (relativa) massificação dos consumos no que à arte diz respeito e os esforços das instituições culturais (desde logo através dos serviços educativos dos museus) em alargar o grau de penetração das práticas artísticas nas comunidades em que se inserem. A própria impossibilidade, no decurso da pesquisa conduzida por Alexandra do Carmo, em localizar outras pessoas ligadas às actividades da Quadrum que não artistas, coleccionadores, galeristas e outros profissionais do meio, é eloquente, não só por caracterizar exemplarmente os públicos de então, mas também por sugerir as possibilidades reais de públicos nos dias de hoje. Os desenhos elaborados pela artista articulam-se neste confronto entre as duas audiências presentes na exposição: a de antes e a actual. Colocando-se no cerne de algumas das questões associadas à transmissão da experiência, os desenhos propõem-se mediar um conjunto de representações desgastadas pelo tempo e às quais a artista imprimiu um segundo nível de erosão, ao fragmentar as memórias dos espectadores originais das actividades da Quadrum em elementos pouco significativos por si só: uma cadeira, um burro, uma pedra. A articulação destes

elementos com os textos/legendas que correm por baixo, bem como a sua localização nos olhos dos «personagens» (outra expressão usada pela artista) que fitam o espectador de hoje, operam uma ligação imediata quer com a sua origem (os depoimentos) quer com o seu destino (o público actual). O olhar (uma das representações visuais mais simbolicamente investidas) é mesmo, nas anotações da artista, o «palco» onde esta «passagem no tempo» se clarifica. A artista referencia também o desenho como o lugar para a criação da «ficção» e o texto como abertura à «poesia» (porquanto não lhes interessa ser “ilustração”, mas tão só “sugestão”), marcando a sua intenção em possibilitar uma «nova realidade» aberta ao «diálogo sobre a essência da produção da obra partilhada com o espectador». Através das três temporalidades implicadas neste trabalho (o tempo passado dos acontecimentos, a transmissão dos acontecimentos através das descrições orais e os desenhos construídos a partir dessas descrições), elabora-se um quarto momento, concretizado no decurso da exposição: o do espectador circulando pela galeria, observando os desenhos e escutando os depoimentos. No limite, aquela audiência que Alexandra do Carmo define no primeiro desenho da série, «que poderia ser no teatro» acaba também por se constituir como espectadora do teatro que se desenrola à sua frente, onde o público actual ocupa o espaço da galeria como se de um palco se tratasse. Nesta espécie de teatro épico brechtiano, não se ambiciona menos do que, ainda de acordo com as notas de trabalho da artista, a «criação de um espaço que se dedique a despertar o futuro espectador», exigindo deste um «compromisso permanente» com o próprio artista no acto de experimentar a obra e de consagrar uma comunidade de experiência.

REPRESENTATIONS OF A COMMUNITY OF EXPERIENCE Catarina Rosendo What do the memories of those who visited the Galeria Quadrum over its twenty-three year life mean? How can the previous conditions that encompassed the concept of the “Galeria Quadrum” be worked? Should they be ignored, and then build something new on the operational neutralization of the past and its history, or contrastingly, should their context be used as material in the creation process of a work to be shown there? Alexandra do Carmo has chosen the latter; her project is elaborated precisely on the collection of memories associated with the place. However, perhaps the first question to ask is not how, but why, and one of the initial answers is this: when it took over the direction of Quadrum in 2009, Lisbon town council â€“ the owner of the premises from the start â€“ decided to revitalize it and also keep both its working programming and the name for which it became known. Neither, incidentally, were defined by the town council, but rather by Dulce d’ Agro, the lesser-known artist who became one of the most important gallery owners in the country after she proposed in 1973 that the council use the restaurant (as it had originally been conceived) that served the CoruchÃ©us complex to hold “modern art” exhibitions. The position of the Galeria Quadrum as one of the most significant exhibition spaces in the national scene, one that is still firmly enshrined in the memories of several generations of artists, critics, curators, and historians, seems thus to be almost inevitable both from its purposeful revitalization (in this sense, verging on patrimonial) conceived by the new council management, and from the appeal that the “subject” of Quadrum still exerts today over a new generation of artists and researchers. This all comes from Alexandra do Carmoâ€™s interest in the ways a community of experience can be constructed between artists and the public, the latter being understood as an entity that intentionally seeks out art â€“ as in the case of The

Steamshop (or the painterâ€™s studio) or A willow (or without Godot), both from 2006 and â€“ to a lesser extent â€“ in Office/Commercial, from 2009. The methods employed in the current project presented at Quadrum are common to several of her other works: a field inquiry that looks to examine a previously selected situation and that is supported by audiovisual records (in this case only audio) of a documentary nature; an intensive and serial drawing practice based on the information from the recorded interviews that is collected and worked on; and the artist’s (self-responsible) hyper-awareness as a kind of “dislocator” of the ways of seeing the situation that was the initial basis of the whole project. Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito) [Everything was captured (even the movements of the goat)] happens in two distinct moments: a sound recording of statements collected by Alexandra do Carmo from the creators and spectators of the activities that took place at Quadrum under the direction of Dulce d’ Agro, that can be listened to in the small hall preceding the Gallery’s old deposit space, now transformed into a living room for the presentation; and a series of drawings made by the artist based on the visual elements and on the ideas in the statements, pinned in a straight line along the West wall of the main exhibition space. The effect of the space is one of emptiness: the drawings are arranged along the wall that least calls the attention of spectators as they enter the gallery, and the statements can only be heard through headphones installed in the backroom set aside for the purpose. The statements record the impressions of several people about works, performances or other events that took place at Quadrum, especially over the 1970s and 1980s. Different perceptive experiences stand out from what we are given to hear. For example, the visual quality of some of the descriptions: â€œ[...] She finished by pressing rose thorns into her arm, delineating a line so to speak which went from her shoulder, or practically her shoulder, down to her wrist.” Or the reactions of the public: â€œ[...] suddenly the audience became really tense [...]â€ ; â€œ[...] it was all recorded, the way people looked, the

questioning, the way they talked about what they were seeing [...]”. Or the sensation of something new: â€œ[...] It was an installation, and I didnâ€™t know anything about that then”; â€œ[...] Finally seeing a big painting... It was one of the first times that I had seen my fellow Portuguese artists produce paintings of the size I had seen abroad”. Or the awareness of the body as measure of comparison: â€œ[...] created an abstract pattern in space, which was about an armâ€™s length higher than the viewerâ€™s eye level, and the same again below and a generous arm span in width. So when you were in front of it you basically felt like you were part of it”. Several of the statements are expressive and descriptive and, when editing the audio material, Alexandra do Carmo tried to make the different voices follow on from each other in a cadence of small narratives separated by silences long enough for each to remain separate from the next yet, at the same time, to be interconnected through the visual thread and the sensations that they describe. In turn, the drawings themselves each bear a phrase at the foot taken from the statements which the artist has selected as condensing the central ideas of each of the interviewees are printed. The remainder of the paper (apart from the rare occasions it is empty) is taken up by drawings done in pencil (lead and coloured) with a lightness of line that verges on invisibility, creating visual representations of elements (ideas or objects) taken from the narratives and placed, in the drawing, in the eyes of human figures who directly face the spectator, now physically in the space of the Galeria Quadrum and looking at the drawings. There are four clear transformational moments from the initial facts chosen by the artist in this work that move from a given reality (past events from Quadrum) to a symbolic construction that retains the characteristics of subjective densation present not only in the memories in themselves but also in their communicative process: firstly, the sound recordings of the statements, with their documentary character that is as neutral as possible, although the

artist asked the interviewees for specific memories of actual works; then, the selection of excerpts for the audio piece, trying to maximize the communicative component of the experiences but also abstractifying the immediate referents as far as possible (each work mentioned and its respective creator is given as “untitled” and “anonymous”); then there is a second selective refinement that isolated the excerpts into ideas, emotions, or objects that arise in the drawings through the printed phrases; finally, the recreation and visual presentation of these elements through the drawing. Although the series of drawings follows on temporally from the recording, both function in the exhibition space in a circular complementarity and refer to each other in a constant transformation of the illustrated and narrative effects differently explored by the specific codes of perception for the sound, the written word and the drawing, and also by their own forms of inter-relationship and more or less innate forms of attention. Two characteristics reinforce this complementarity between the drawings and the recording, the most evident of which is the spatial sequencing of the drawings that repeats the temporal succession of the recording. The other is the acceptance of “error”, as Alexandra do Carmo calls it, that recurs throughout her work. In this case the variety of errors, clear in the drawings in their broken and crossed out lines, crooked perspectives and mistaken proportions etc., work as extensions of the oral pieces, with their interjections, pauses for thought, corrections of ideas and repetitions of words that the artist has chosen to leave present in the recordings. Even the title of this project, Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito), makes clear the margin of error innate to memory processes and that spills over into the drawings in the act of doing them. The phrase is taken from one of the interviews and the goat in question is actually the donkey that was part of JoÃ£o Vieiraâ€™s performance Caretos that was presented with a group of paintings in 1984. This mistake is never clarified in the development of the piece, although the artist does show the contradiction through a second statement that mentions the other animal.

The importance of error in Alexandra do Carmo’s work is tied to an idea of experimentation directly linked to communication processes and to the immediacy of action. In this case, as in many others throughout her work, what is important is an investigation into the modalities (or, even before these, into the possibility) of contact between artistic experiences and a particular audience. Her interest was not in the stories, numerous when the subject of Quadrum is raised, of the role and personality of its director, Dulce d’ Agro, but instead in the narratives of the experiences of those who took part - whether assiduously or occasionally - in the gallery’s activities and, above all, in the possibility of transmitting these narratives through a space of time that has stretched over thirty years. An important aspect of the statements collected by Alexandra do Carmo is that they record memories that are still vivid due to the feelings of fear, novelty, shock or derision, each of which is indicative of the participatory and experimental nature of the artistic proposals referred to by each of the interviewees, whether a performance involving blood (A hot afternoon 3, by Gina Pane in 1978), the leading of spectators to the interior of the work through the almost complete obstruction of the gallery circulation space (Corredor, by Ana Vieira, in 1982), a rolled stone placed on the ground (Trajecto dum corpo [Journey of a body]), by Alberto Carneiro, in 1977), the desecration of the gallery space through popular culture (Caretos, by JoÃ£o Vieira, in 1984), or the alteration of the normal scale of paintings seen until then in Portuguese exhibition spaces (AntÃ³nio Sena’s exhibition in 1975). One of the questions that this project raises (and that is intimately related to the successive challenges that over the years the artist has made to the way that the communal notion of audience works) is to examine in what way the aesthetic options of a particular moment, moulded as they are by institutional and individual representations of a varying nature, interact with other aspects of a given society in the creation of its cultural patrimony. The stories recorded by Alexandra do Carmo refer to some of the most intense episodes experienced by the Quadrum public.

Through the closeness of the details described and their implicit meanings, each of the short personal narratives reflects a broader kind of perception and reception of art that constructs a shared, communal awareness of those experiences. Understood as a whole, the narratives here show a fundamental change in visual habits that were introduced at the time through the gallery programming, if not due to its radicalism then to its regularity. More than contributing to the introduction of the renovation of methods of artistic production, Quadrum’s alternative statute configures itself in a rupture with exhibition and critical typologies that are still, in our own context, too dependent on Portuguese painting and sculpture (until then almost non-existent). Maria Nobre Franco, who in the 1980s directed another of the most influential galleries in our institutional context (the EMI â€“ Valentim de Carvalho), clearly expresses in her statement what was to be the most common reaction of the Quadrum exhibitionsâ€™ public: “I wasn’t used to seeing an exhibition like that.” Other galleries tried to break with artistic tradition, although in a more erratic way or, when more consistent (in the case of the Buchholz, under the direction of Rui MÃ¡rio GonÃ§alves between 1965 and 1974), without the benefit of the visibility of experimentation and new media that the post-revolutionary period allowed and imprinted on the Portuguese context. No other Portuguese commercial gallery can be so legitimately registered as a promotion space for the most diverse experimentation, particularly in the period between April 25th 1974 and the start of the 1980s, when it was associated with an idea of the avant-garde that was often, due to the artists who appeared in connection with Quadrum itself (as in the case of Ernesto de Sousa), an inescapable concept for valuing artistic practices. The statements collected by Alexandra do Carmo allow us today to understand how a specific period considered itself. They involuntarily transcend the individual experience to construct in their entirety one of the most relevant historical experiences of Portuguese artistic circles, showing their structure of meaning more emphatically than any other “official history” of Quadrum would have been able to do

(made impossible anyway due to the absence of any gallery records from the period). Therefore it is not surprising that none of the interviewees mentioned works connected to French Informalism paintings or to kinetic art - both of which formed the gallery’s main programming and exhibitions in its three first years of existence. These are memories that time has made irrelevant both for Quadrum’s present and, above all, for the creation of new ways of seeing and participating in artistic manifestations. At the same time, it is symptomatic that the descriptions recorded by the artist focus either on very concrete technicalities (the height of a suspended backdrop, the quantity of straw bales spread over the floor, the extreme liquidity of a paint), or on the strong emotions and visceral sensations engendered by some of the works. What is absent is the ambition, on the one hand, to supply a detailed and complete explanation of the works that are mentioned and, on the other, to elaborate on the meanings of what was seen or experienced. This internalization of the importance of the subjective experience, being the sign of a notion more real than academic of the role of the spectator in the construction of the (multiple) meanings of the works discussed, reveals eventually a kind of artistic perception that the exhibition proposals of Quadrum most certainly helped to create (or at least consolidate) in the Portuguese cultural context. * At one point, Alexandra do Carmo writes in her work notes: â€œ[a] gallery that functioned as a stage for experimentation”; “this gallery was almost a studio”. These ideas clarify the experimental dimension of the numerous activities that took place at Quadrum as an extension of the rehearsal space associated with the traditional studio space and as an elaboration of the work of art in a situation open to a particular audience, the gallery’s public. For Alexandra do Carmo, both the intention to leave the errors in her drawings explicit and this idea of a studio shape an investigation into the artistic practices understood

as a free zone, one that is able to generate not only a discussion but a communication process constructed in real time, established between the artist and the public around the symbolic representations. As many post-studio practices have shown, it is about working within a given community, more than working for it. The elaboration and installation of Alexandra do Carmo’s project are elucidatory in this respect: the work presented now at Quadrum completes a path that began in the work places of the interviewees (where the interviews were recorded) and that “served as a temporary studio” for the artist (as she has written in her notes), to arrive at the very exhibition space to which these interviews refer, in the form of recordings and drawings, both with a level of referential and objective rarefaction that make the gallery seem as if there was nothing to see, only clues for something to do. This is precisely the role of the public that today visits the Galeria Quadrum and finds Tudo foi captado (mesmo os movimentos do cabrito). Referring to the first in the series of drawings that occupy the main room, Alexandra do Carmo wrote in her notes: “start with the drawing of an audience, it could be in the theatre”. The path is here open to a narrative production in which there is an attempt to bring to the public, currently visiting an exhibition built from the memory of other exhibitions held there in the past, the awareness of a specific way of seeing and perceiving artistic practices just as they happened in Quadrum’s heyday. There is here a confrontation between two distinct eras regarding the reception of art (more than merely at the level of its production techniques): how can the spectator of today understand the sensations of difference and novelty felt by the audience that Alexandra do Carmo has tried to capture, as the former has become so familiar with media research, discourse construction, de-materialization, inter-disciplinary blurring, models of participation, questions of identity, etc., that already shape, somehow, the classical repertoire that is part of the current broad institutionalizing context of experimentation? It may be an attempt to constitute a new kind of spectator, historically aware

of their function and yet also conscious of the fact that the public, both past and present, is still largely circumscribed to a specialized audience (or rather, one that holds a certain visual culture), despite the (relative) commodification of art and the efforts of cultural institutions (particularly through museum educational services) to deepen understanding of artistic practices in the communities in which they are found. The impossibility, in the course of Alexandra do Carmoâ€™s research, of finding people connected with Quadrumâ€™s activities other than artists, collectors, gallery owners and other professionals from the field is eloquent, not only because of its exemplary characterization of the public of the times, but also because it suggests real possibilities for a public today. The drawings made by the artist articulate themselves in this confrontation between the two audiences of the exhibition: that of the past and that of the present. By placing themselves at the heart of some of the issues associated with the transmission of experience, the drawings aim to mediate between a group of representations eroded by time and on which the artist has now imprinted a second level of erosion by fragmenting the original spectators’ memories of Quadrum activities into elements with little meaning on their own: a chair, a donkey, a stone. The articulation of these elements with the texts/ captions that run underneath, and their positioning in the eyes of the “characters” (another expression used by the artist) that watch the onlooker of today, create an immediate connection with both their origin (the statements) and their destination (the current public). The gaze (one of the most symbolically vested visual representations) is, in the artist’s notes, actually the “stage” where this “passage through time” is clarified. The artist also references the drawing as the place to create “fiction” and the text as an opening to “poetry” (since none of them are interested in being “illustration”, but rather “suggestion”), marking her intention to engender a “new reality” open to “dialogue on the essence of the production of the work shared with the spectator”. Through the three temporalities involved in this work (the past

when the events took place, the transmission of the events through the oral descriptions and the drawings constructed from those descriptions), a fourth is elaborated, shaped in the course of the exhibition: that of the spectator walking through the gallery, looking at the drawings and listening to the recordings. Taken to an extreme, the audience that Alexandra do Carmo defines in her first drawing of the series, “that could be in the theatre” also ends up as spectators of the theatre unfolding before them, where the public of the present fills the gallery as if it were a stage. In this kind of Brechtian epic theatre, according to the artist’s work notes, the aim is nothing less than the “creation of a space dedicated to awakening future spectators”, demanding from them a “permanent commitment” to the artist through the act of experiencing the work and of consecrating a community of experience.

OFFICE / COMMERCIAL 2007 Vídeo, NTSC, cor, estéreo, 30’45’’ Video, NTSC, colour, stereo, 30’45’’

Série de Desenhos Lápis, lápis de cor e texto impresso s/ papel Pencil, colour pencil and printed text on paper 49,1 x 33 cm

Office/Commercial, 2007, Vídeo, NTSC, cor, estéreo, 30’45’’ Video, NTSC, colour, stereo, 30’45’’

Série de Desenhos de 2008 (da série Office / Commercial) | Lápis, lápis de cor e texto impresso s/ papel Pencil, colour pencil and printed text on paper, 49,1 x 33 cm

The Steam Shop (or the painter’s studio) | 2007 | Vídeo, NTSC, cor, estéreo, 66’46‘’ Video, NTSC, colour, stereo, 66’46‘’

Imagens da exposição na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2008

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

Imagens da exposição na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2008

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

Imagens da exposição na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2008

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

Imagens da exposição na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2008

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

ALEXANDRA DO CARMO’S PERCEPTIVE FISSURES David Barro There is a group of artists who carry out a subtle narrative, with minimal devices, with moments that are born out of patient waiting and with a tense, reflective gaze. The case of Alexandra do Carmo is one of them. Her drawings emerge like a journal capable of reflecting and reflecting on what being an artist today means, what their place is and what their difficulties are. As if it were a game, and without losing her sense of humour, Alexandra do Carmo works on communication, sounding out its possibilities until concluding its impossibility. Like in palaeontology, each step forward comes from other tiny discoveries which apparently do not mean anything and lead nowhere, but which end up making sense. In her latest works each drawing grants meaning and form to an idea. In this manner Alexandra do Carmo reveals and decodes the real world in order to multiply its possibilities. She does so using metaphorical figures such as the dinosaur and the chimpanzee, which function as writing, and take us into a sort of materialised dream, a reality that involves the first reality and reminds us of the fictional element that is hidden in both of them. When looking at her drawings, we become locked within a story almost without noticing it: the story of the artist’s diary. Immersed in a sort of circular, Borgesian ruin. As pointed out by the French philosopher Clément Rosset, in his work Le réel et son double: essai sur l‘illusion, “all duplication supposes the existence of an original and a copy, and one needs to question which of the two, the real event or the “other event”, is not really the double of the “other event”. So at the end it turns out that the real event is the “other”: the other is this real that occurs, that is, the double of another reality that might be the real itself but which always flees and about which we will never be able to say or know anything”. After all, our artist and her writing in the shape of drawing also ends up moving in a sort of Moebius strip that does not allow one to distinguish between the inside and the outside, in a seamless and endless curve, a course that insinuates but cannot totally deduce the realities, accepting them in a natural manner, as if in an incongruous

events in a sort of independent and concomitant existence. In her recent works she thinks that animal gaze – that of the chimpanzee – as light, as possibility and memory, as the passing of time that allows one to draw different phases and moments, both interior and exterior ones, clear and blurred shapes. So the marks and lines that form the fiction of the workshop in the eyes of the chimpanzee and those that form the animal figure are mixed together in a sort of Piranesian, almost magical tightrope-walking, drawing up presences and stories as it goes on building up. Like the very process of “making”, thoughts overlap and are absorbed in a sort of palimpsest. There is a past and a present, a cinematographic rhythm in the action of looking until coming to an illusion of order that comes from repetition. In the meantime, the succession of images has already formed a story, a reading. In her last work, which is the reason for this book, the drawings represent the narrative of the video in emphasising the fiction. The film itself is a performance, in this case a documentary on the artist who intends to rent an apartment in Brooklyn. The questions follow on, and everything is being filmed. In the video we are shown the whole relationship with the real estate agent, and as a backdrop we see the

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

change taking place in that area of New York City, which had previously been the home for other types of workshops, just like the development of art and the development of the space. The title – Office/Commercial – underlines that sense of spaces for rent. As always, Alexandra do Carmo uses ideas as her material. The simple, narrative will result from her reduction into a drawing, avoiding unnecessary noises, often seeking colour as a pictorial hue, being timid yet inevitably more instinctive, like a syncopated note that seeks out the delicate emphasis. If at first it was the dinosaurs, now it will be the chimpanzees who take us on a journey into the past without leaving the metaphorical present. Everything is more important than it seems. It is a matter of not losing one’s calm. Like in a music score . Let us think of the figure of the chimpanzee, dumb, upstanding, challenging the spectator like in the best performances. The spectator has to face up to that divided gaze (...). Meanwhile, the dinosaur heads from previous works insist and are repeated until they make up a landscape. Repetition, more than ever an action on memory, is associated to difference, like in the artist’s stubborn making, like that above-mentioned palimpsest of emotions

that make a time denser and do so sketching the horizon line. But let us not forget. Drawing is physical and imaginative, something that gives off a feeling of being incomplete; the simplest and most personal form of making a picture. We could think about how many artists have erased everything to try to go back to draw the story. A good therapy for correcting errors. Because the drawing has taken on a meaning as a (literary, subjective) refuge in order to narrate some current themes without overdoing it, to the point of occupying a privileged place in relation to such a spectacle. For Alexandra do Carmo, the drawing is present and, as we have stated, its set is an accumulation that acts like a daily register. We should insist on it in the same way that she insists on that performing sense of drawing. Each drawing is a past and a present, each image is the construction of a memory. Alexandra do Carmo repeats and represents sequentially in order to resemble an order that is never really that, but which only manages to be a mark, possibilities for a story told in simultaneous translation. So the notes printed on paper correspond to the presents in her videos. Past, present and future as a trajectory lead us to a story capable of functioning as a hypertext in which everything is united and

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

deconstructed, is disorganised and represented, but above all is repeated. Let us think of the theories of Michel Serres, for whom the history of science undergoes turbulence; that is, it is subjected to random connections of all kinds among several different areas. Serres points out how science moves forward through the unpredictable and the unexpected. “Both the world and objects, both bodies and my own soul are, at the moment of their birth, drifting. Drifting close to descent down the slope. And this means, as is usual, that they irreversibly become undone and die (...) The drift is the whole of time: the dawn of appearing, life limited by finiteness and disintegration, a random explosion of multiple temporalities in the infinite space” . In Alexandra do Carmo that discontinuity and indefinition, that turbulence, is the product of that continuing test, of that drawing as experience. The chimpanzee’s eyes would be a sort of interconnected link allowing an uninterrupted but broken reading, one interconnected but cut. Like an endless ‘text in movement”, it cannot be read in its physical impossibility. The spectatorreader sees before him a story told by an author-actor which is no more than a text which is only made up of alternative beginnings of texts, of fictions drawn about that camouflaged performance of gathering information. Deep down it all fits in with what Roland Barthes defined as the ‘ideal text’, thinking of an interwoven text that might constitute a type of galaxy of meanings, a reversible text. We are talking about a text that is experience and fiction, a non-linear search, often following a sort of serendipity. The reader defines and decides his path of reading, altering the centre, the start, the axis of its organization. Thus we establish a decentralised, open path, with no hierarchies. An alternative for the spectator. Moulthrop termed this “textual promiscuity”. All of the courses generated introduce different possibilities of interpretation that lead us, in the final analysis, to think of poetry. The original meanings and messages are fractured, making the reading richer through that which is called “poetic licence” semiotics. The hypertext drawn out in Office/Commercial would thus come close to a puzzle with the perceptive appearance of a zapping process, in which what is suggested is much more efficient than what is suggested by a thing, if we follow Borges. The figure of the chimpanzee, which in this case

takes on a tormented appearance, with blurred edges in which the imperceptible stands out, stands as evasion and disorientation in its distorted gesture, but also as a process; as a process of the construction of a language. I am thinking of how Samuel Beckett, in an article on Proust, points out our inclination towards the vulnerable and sensitive when we are taken out of the safe context of our daily surroundings. Alexandra do Carmo seems to wish something to emphasise something like this in many of her projects, aware of the cryptic sense of contemporary art for a non-specialised spectator, overwhelmed by doubt and attracted by that impossibility that emanates from the indiscernible and alien that it may produce, but above all obliged to make an effort, like the chimpanzee, to reach an interpretation that he ends up being unable to reach. To see, or to understand? To look at, or to read? To observe, or to interpret? How many questions might we ask ourselves about the possible reading or non-reading that the figure of the chimpanzee might take from the images? And if we, the public, are the chimpanzee, and the project is what we call art, what do we understand about that art that virtually flow from those images projected by the chimpanzee? The question posed by Alexandra do Carmo is merely that of how to communicate from the position of the artist and whether that communication is truly possible. The masked used for this search – that of the chimpanzee – may be insignificant, although in this case it is not. The chimpanzee, which is very close to the human being in its genetic make-up, is a key towards emphasising the fiction that the very act of drawing already contains within itself. Also to reveal the artist’s gaze, and, of course, a sense of humour contained in each one of these portraits-self-portraits. The fictionalised reality functions as a mirror in the eyes of that chimpanzee that ends up granting expression to a drawing that is apparently similar but which always bears the tones and marks of previous attempts and mistakes. In Alexandra do Carmo’s drawings one may read notes capable of remaining there, in the same drawing, from much before the result we see. While the spectator reads these notes he is, unwillingly, caught in the image-reflection of the chimpanzee’s eyes, as if he were involved in that same space, as the main character of the tale by Salvador Elizondo, La historia según Pao Cheng, felt: On a summer’s day the philosopher Pao Cheng sat down on the bank of a stream to foretell his destiny in

a shell of a turtle. Before the eyes of his imagination, great nations fell and small ones were born which later became great and powerful before falling in their turn. The force of his imagination was such that he felt himself walking through its streets. Through one of the windows, he could make out a man writing. Pao Cheng then looked at the sheets of paper lying on an edge of the table and as he went on deciphering the meaning of what was written in them his face clouded over. “This man is writing a story”, he said to himself. “The story is called La historia según Pao Cheng and it is about a philosopher from the olden times who one day sat on the bank of a stream and thought about… Then if I am a memory of hat man and if that man forgets me, will I die?” We, or rather our illusion, is what operates in this redoubled world; this is done so up to the point that, like Pao Cheng, we can no longer distinguish between realities and appearances. If we think of Alexandra do Carmo’s work in a retrospective manner, some keys to it are revealed. If in Office/Commercial (2007/2008) she explores the transformation of spaces, in A willow (or without Godot) (2006) it is the spectator’s behaviour that is seen, taking Beckett’s well-known play as a starting

point. In previous works the creative process (untitled drawings, 2006); the literal and symbolic creation of a workshop by the artist and other workers using the specific language of art to question virtual proximities (Argon Corporation, 2004/2005); the immodest gaze of a spectator at the inside of the workshop through a microscope (50 Richards, 2004); the relationship between the artists activity and that of a palaeontologist (Wild m5, 2004); or the spectator as author at the time of producing (Micron 005, 2002/2004); tell us of a concrete search: to bring the spectator close to the work, both physically and conceptually. The first approximation is obvious: whether this is looking through a microscope or forcing him to physically come close to the drawing in order to understand what is taking place inside the eyes of the chimpanzee or the motif of some dinosaur heads makes the reception physical. Meanwhile, conceptual approximation takes place almost in the opposite way: in seeking a direct confrontation a break in the discourse or the event is produced. Here the mistake, like in the act of drawing, takes place “where stating is impossible”,

Views of the exhibition Office /Commercial at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008

in the incomplete and impossible aspect of all communication, in the now metaphorical difficulty that flows from the choice of the animal itself. In Office/Commercial it is not the first time she has approached the complexity of the idea of the artist’s workshop. Before, for example, the deconstruction of the essence of the workshop took its starting point in Courbet’s painting (The Painter’s Studio) in order to reformulate the notions of the public and the private and the new models of postproduction and representation. With her shiftings, Alexandra do Carmo makes her attitude political, seeking to intervene on the social sphere in a critical manner, showing and granting greater presence to the process. And always from anthropological performances and collective field work capable of uniting the non-artistic social aspect with the specifically artistic one. Deep down this underlines a deconstructive style that we may compare to some words by Italo Calvino: “Kublai Khan had stated that Marco Polo’s cities were alike, as if moving from one to another did not involve a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city that Marco described to him, the Great Khan’s mind went off of its own accord, and dismantled the city bit by bit, rebuilt it in a different way, replacing ingredients, displacing them and inverting them. Marco went on referring to his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening to him and interrupted him”. And there is a great deal of interruption in Alexandra do Carmo’s drawings, although it is in order to move forward. They are drawings that appear to be suspended, in a sort of almost thrilling product of going through the mirror as a form of experience, as we will see further on. Limits, balances and tensions, everything inviting one to penetrate it with the aim of coming across the true depth of an image that is always the same but always different. Deep down, Alexandra do Carmo is interested in taking detours and disseminating meanings. There is a search for effort in interpretation,

an active participation capable of restating the idea of an art capable of functioning as a science of knowledge. This is the reason for her ambivalences, her games of differences in what is apparently the same, her search for singularity in the similar. All of Alexandra do Carmo’s drawings remain open, and thus accept and inherit the universe of mistaken marks from her previous attempts, seeking the essence of that hand that draws in feeling out possibilities. In Alexandra do Carmo it will always be difficult to have access to the image because the present always emerges as a presence in the suspended gaze. In a certain manner Alexandra do Carmo rushes into a challenge of rigid conventional order and proposes the disorder of poetry, or, which is the same, the random and exception. But it seems to me that this poetic disorder comes from a mental order, from an image that starts to experience variations and crossing in a manner similar to that of fantasies or dreams. The mental image is distinguished here from the mental scheme in which she keeps the visual traces necessary to recognise a thing or a place; in this case the search for a studio may turn into an obsessive view of previous levels that little by little we deform and shape to our liking. They are virtual images, dominating forces that have a lot to do with the psychic, impressions of similarity or of analogy that may manage to be simple mental constructions. Perhaps for this reason Deleuze wonders, “Is it not, in short, the definition of perception to make imperceptible forces perceptible to the senses, the forces that populate our world, which directly affect us, which make us perceptible?” The artist’s fantasy may be found there. And it is in that sort of imperceptible fantasies that Alexandra do Carmo manipulates her structural bases in order to uncover her particular view, disturbing all distinction between the real and the virtual, without betraying her fidelity to some conceptual presuppositions that remain firm, dealing with democratising aesthetic experience through forcing the idea of an active spectator.

As I was stating, Alexandra do Carmo’s work offers a certain resistance. It emerges there were the meaning still lives without being flattened by the image. The patient gaze unveils that first ambiguity and generates a kaleidoscope of possibilities in one’s gazing, as Berger points out so clearly. Alexandra do Carmo imitates the process of seeing and only thus is it possible to discover her intentions. Everything becomes obvious when she draws the head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a thin orange marker pen, a head that is not recognisable at first sight, which leads us to a virtual, ambiguous landscape. Once the head has been recognised the doubts as to how to interpret it remain, with form and meaning never seeming to come together. Robert Knafo explains this with some feeling: “What I see as interesting in this is that some aesthetic projects of disruption or of radical redirecting, of that liaison between form and meaning can produce very different results: some art provokes a sort of semiological dyspepsia; it seems to actively frustrate understanding and appears arbitrary, or even perverse, impermeable to interpretation. On the other hand, artistic instances and strategies like those of Alexandra do Carmo, even when they are disorientating, may at the same time seem thrilling, reverberating and stimulating; instead of raising up an impenetrable wall, throw open a series of doors and windows that is greater than usual” . Alexandra do Carmo fractures and decomposes the meaning, effectively multiplying it and even exploding it like Lewis Carroll’s Alice: “In another moment Alice was through the glass and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room (…) Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimneypiece had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.” Carroll’s words are particularly revealing of the leaps that the image also undertakes with Alexandra

do Carmo, although in her everything is turned into something more subtle, into a palaeontological poetry that is born out of the note, the indication and of insistence. Deep down it is a matter of producing meaning by showing the fiction and the gaze as a product of time. Like in her chimpanzees, the artist’s reality precedes the image, and the latter precedes the meaning that the spectator may be able to assign to the group of drawings that acts as a set. Just as in the overall set of her work there is a conscious process of absorption of forms and contents, involving the spectator in that process of creating the product, although it may be a performance, in order to seek a direct relationship, the creation in symbiosis that would traditionally only be the function of the artist and now has cut short the distances. Therefore she attempts to strip creation and grant music to these ideas, which more than ever are the material for action. In Alexandra do Carmo’s work everything seems simple although it is a product of an analysis of the complexity connected to the visual. Thus questions referring to alterity, to repetition, to the process, to error, to reception and, in short, to the imperfect act of creating and the difficult position of the creator as the generator of meaning – all this is hidden in each one of her drawings, videos or performances. They are perceptive fissures that positively draw a lost identity.

Série de Desenhos de 2008 (da série Office / Commercial) | Lápis, lápis de cor e texto impresso s/ papel Pencil, colour pencil and printed text on paper, 49,1 x 33 cm

MICRON 004 2002-2004 Performance, 1 hora Performance, 1 hour

Imagens da exposição no Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2002 Em Micron 005, uma performance realizada no Lugar Comum-Fábrica da Pólvora de Barcarena, é utilizada uma mesa estreita e comprida (6 metros), a artista apenas estabelece contacto visual com a outra pessoa. A actividade dos participantes consiste em desenhar directamente nas lentes da camâra de video, esta imagem é projectada em tempo real na parede adjacente. Estabelece-se assim uma situação onde o papel do espectador e do autor se entrecruzam; pelo acto de desenhar vendo a sua própria face ampliada, cada participante é confrontado com os seus próprios pensamentos, enquanto os revela aos outros no através do desenho.d

The performance consists of the following: in a large (12m x 10m x 4m) darkened hall, there is a long, thin table (5.4m long and 60cm wide). The artist sits at one end of the table, and members of the audience are invited to take turns sitting at the other end of the table, with a small spotlight aimed at both parties. In front of each of us is a digital camera turned towards the seated party, a small pen (micron 005), and fluid and paper for cleaning the camera lens. The cameras are attached to video projectors, which are mounted underneath the table, and project the images from both cameras side by side, with a small overlapping area, onto an adjacent wall to the size of 4.4 m x 3m. They both draw directly on

Views of the exhibition at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2002 the lenses of the cameras, with the images projected onto the adjacent wall. As the camera is aimed toward each person’s face, the lens drawing appears on top of the person’s face, the drawing is amplified by the projection. It is through the projection that the parties become connected; as their drawings overlap by one meter, one can interfere with the projected space of the other. The participants can see the ongoing results of their drawing through the camera’s small viewing screen, which is turned towards the participant. The camera is permanently on auto-focus. Each participating audience member can stay at the table for as long

as they want. On the table there are information and one instruction for the participants which is : 1. please erase the drawing before you leave the table. The length of the table prevents verbal communication. The distance between the artist and the participant is emphasized by the long and narrow dimensions of the table, which is related with the traditional scenario of the intimate moment of a couple at the dinner table. The communication, therefore, is created through the visual elements of the projection. The duration of the performance is one hour.

Imagens da exposiĂ§ĂŁo no Lugar Comum, Barcarena, Portugal 2004.

Views of the exhibition at Lugar Comum, Barcarena, Portugal 2004.

ROGGENBROT

2002 Performance 1 hora / 1 hour Stills do video número 1, apresentado em Breadmatters III, Cork Arts Center, Ireland, 2005 Stills of the video number 1, presented at Breadmatters III, Cork Arts Center, Ireland, 2005 Colaboração com Alison Knowles

O projecto Roggenbrott é composto por três projecções video; nos videos laterais podem ver-se imagens das viagens pelo rio Hudson; Manhattan-Barrytown, Barrytown-Manhattan, o audio é uma gravação de Knowles de 1995, o conteúdo refere-se ao rio Hudson e é retirado do texto de Knowles para o projecto Bread and Water do mesmo ano; neste, imagens de pão estão associadas a perfis topográficos de rios. O video central mostra o encontro entre as duas artistas e a performance realizada (o fabrico de pão).. O video investiga a produção artística em colaboração e o que significa interpretar o trabalho de um outro artista.

Roggenbrot is a video work that investigates collaborative production in art. The starting point came from Alison Knowles’ piece Bread and Water, where the two elements of the title are paralleled through images of bread that double as specific topographical profiles of rivers. For Roggenbrot, the artists baked bread together in upstate New York at Alison Knowles’ studio. The journey along the Hudson river between both artists is energised by a series of resonances -- the site of the practice is extended to other domains such as the river and the place of living. In this video, two narratives are interwoven - a static framed situation inside the studio where the artists are discussing the project and by opposition, the actual making in an outside dynamic context where the practice becomes richer.

Vista da exposição no Cork Arts Center, Ireland, 2005 View of the exhibition at Cork Arts Center, Ireland, 2005

WILD M5 Video Video 17 Desenhos 17 Drawings

Alexandra do Carmo: Time’s Archeologist by Jonathan Goodman

culture is seen as central to the art effort. The ideas inherent in such work are likely best adumbrated as language-based communications, in which the More than anything else, the New York based-artist idea of the piece takes over as the justification of its Alexandra do Carmo is an archeologist, scrutinizing meaning, rather than the sensuous given of the image memory on both a public and private plane. Her video itself. do Carmo’s art doesn’t necessarily trade on the Wild m5 and series of dinosaur drawings articulate politicization of her message, but the implications a process whereby the impact of the art has much of what she does are profoundly intellectual, and to do with the audience’s perception; the activities therefore conceptual to an extent. The brilliance of presented in the video, in which a paleontologist sifts her dinosaur series is that it is based on an extended through mud and silt while looking for such things as understanding of drawing--what mark making means. tiny teeth that would date the material being studied, Her barely visible imagery at first suggests misty enderings of what we do not easily internalize. Both mountains in the Chinese tradition; however, closer video and drawings present a specifically materialist appraisal shows the landscape to consist of specific point of view and a deeply personal reading of what dinosaur forms, for example, the head and teeth of creativity and content is capable of, very early in Tyrannosaurus rex. the 21st century. do Carmo, like many other artists working today, proceeds along oblique paths, In certain kinds of metaphorical understanding, one trusting to a degree of indirection that may make thing becomes another, which becomes another. initial understanding of her work difficult in all its There is a protean freedom in our reading of art metamorphic implications. whose intellectual basis supports, indeed encourages, multiple readings on the part of the viewer. When the Part of the struggle to understand, and in a way to notion of memory is also invoked, the interpretation complete, do Carmo’s art, stems not so much from of the image is made richer and more complex by the complications of her vision as it does from the virtue of its relationship to tradition as an environment increasingly indirect notion of creativity itself. The supporting the artist’s current efforts. In do Carmo’s context surrounding the art object has become as video Wild m5, we see a physical paleontologist sift meaningful as the artwork itself; this is because many through a small amount of dirt as he searches for the of the ideas in contemporary art are intellectually small teeth and bits of bone that will in fact date the driven, understandable only insofar as the ideas ground from which the material was taken; later in the surrounding the work are made intelligible to those video, we see larger amounts of mud, in which the viewing the object. Much art conceived of in this way hard remnants of animals are seen. If the short scenes is political by implication; there has been a steady of research are taken together, the film becomes an push to politicize the implications of art because we inspired attempt to read such activities as central to are entering an age in which the democratization of

the process of finding, even of categorizing the act of scientific research as a major way of ordering the world, of making sense of our environment. What do Carmo is after, in her powerful filmic exposition of the scientific method, is not so much an expression of the physical specifics of research (although that is a meaningful part of the video) as a sense of tradition that would bind the anthropological effort to the image-making undertaking. The search in the mud for small evidence of animals is not unlike the artist’s search for an imagery adequate to the genuine intricacies associated with living in contemporary life--the key to both endeavors is a sense of history, no matter whether literal, as occurs in the video, or oblique, as intimated by the artist’s efforts to forge a new vision based on the past. (...) For many reasons, memory is crucial to do Carmo’s understanding of art and tradition. The scientific process attempts to quantify the past, while the artist’s psyche is driven to interpret it, yet the point of the artist’s work is that the two processes are not so different from each other as might seem at first. The viewer is also an important part of the equation, as he or she completes do Carmo’s task of presenting processes and images in time. Research may be a central part of the artist’s equation, whose elements are dug out from time much as an archeologist might unearth bits of culture from dust; however, the viewer’s interpretation of what is seen depends upon how the drawing is read--as a version of the Chinese landscape, as a seamless representation of the dinosaur, or as a

comment on the nature of creativity itself, namely, the representation of something just barely visible in the imaginative landscape, in which mark making becomes a trope aimed at demonstrating the importance of the effort--searching the mud, marking the paper--in a larger quest for meaningfulness in the postmodern landscape. do Carmo’s gift to us is that she refuses to align herself with any single interpretation in particular, in part because she knows that the constraints of a single reading do not do justice to the complexity of her task. The dinosaurs in the series first read as mountainous landscapes hidden by mists; a more careful look shows that the forms are dragon’s heads and long teeth, portrayed with a subtlety and delicacy that belies the ferocity of the real-life dragons do Carmo is portraying. The artist just barely portrays the forms with an orange pen; she demands that we not only casually see the imagery but also study it for the sake of the meaning it makes upon closer scrutiny. That the images reaches toward invisibility is central to Carmo’s esthetic because absence is as important to her as the presence of form. Drawing is not only a matter of imposing form on the page; it also concerns the experience of absence or emptiness, which the artist presents as though her structures were conforming to a nearly Zen investigation of what is no longer there. That the dinosaur drawings conform to another genre, their seeming appearance as Chinese landscape, complicates do Carmo’s rhetoric, wherein the given is treated as a multiple reality. The artist’s interest in forms of the real is available to her audience in a process of becoming that implies a belief in more than one reality; this gives do Carmo her interest in

Vista da exposiĂ§ĂŁo na Sala do Veado, Lisboa, Portugal View of the exhibition at Sala do Veado, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004, view of the drawing installation,17 drawings,pen on paper

an imagery that may be applied to more than one notion of being. The complications bring out the idea of drawing as a phase of creativity; understood in its largest manifestation, drawing possesses a realism that implicates or includes its absence or anti-self. As a result the forms, which are literally taken from a child’s natural history book, participate in their own undoing. do Carmo’s esthetic, then, involves its own negation-a stance whose remarkable sophistication is understood by its very absence as form. As an audience, we are invited not only to see, but also to imagine a reality whose presence is implied as much as it is publicly stated. The video convinces us of the parallel between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of art, just as the drawings hover delicately between absence and existence; both the video and the drawings wait for completion on the part of their viewer, who internalizes the material he or she sees in a process that imitates the creativity of the artist herself. As a result, meaning is generated within the triangle of the artist relating the work to her audience, in a way that reads creativity quite democratically--as one form of information among others. This is why do Carmo spends her time filming the working paleontologist; she sees his activities as parallel to her own. Both do Carmo and the paleontologist are archeologists of time, even though the time of the mud and teeth is literal and the time of the imagined dinosaurs is figurative or metaphorical. Both activities insist on an inner integrity, through which statements about the past may be made. The dinosaurs are icons of patience, relating brilliantly to the slow, methodical work of the scientist in the film.

with such a concept. For all her art’s complexity, a simple reading, based upon democratic impulse, is capable of being just to what she does. It is an interpretation that calls attention to the meaning of observant activity: an awareness of the call of the real in actions that serve as metaphors for ways of living in the world. Consequently, do Carmo’s demand that we read her art in all its intricacy becomes in its own way a request that we suspend our judgment in favor of more sophisticated awareness--of absence, of the deeply metaphorical nature of our own actions. Drawing becomes the stand-in for creativity, such that it becomes its own reality. The play of form, based as it is upon absence and archeological awareness, is

do Carmo is unusual, even remarkable as an art artist because she insists on so much: the ability of her drawings to function as landscape and creature, the ability of her film to serve as a point of creative representation. Her largest theme is the meaningfulness of creativity, which she extends to include much more than what we usually associate

Stills do vídeo Wild M5 Stills of the video Wild M5

50 RICHARDS 50 Richards 2004 Instalação video/audio Installation video/audio 35 min loop, Location One, NY 2004. Instalação sonora criada por Paul de Jong Sound By Paul de Jong No vídeo-instalação 50 Richards apresentado no Location One em Nova Iorque, o atelier da artista (número 50 da Richards Str.) é utilizado como cenário para uma auto observação em video. Este vídeo é mostrado num pequeno monitor por debaixo das lentes de um microscópio onde o espectador o pode observar. É criada uma situação de conflito entre o que é a observação científica e um acto de voyeurismo. Neste projecto, o ateliêr não só é necessário em termos práticos, como é também uma condição primordial para a investigação. “ A peça junta a ideia do ‘voyeur’ e do ‘investigador’ e efectivamente questiona a distinção entre os dois.”

This installation consists of a microscope (Olympus SZ) on a table and one chair; video images pass underneath the main lens. A sound system;(sound tube) is provided to the viewer, it comes from the ceiling and covers the specific area where the microscope is placed and consequently envelopes the person seated at the table; the video piece is a continuous recording of the artist studio practice. The sound is created by the musician and composer Paul de Jong and it was inspired by Alexandra do Carmo studio practice. “I used my studio at 50 Richards Street as the scenario for a self-observed video that was then shown to the audience through the lenses of a binocular microscope. Public knowledge of the hermetic studio practice was evoked with the conflicting dynamics of clinical detachment yet voyeurist investment of viewing time. “The work couples the idea of ‘voyeur’ and ‘investigator’ and effectively throws open the distinction between the two.”2 Can one measure the distance from author to viewer? How close is this relationship? How public is our artistic practice?” Alexandra do Carmo “In composing a soundtrack for 50 Richards I attempt to create a continuous shifting between involvement and isolation. I try to manipulate these relations

of sound to the visual material as much as the relations of the viewer to the environment outside of the presented work. Sometimes the sound has an immediate relationship to the actions that can be seen in the video; isolating the viewer deeper inside the world of the studio. The sound gradually drifts in and out of musical elements mixed in with the sound of the actions in the studio, and eventually these musical sounds blur the borders between a musical backdrop relating to the studio space to an exclusively musical environment which isolates the viewer from the gallery space in which the work is being presented.” Paul de Jong

Imagens da exposição na Location One, Nova Iorque, 2004 Views of the exhibition at Location One, New York, 2004

ARGON CORPORATION 2004 video 9 minutes, 17 seconds

O video Argon Corporation é o resultado de uma recolha video continua durante 15 dias. A artista propos-se construir um espaço de “atelier” numa area de passagem de onde ocorria em simultâneo a construção de uma das paredes deste espaço ;(todo o piso estava a ser renovado e esta parede era a ultima a ser construida); durante estes dias o trabalho realizouse simultaneamente ao dos trabalhadores da empresa Argon Corporation, a qual é a responsável por esta empreitada. A parede semi aberta define uma separação de território, o colectivo de pessoas presentes e as suas acções encontram modos de modificar esta separação. Interessou-me definir um espaço com base na dinâmica social construida, pelo que a arquitectura ou mesmo o décor do sitio provem de uma situação particular, de comportamentos e atitudes de um grupo com diferentes pessoas na mesma situação; o ateliêr foi mobilado com objectos que os moradores deste edificio deitavam fora ou aos quais foi pedido um empréstimo temporário. Constitui uma reflexão sobre as possibilidades e contradições da pratica artistica em confronto com outras situações de trabalho. Após este evento de 15 dias, a artista trabalhou durante seis meses sobre papel, com base nas ideias presentes no video. Isolei uma sequencia de 30 segundos deste registo video, uma situação particular do meu relacionamento com um trabalhador; [situação: ele entra no meu espaço, utiliza a minha camara fotográfica e tira duas fotos e volta para o seu espaço], o papel de observador que era constantemente desempenhado por mim ou pela camara de video, é por breves momentos invertida, passando a pertencer a este trabalhador por intermedio de uma camara fotografica. O desenho reflecte preocupações sobre o confronto e da distância entre estas duas personagens. Desenho: (lapis s/papel, rolo de 6 metros): Cada imagem desenhada tem uma correspondencia com uma imagem video (still); O desenho tem a presença de erros constantes ao longo do tempo em que foi feito, o par de rinocerontes encontra-se em permanente oposição fisica.

The video presents the construction of an artist studio space for a period of 15 days based on the human and physical resources of the building. the site chosen to build the studio is a space of transit for the people as well a site of renovation where workers were building. The existence of a semi-open wall and a division in between the artist and everyone else are used to investigate the existent social limits in this specific place.

Imagens da exposição em Coimbra, Museu da Ciência e da Técnica,2005 Views of the exhibition at Museu da Ciência e Técnica, 2005

Imagens da exposição no Whitney Museum, Nova Iorque, 2005 Views of the exhibition at Whitney Museum, New York, 2005

S/ TÍTULO

2010 S/ título, Lambda print, 60 x 90 cm, Ed. de 5 Untitled, 2010, Lambda print, 60 x 90 cm, Ed. de 5

S/ TÍTULO

2010 S/ título, Lambda print, 60 x 90 cm, Ed. de 5 Untitled, 2010, Lambda print, 60 x 90 cm, Ed. de 5

CLIPPING

David Barro - Animal Gaze on NY Arts - International Guide http://www.nyartsmagazine.com