Ideographies

Tomasz Załuski: Can Latin America be spoken of as a certain whole? Is there something that might be called its ‘essence’? Could you define it in existential, political and artistic terms?

Regina Silveira: In 1997, I made a work about Latin America, Quebra Cabeça da América Latina (Continua)… [Latin American Puzzle (Continued)…]. In it, I offered an ironic commentary on the stereotypical image of Latin America. The work had a ‘touristic’ character. It commented on the way Latin America is usually viewed, not only from the outside but also from within – even we, the inhabitants of the region, know little about neighbouring countries. My puzzle consisted of more than a hundred stereotypical icons of Latin America, presented as fragments of black-and-white images. It is an extensive iconography that could be supplemented and enlarged indefinitely: from football to mariachi, from Carlos Gardel to guerrillas, from cannibal Indians, military leaders, llamas and Sugarloaf Mountain to Machu Picchu, tango and many, many other things. This iconography was drawn from various encyclopaedias and tourist guides, embassy brochures, travellers’ prints, as well as books, magazines, newspapers and every other source I could reach, hunting for images like a true ‘predator’. In an ordinary puzzle, the individual pieces fit together to form larger, coherent images. That never happens in my puzzle. There is no continuity between its elements – documents meet fictional images in their juxtapositions, while fragments of distinct geographies and histories, different times and places, intermingle. They create nothing beyond an internally inconsistent, entirely random and open narrative. My intention was to create a paradoxical cartography for this non-existent Latin America. Those who try to treat the social, political, economic, cultural and artistic landscape of Latin America as a unified whole have no idea of the enormous differences separating the countries of the region and know nothing of the particular history, culture and art of each one.

T.Z.: How would you describe your work to date? Can any periods or tendencies be distinguished within it?

R.S.: I am an artist who, at the beginning of her creative path, back in the 1960s, abandoned painting in favour of other conceptual practices. Today, after fifty years of intensive work, I find it very difficult to describe this entire path in a concise way. It might still be possible in terms of poetics, since throughout that time, regardless of the medium I was using, I have addressed the nature of the image and the politics of visual representation – I have been particularly interested in perceptual conventions and the relationships between images and the world. Describing the media I have used and the supports on which I have worked would take considerably more space. In brief, however, I can say that throughout these decades my curiosity has led me to employ ever new creative means, from traditional techniques already bearing the stamp of art to the most advanced contemporary technologies. Everything depended on what I needed to realise a particular work, the aims I set myself and the meanings I wished to give the work. To elaborate slightly, I would say that in the 1970s I worked mainly with new graphic media, made artists’ books and produced works that could be classified as video art and mail art. In the 1980s, I created objects and monumental installations that were fundamentally ephemeral and painted directly onto the walls of architectural interiors.

In the mid-1990s, I began using digital technologies, which gave my works the qualities of permanence and repeatability. This was also when my enduring fascination with urban space was born: a territory that is unprotected and anonymous, yet exceptionally well suited to laser projections of images and animations. Entering into dialogue with ever larger architectural spaces, and designing and carrying out interventions within a specific architectural context, is a tendency that began in my art in the 1990s and continues to this day.

T.Z.: Let us return to the 1970s. Alongside which Brazilian artists, and within what configurations of the decade’s tendencies, interests, subjects, strategies and practices, would you place yourself and your art?

R.S.: In January 2009, Gloria Ferreira published an extensive and insightful critical study of art in 1970s Brazil entitled Anos 70, Arte como Questão [The 1970s: Art as a Question]. The text appeared in the catalogue for an exhibition devoted to the art of that decade, organised by Ferreira at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo. My participation in the exhibition was closely connected with the nature of my artistic practices in the 1970s: my graphic works, artists’ books and publications in alternative-circulation magazines, as well as my membership of a small group of video-art pioneers in Brazil. This multimedia phase of my work, together with the more technologically oriented pieces I made soon afterwards, has led my works to be regarded as some of the first manifestations of technological art in Brazil. When, in the mid-1980s, I began making installations outside the gallery and developing a different kind of poetics, however, I moved far beyond those configurations and classifications. The same happened with other artists of my generation – we left the 1970s behind us. Our art remained free of classification, which suited me very well. We nevertheless continued experimenting with the language we had developed earlier, using it for other purposes. The process of placing my works within specific architectural spaces – which began in the 1990s, after my longer stay abroad (in New York, where I was able to live first thanks to a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and then a Pollock-Krasner Foundation fellowship) – coincided with my decision to end a long career as an art-school professor and become a full-time artist. In recent years, my activity has placed me in a kind of transgenerational situation. It means that I am almost always associated with younger artists whose education I had the opportunity to participate in. The result is a set of open genealogies based on purely conceptual connections and affinities…

T.Z.: You also participated in the alternative-culture movement that existed in Brazil in the 1970s. It formed part of the larger, international, perhaps even global phenomenon of the counterculture. What precise form did it take in Brazil at that time? What determined its local specificity? Why did you decide to become involved in creating alternative culture?

R.S.: In Brazil, the years of the counterculture coincided with the harshest and most brutal period of military dictatorship. I cannot offer here a long and complicated account of the attitudes of those involved in creating alternative culture or the events that shaped its history. In any case, the Brazilian counterculture developed dynamically in theatre, music and the visual arts. Despite the repression, torture and expulsion suffered by its participants, it did not lag behind the international scene. What perhaps determined the distinctive character of the Brazilian strand of the counterculture was the intense energy of the poetics then being created. Artistic activities did not turn into mere pamphleteering or remain at the level of bare facts. During that period, I also left Brazil for an extended time: first I lived in Spain, working there as a university lecturer, and later in Puerto Rico, teaching at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. Altogether, I spent five years outside the country. I was not in exile. It was, rather, a period of being in the world, learning about and experiencing new media and artistic languages, a time of creative education and professional development. My turn towards more conceptual practices resulted instead from the confluence of many different poetics and from life experience – it was not the effect of any conscious, considered decision. At that time, I was already travelling extensively through the United States and Europe, and I also had the opportunity to take part in countless manifestations of alternative culture, which I later helped to promote and create after returning to Brazil in the early 1970s.

T.Z.: You mentioned the military dictatorship that lasted in Brazil from 1964 to 1984. How did the experience of living under a dictatorship affect Brazilian art, and especially the Brazilian avant-garde of the period? How did it affect your art?

R.S.: I mentioned vitality, imagination and poetics as distinguishing features of the Brazilian counterculture. All these also appeared in our most radical avant-garde’s responses to the political situation of the time: it was an extraordinary combination of politics/poetics, in the best sense of both words. Living under a dictatorship, with press censorship, torture, persecution, arrests and informers everywhere, is always a bad, violent experience at every latitude on this planet. In my art, the political marks of the 1970s appear vividly in such graphic works as the series Executivas [Executives] from 1977, Destruturas Urbanas [Urban Destructures] from 1975–76 and Dilataveis [Dilatables] from 1981. In them, I used press images to create metaphors that would function as ironic commentaries on the various forms of power present in the politics of images and representations circulating in the mass media and the political world of the time.

T.Z.: In one text, you wrote: ‘When I returned to Brazil in 1973, constitutional rights were still suspended, while informing, arrests, torture and a pervasive sense of helplessness were leading to the gradual destruction of public and private spheres of life and action. Popular music, theatre and the visual arts continued to respond to this situation with works of a political nature. Their content, however, could not manifest itself freely, but only in the form of subtle or highly poetic metaphors that often managed to evade the censors. Among the first works I truly created under the influence of the period’s political and social events were series made using the new graphic media of the 1970s. The images that appeared in them were almost always critical representations of political power, the mass media and the progressive destruction of urban space. Yet these works contain no explicit political content – I always preferred to imbue my images with irony. I once even transformed a recipe for nut pudding into an ironic commentary on the most widely discussed political paintings of the period, which invariably ended up in bourgeois drawing rooms, decorating the wall above the most expensive sofa.’ I would like to ask whether you believe that allusion, metaphor and irony are always better than literalness and an explicit message in such cases, or whether this depends on the situation and the local context. Is art that is ‘indirectly’ political consequently less vulnerable to appropriation than, for example, painting that directly addresses political subjects? What is the function of art that enters the political sphere – what are its political and artistic functions?

R.S.: I would never describe this as an ‘indirect’ approach to political issues. I meant only that political content was not communicated literally in my works. From my point of view, irony and allusion can be more sophisticated means of communicating political content than the inflated rhetoric of ‘committed’ works, whose message is rarely imbued at every level with the ambiguity of art. Such works are ‘superficial’, possess little capacity to provoke political reflection and cannot change the world… Everything admits of degrees, however, and depends on the context: why should I not admire good art – even if it were thoroughly saturated with rhetoric – when its message is combined with artistic quality? The function of art is its use-value: it is grounded philosophically and phenomenologically, and resides in its capacity to change the way we perceive our relationship with the world. This applies to political art as well.

T.Z.: Could you briefly describe some of your works that have political resonance?

R.S.:Paradoxo do Santo [The Saint’s Paradox] from 1994 is a paradoxical combination of the shadow of an equestrian monument enlarged to gigantic proportions and a small wooden figurine of a folk saint riding a horse. It is this figurine, together with the small wooden pedestal on which it stands, that seems to cast the enormous shadow on the wall. This is a distorted outline of an equestrian monument by the modernist artist Victor Brecheret. The monument stands in a square in central São Paulo and depicts the Brazilian military hero Duque de Caxias, commander of the Triple Alliance army. In the nineteenth century, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay united in war against Paraguay; Paraguay’s devastating defeat had catastrophic consequences that the country continues to feel practically to this day. The small wooden figure of a saint, a folk sculpture from Guatemala, depicts Santiago Apóstolo, patron saint of the Spanish army, also known as Santiago Matamoros and invoked under that name in the context of the centuries-long process of driving the Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula. He is also the patron saint of Spanish America – he appeared in the context of the colonial wars fought there, which decimated entire Indigenous populations and destroyed their cultures. In my installation, the difference between the shadow and its source, as well as the paradox of a double absence (the absence of the monument that casts the enormous shadow and the absence of the shadow that would actually be cast by the wooden figure of the saint), draw attention to the military leader’s shadow, which becomes the dark and perverse ‘other’ of this seemingly innocent saint. By bringing these two figures together transhistorically and paradoxically, I sought to comment on the continually renewed connections between power, militarism and religion in Latin America.

A second example: in the installation Mundus Admirabilis, created in 2007 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brasília for the exhibition Jardim do Poder [Garden of Power], I filled the interior of a large glass room with enlarged images of insect pests. The giant insects form a site-specific work: on the one hand, they relate to the glass room; on the other, to the city of Brasília, the seat of government and the centre of political power in Brazil. On the one hand, the glass room, twenty metres long and wide and seven metres high, transformed into a garden pavilion penetrated by light, becomes an environment for insect pests fighting and devouring one another. On the other hand, pests have a very specific connotation in Brasília: they allude to the world of politics. Their size is a phantasmagorical element that makes it possible to perceive the glass room as a gigantic cage in which different species of warring insects seem to live in ‘miraculous’ isolation. Whether viewing the light-filled room from outside or within, the visitor not only has an opportunity to observe all these species of insects, but also sees that they have ‘miraculously’ been confined in a cage at last.

A third example: my work Rerum Naturae was prepared for the exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas [Mundus Admirabilis and Other Plagues], organised in 2008 at Galeria Brito Cimino in São Paulo. The idea of the exhibition was to update motifs of biblical, historical and mythical plagues by transferring them to other contexts of meaning. In my work, a commentary on the plight of people who live from day to day, I used images of insect pests from natural-history treatises, applying them to white, everyday porcelain vessels with a third-firing decoration technique. The porcelain objects were placed on a table ritually covered with a white tablecloth, on which the same insects were embroidered in enlarged scale and the finest detail using black thread and cross-stitch. At the same exhibition I also showed the audio work Per Capita, in which I interpret the phenomenon of urban violence as a manifestation of contemporary ‘pestilence’. Through a loudspeaker resembling the muzzle of a gun, the viewer could hear shooting. The sounds of stray bullets were accompanied by a small flash of light emerging through a narrow slit in the wall.

T.Z.: I would like to return once more to the 1960s and 1970s, and to your interest in conceptual art at the time. Over the past two decades, it has often been argued that conceptual art was a diverse and heterogeneous phenomenon, existing in many different versions across various regions of the world and in different cultural and socio-political contexts. There has also been a kind of rediscovery of the conceptual art created in Latin American countries: its engagement in socio-political critique, which appeared there earlier than in American and Western European conceptualism, has been particularly appreciated. As an ‘insider’, would you agree with this view? What was conceptual art in Brazil? What did it mean to you? What opportunities and possibilities did it seem to offer?

R.S.: In this part of the world, the various forms of conceptual art and new modes of artistic communication certainly carried greater political weight – everywhere from Mexico to Argentina, including the group of ‘Latino’ artists living in the United States, who represented a less ‘cool’ strand of conceptualism. Perhaps this was because artists from these regions worked in a social situation marked by far greater tensions and conflicts. On the other hand, these specific forms and varieties of conceptual art, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, developed under the influence of Fluxus manifestations and other practices drawing on the Dadaist legacy. It must also be remembered that in Brazil the currents of technological art that had emerged from the concretism of the 1950s combined in an exceptionally fertile way with conceptual art and the exploration of new media, lending an interdisciplinary character to the radical art scene of the 1970s. I always rejected the label ‘conceptual artist’, just as I rejected the labels ‘painter’ and ‘printmaker’. I preferred to be called a ‘multimedia artist’. I believed this gave me greater freedom to use alternative tools for creating, disseminating and exhibiting my works, which were almost always difficult-to-classify ‘hybrids’.

T.Z.: Conceptual art often entailed a critique of art institutions, as well as a critique of the ‘institution’ that is art itself. Is this aspect of institutional reflection and critique also present in your work?

R.S.: My work does not contain institutional critique in the sense of direct political action. I could, however, cite works from the conceptual period whose subject is the art system considered as a whole. One example is Pudim Arte Brasileira [Brazilian Art Pudding], discussed earlier, a highly politicised recipe that I distributed anonymously at the entrance to the São Paulo metro in the late 1970s, as well as a questionnaire about the art system that I prepared myself and then distributed (together with Julio Plaza) to participants in the performative event Mitos Vadios [Wandering Myths]. It took place in 1981 in an abandoned car park in São Paulo. Todas las Noches [Every Night], an as-yet-unrealised project, was intended as a gesture critiquing art in museums as well as museums themselves – particularly those in which architecture plays the principal role. It was to be created in New Mexico, in the Museo de Monterrey building designed by the architect Ricardo Legorreta. In this project, which became a starting point for many of my later works, I planned to cover the entire interiors of five exhibition rooms with enormous black shadows cast by typical museum furniture, such as display cases and visitors’ benches. The furniture itself, of course, was to be removed. In short, completely empty museum galleries were to be filled with shadows cast by an absent interior architecture. As an act of critique, I wanted the museum to be enveloped in shadow and night. The project remains a living idea to this day and is still awaiting realisation…

T.Z.: I have encountered the claim that Brazilian art of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s looked like an alternative version of the Western art world: the same elements were arranged in different configurations, had different functions and meanings, and were interpreted and valued differently. Would you agree? Do you think this kind of ‘local specificity’ in Brazilian art is still present in your work? Or did you have to relinquish it to some extent – and, if so, to what extent? – for your work to gain access to the Western, or global, art world and find recognition there?

R.S.: I must tell you that it was only towards the end of the 1980s, thanks to the presence and support of curators from outside Brazil, as well as extensive international travel and the accompanying exchange of experience, that Brazilian art of the 1960s and the art of the new generation that emerged in the 1980s began to appear in international exhibitions and become the subject of publications with an international reach. It was a slow process, although the situation has steadily improved since then. Initially, audiences knew nothing about what they were seeing in exhibitions. Simplified analyses of artistic languages and genealogies also appeared at that time – and, indeed, to this day they conflict with the testimony of those who actually know our history first-hand. As for the Western art world and the entry of Brazilian art – or my own – into it, I must say that the assertion you have cited seems a little strange to me. One cannot confuse the value and originality of Brazilian art (in other words, our ‘local specificity’!) with the possibility or strategy of being inside or outside a mainstream that, by the 1980s, was already losing its vitality and dynamism… It should be remembered that, since 1951, the São Paulo Biennial, undoubtedly the world’s second most important art biennial after Venice, has been our principal ‘window’ for exchange with the outside world. It also functioned as an excellent educational tool for our artists, theorists and art historians, and for those involved in art education. Furthermore, over the years it contributed to a relative enrichment of the artistic repertoire and to greater public interest in artistic practices, among an audience already characterised by considerable openness to manifestations of contemporary art.

T.Z.: One of the principal themes running through your work since at least the 1980s is the transformation of Western conventions of visual representation, above all geometric perspective and the closely related system of light and shadow. You seem to turn what is regarded as the mechanism of ‘natural’ perception into a means of producing strikingly unnatural, strange, enigmatic, uncanny and paradoxical effects – both perceptually and conceptually. Which elements of this undertaking are most important to you? Which aspects come to the fore?

R.S.: It is a long story, but I shall try to answer briefly. Doubts about whether the optical system of perspective truly makes it possible to create ‘correct’ and ‘normal’ representations of the visual field emerged in the West at almost exactly the same time as interest in the convention of geometric perspective as a scientific instrument for representing the world reached its height. All this happened before Leonardo made his small anamorphic drawing of an eye, described the perspectival distortions that arise at the margins of the visual field, and devised his famous diagram with columns to show the limitations of the perspectival system and its associated single viewpoint. Today, centuries later, no one believes any longer in the ‘naturalness’ of this system of representation. What matters now, however, is examining the genealogy that perspective shares with photography, cinema, virtual reality, simulations and other categories of digital illusionism. As for me, I discovered the optical phantasmagorias and visual riddles of Mannerism, which understood art explicitly as magic and invention, when I became interested in Duchamp in the early 1970s – or, more precisely, in his ironic Opticeries, which the artist himself often called essays in perspective. They nourished his imagination and formed the basis of many of his well-known works. I have always been interested in the difference between the perception of reality and its representation, mediated through codes and conventions of resemblance. Yet I have also always favoured deconstructing these codes from within in order to bring out the tensions existing at the boundaries of perception and representation. From the outset, I undoubtedly believed that art was founded on surprising tricks, that it was invention and language.

T.Z.: When did this issue of geometric perspective appear in your work, understood not as a tool for creating ‘normal’, common-sense representations of reality, but as a conventional, ‘artificial’ means of representation that might offer entirely different possibilities?

R.S.: My first reflections on the conventional character of perspectival representation found expression in the 1980 series Anamorfas [Anamorphs], consisting of prints and drawings. It was then that I began to wonder whether the traditional idea of perspective as a scientific way of looking at the world and a mechanism for creating ‘normal’ visual representations could be reversed. This turn enabled me to enter the realm of phantasmagoria and metamorphosis. In the Anamorfas series, my favourite strategy was to introduce distortions into geometric grids. Each work contained the photographic outlines of small, ordinary objects. It seems to me that, in attempting for the first time to examine the conventional character of the means of representation, I adopted a metalinguistic stance, focusing on the nature of representation itself and on modes of depiction. This resulted not only in the Anamorfas series, but also in the extremely long series A Arte de Desenhar [The Art of Drawing], created at almost exactly the same time, as well as many video works, prints and artists’ books. I was also investigating perception at the time, which was connected with my efforts to test the limits of a given representation’s recognisability when it is shown in radical foreshortening or distorted by its placement.

T.Z.: Let us now return to the very roots of your artistic practice. This year you took part in Philagrafika, an arts festival held in Philadelphia from January to April. Its idea was perhaps best expressed by the title of the principal exhibition, ‘The Graphic Unconscious’. The curators wanted to reveal the symptoms of the existence and operation within contemporary art of what might be called a generalised ‘graphicness’. They sought to bring together concepts, practices and ways of thinking and acting that could be related to such a generalised ‘graphicness’, and sometimes even connected with printmaking in its more traditional sense. Considering that printmaking was one of the starting points of your artistic practice, and looking at all the ‘travelling graphies’ encountered in your work – from ordinary impressions on paper to monumental interventions in an existing architectural fabric, from traditional printmaking techniques to contemporary technologies of digital reproduction and creation – it seems to me that something like a ‘graphic unconscious’ has shaped your art from the outset and continues to do so today. Or perhaps it was never an unconscious drive or impulse? Perhaps a conscious strategy was at work throughout? Could your art – though only in this context, of course – be described as an exploration of ‘graphicness’ in an ‘expanded’ or ‘transmedial’ field?

R.S.: A considerable part of my work could very well be described in this way. I would not say that it was a planned strategy, however – it simply seems that making graphic traces, in the broadest sense of the term, has always been the best means of expression for my imagination, allowing me to realise my intentions, create new configurations and discover visual paradoxes. ‘Making graphic traces’ – that is, drawing and leaving marks on all kinds of support, on paper, porcelain, the walls of architectural interiors, the surfaces of monumental façades and even the urban fabric itself – is always the starting point for me when creating a work. This is followed by the phase of planning the subsequent steps I must take in the process of realising it – practically the same procedure is used in traditional printmaking, with which I was associated for many years as a university lecturer. I must also mention a second important source of my art alongside ‘graphicness’: the use of the photographic image, which is in its nature an ‘index’ of reality. Since the 1970s, photography has nourished my imagination in various ways, but it has never been an end in itself for me. Nor have I ever practised art photography. I do, however, very often use photographic images appropriated from various sources and transform them according to my needs. I first employed this strategy in 1971, in the series of screenprints Middle Class & Co.

T.Z.: Yes, it is easy to see that what, following Charles Peirce, are called ‘indexical signs’ often appear in your work, and not only in pieces that use photographic images – signs that have the status of traces, imprints or marks left by the ‘touch’ of reality itself. Which aspects, associations and meanings connected with such signs are important here? What kinds of visual and semantic energy matter to you in this case?

R.S.: I am, of course, fully aware of the nature of the images I favour – photographs, traces and shadows. These are images that fall within the paradigm of indices and marks left behind – images that are almost physical imprints of reality, whether presumed or fictional. Some associations connected with this kind of sign are widely known: indices point to the idea of absence, while traces reveal an event that took place in time. I am also interested, however, in magical associations, or those connected with the category of ingenious inventions and tricks that make it possible to create phantasmagorias and visual paradoxes. I must confess that the effects of ‘wonder’ and ‘astonishment’ are very close to me: those typically Mannerist elements that persist in art through Duchamp and beyond. They became foundations of cinema, and today play an important role in many virtual realities of the digital universe.

T.Z.: Let us return briefly to the question of ‘graphicness in an expanded or transmedial field’. In what forms has it appeared in your art at different stages of its development? What caused you to move away from traditional printmaking practices towards what you do today?

R.S.: The shift occurred when I made my first screenprints while in Puerto Rico in 1970, and at the same time learnt several simple photomechanical processes. I was then ready to move towards unconventional graphic practices open to new forms of activity and new artistic ideas. From screenprinting, I moved to lithography based on the use of photographic images; then I turned to offset printing, xerography, blueprints, microfilm and video. In short, I entered the broad world of ‘other’, non-artistic graphic processes that were then in common circulation… At that time, photomechanical techniques were used almost exclusively in commercial printing and were decidedly rejected – along with photography – by practitioners of traditional fine-art printmaking. Yet they offered me precisely what I was looking for: a dry syntax that required the rejection of autographic aspects, allowed photographic images to be transferred from print media and made many, many other things possible. I sought to ensure that these newly opened possibilities would not be mine alone – using the new potential of graphic images was always part of my university printmaking curriculum. Today, this entire field has expanded still further for me thanks to digital media and new image-printing and cutting techniques. Beyond paper or photographic film, the supports I have used in my artistic practice to date include white porcelain, wall fabrics, glazed roofs, interior walls and building façades, and later the fabric of the city itself. As for other graphic media I have employed, I could mention video, light projections and laser…

T.Z.: I came across the term ‘ideographies’, which I believe you coined. How should it be understood? To what does it refer?

R.S.: To be honest, I do not remember the occasion on which I used this word, nor what meaning I might have assigned to it. I do think, however, that ‘ideographies’ is a felicitous compound, referring both to written signs and to ideograms. Ideographies have something in common with the nature of graphic traces and with that of ideograms, insofar as a quality or meaning arises here through the combination – sometimes entirely unexpected – of two different terms, two different elements. Perhaps I used the term ‘ideographies’ in relation to a situation in which a graphic intervention in architecture covers a building’s walls and invests it with meaning so radically that it becomes difficult to remember what the building looked like before. This effect persists for a long time, as though the act of intervention had ‘stuck’ to the building and to our memory. It may also be that I was trying to use the term ideographies to describe the effect created by a shadow or footprint drawn on white porcelain: once we have seen it as ‘porcelain with a shadow’, it will be very difficult for us to imagine it as immaculately white again.

T.Z.: When did your works acquire an ‘architectural’ dimension and take on a ‘site-specific’ character? Where did this desire to take account of the specificity of a place and the monumental scale of architectural and urban spaces come from?

R.S.: This ‘architecturality’ first appeared in the 1990s as the result of a graphic and object-based approach through which I created large-scale works that were still confined to conventional exhibition interiors and gallery spaces. The motifs of these works – constructed as silhouette forms cut from plastic or ceramic tiles – were conventional architectural drawings taken from technical building plans. By introducing distorted perspectives and bizarre viewpoints into the original drawings, I transformed them into ambiguous, deformed configurations. Site-specific projects appeared naturally in my practice and gradually increased both in number and in scale. Almost every time, they were responses to invitations to realise a project relating to a particular place. These invitations came from art institutions and curators, who often tried to imagine for themselves what kind of intervention I might make in the space they had selected. Sometimes, though rarely, I proposed preparing a site-specific work myself, and when I could choose the location and create the project, my plans were always ambitious and risky. There was also the danger, however, that they would never leave the table on which I drew them… In fact, planning works for small places is just as complex as planning those for large spaces. Yet I prefer the challenges of a grand scale.

T.Z.: Where do you begin when preparing a monumental-scale work or planning an intervention in an architectural space? How do you approach specific architectural and urban spaces, and in what terms do you analyse them?

R.S.: First I have to visit the place where my work is to be made, examine its context, learn about the history of the building and its surroundings, the viewpoints inscribed within it, the way it is used, and the flows of people and space – in short, the entire universe of qualities and meanings that I might use in my work. A kind of puzzle appears in my imagination, with many elements that I must interpret and combine into a certain whole. The curatorial concept is often one of these elements, and I have to take it into account when thinking about my own work. I always photograph the space as well, so that I can later draw on the photographs and discover the scale and a possible presence. For projects in urban space, such as those involving moving light projections, I travel through the city on foot or by car, trying to find suitable locations for the projections. I then take notes in order to prepare small maps of the places where my artistic intervention is to occur. Each time I also have to study maps and architectural plans; sometimes, before I begin realising the work, I have to return to a place or building several times to test the effects of such things as scale, configurations, situations and colours. I can also create works intended for architectural spaces in distant parts of the world, provided, of course, that I have a great deal of information about the location. Almost always, however, I have to travel there and visit the specific site in order to understand the character of its space fully or determine the scale that the elements of my planned solution should have. For the intervention I was preparing for the Fine Arts Museum in Taipei, I travelled there only once before realising the work itself. I wanted to examine the surface of the building and determine the average size of the human footprints that I intended to introduce into the extensive space surrounding the museum. By contrast, when creating an installation for the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, I had to travel there four times in order to examine the building’s interior closely and feel its space. This was essential: it allowed me to solve very difficult problems of scale, lighting and the transparency of the materials I intended to use, and to find techniques and media that would comply with conservation requirements and would not damage the building’s architectural fabric.

T.Z.: I have noticed an interesting feature of your ‘site-specific’ installations. You often employ a strategy of repeating an element of a given architectural space and reproducing it elsewhere within the same space, although the element always undergoes a certain displacement, fragmentation and transformation. Rather than affirming the identity and narrative self-reference of a given place, you seem to bring about a situation in which it is confronted with its spectral ‘other’, materialising as an event in your work. In doing so, you appear to open the possibility of another perception of the place, another ‘navigation’ through the space and another narrative about it. How would you respond to this interpretation?

R.S.: I think you have identified this strategy very well. Numerous works in which I have employed it could be cited, but it appeared clearly in the ‘catastrophic’ installations I made in 2003 for the exhibition Claraluz at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo, and in 2005 for the exhibition Lumen at the Palacio de Cristal, part of Madrid’s Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. They were ‘catastrophic’ because they concerned the imaginary event of a glass roof collapsing: they showed its surface cracking and breaking into pieces, virtually falling in a luminous cascade and then settling on the floor. The two projects were so closely connected that the title of the installation Lumen, included in the Claraluz exhibition, also became the title of the entire exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal; in turn, the glass-roof installation presented there was entitled Memoriazul, emphasising the connection and mutual reference between the two works. I believe these installations acquire an allegorical dimension through the narrative unfolding in a fictional time, frozen in the arrested visuality of fragments and pieces of the ‘shattered’ glass roof. At the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the gold colour I used for the projection of the glass roof broken into pieces established a relationship between art, gold and wealth. This was connected with the fact that the building had previously served as a bank. My work also extended to the lower floor, where the former bank vaults were located. There, the pattern formed by fragments of ‘shattered’ glass covered the walls and interiors of the vaults, restoring their original function. At the Palacio de Cristal, an exceptionally light structure penetrated by illumination and marked by tremendous – I would even say excessive – beauty and transparency, I sought to bathe the building’s interior in blue light by shattering the glass roof and placing its pieces on the floor. In Memoriazul, I wanted to evoke the transcendental meaning of light, which I associated with enlightenment and the experience of an unfathomable sublime.

T.Z.: What is the general idea behind the project you will realise at Atlas Sztuki? What is its starting point?

R.S.: Ever since I made my first direct intervention in an architectural space – this was at Madrid’s Centro Galileo in 1988, and the work itself was entitled Símile – I have been interested in the ambiguous and mysterious nature of ‘thresholds’, meaning all kinds of boundaries within architectural space. Windows, doors and entrance arches are openings or thin membranes that physically connect individual spaces and permit the flow of light, air and also, in a more metaphorical sense, shadow. I have often reversed the normal relationship, using shadows to generate strange, tense situations, or created projections of shadows that were wholly incongruous with a given place. I have always imagined thresholds and other boundary elements as sites of improbable and extraordinary events, as well as areas where all kinds of penetration and invasion can occur. They are also spaces of passage, and as such enter into a relationship with time and memory. The works I intend to make in the exhibition spaces of Atlas Sztuki address precisely this subject of thresholds. Their principal motif will be the windows that surround the entire building and give it its unique appearance. In the gallery rooms, I want to make two installations that constitute acts of perceptual and poetic intrusion into the time-space and memory of the building itself. Both works are based on technical and conceptual oppositions. The installation Depth presents an image of an abyss created on the floor using vertical anamorphosis – the lines of the windows, seen in extreme foreshortening, produce the effect of a space receding into the depths. It will function as a virtual depth capable of disrupting spatial perception and arousing a sense of unease in viewers. This large-scale, digitally generated image also possesses a temporal dimension. It makes it possible to reach the archaeological strata of cultural memory – through it, I am trying to evoke the memory of the windows of the former market that once occupied this building.

In the installation 1,001 Days I use a different strategy. It is a digital animation, a sequence of days and nights projected in a loop onto the surface of several windows in the second room. The projection extends all the way to the floor and touches the adjacent walls. Paradoxically, the closed and sealed-up windows allow time and the outside world to enter the gallery space. The projection dematerialises the walls and objects inside. The endless sequences of days and nights entering the interior ‘through the windows’ are intended to disrupt the normal perception of the gallery room and transport the viewer into an open, boundless space.

In this imaginary time-space, the sequences of images of days and nights will be accompanied by the sounds of wind, children’s voices and nocturnal noises. They too are traces of time flowing from my memory.

T.Z.: Shadow, absence, emptiness, trace – why have you privileged these particular categories? From roughly the beginning of the 1980s, they seem to form a systematic configuration in your art. Why do you bring them to the fore? Does this gesture contain a particular vision or diagnosis of contemporary culture?

R.S.: All (or almost all) of these terms form a configuration that refers in my work to the dark and enigmatic aspect of the relationship between art and the world. As I mentioned earlier, they belong to the Peircean category of indices, signs of time and of absence or presence. Such signs have always stimulated my imagination and been the source of many of my ideas and works, not only during the early period of my practice but also in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. The tendency to focus on indices is for me an almost magical matter, a question of understanding art as magic or enigma. Whether using elements that refer to the category of the index and can be described through the concepts you have listed corresponds to the gradual – and, as some argue, catastrophic – changes in the cultural paradigm over recent decades is an interesting question that could serve as the guiding thread for a critical analysis of my entire body of work. And not only mine, since it concerns many other artists and their works. Indexical signs play an important role throughout contemporary art. Please do not forget, however, that in recent years the paradigm of art has shifted towards the other extreme, where the opposite of shadow ‘lives’: light, always fully present and given at its greatest intensity. In many works of recent years, light has played an important conceptual and semantic role, becoming their subject and generative principle. It makes it possible to evoke meanings connected with a kind of transcendence that we can approach only through images.

T.Z.: You worked as a lecturer at an art school for several decades. What was your philosophy of education? Was there any connection between your artistic and teaching practices? Did you try to translate one into the other in some way?

R.S.: I began teaching when I was twenty-five. I first worked at the Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul, then in Puerto Rico, and from 1973 I taught in Brazil (and sometimes abroad) on master’s and doctoral programmes. I stopped teaching in 2000 because I wanted to leave this ‘double life’ behind, become a full-time artist and remain one for as long as my energy lasted. Throughout this period, I had innumerable students, and I remain in contact – both professionally and as friends – with many of them to this day, particularly those who went on to establish themselves on the art scene; we continue to talk, and I still feel a close connection with the activities and work of those whom I considered good artists from the outset. It is perhaps worth mentioning what my students think of me: to them, I was someone who helped them find and develop their own poetics. I shared the questions that preoccupied me and taught them to seek their own original answers, to create new ideas and modes of practice, even ones fundamentally different from mine. I always treated students as representatives of future generations of artists. I taught them the language of art, strategies and techniques, shaped their attitudes and, in sharing my professional experience, always tried to lay my cards on the table. I did all this while respecting the generational differences that should be maintained. Today, my former students work not only as artists. Some later began working in other areas of the art world. They now teach, and work as art historians, curators and even museum directors, both in Brazil and abroad. Together, we form a large, open and very liberal family.