Dreams of a Red Empty Space (on Enunciations)

All images: © 2014 Tatiana Macedo (video-still)

With the advent of social media society has increasingly become to live in a two-dimensional media – Internet, television, movies, etc. It is one world that alienates people from social interactions and from life changing personal experiences. Responding to this isolationist trend in social culture artists have started to create works that have been about altering the senses, seeming to surround the viewer, who will be completely involved in something. In the same way Hélio Oiticica's (1937-1980, Brazil) exploration of the dimension of colour while undermining the usual separation of the art-object from the viewer (for him looking was a kind of dancing); when we become immersed by the spatial and sonic surroundings when walking around a new city or undetermined landscape, or how we can easy relate with the familiarity of the streets of our local neighbourhood.

Since the invention of the photographic medium in the nineteenth century and, as a consequence, of the film/video medium some decades later, and more recently the development of digital platforms, artists have been using the camera as a tool to conceive, produce or capture their transient performative images. Time and space became then documented throughout its different creation or presentation stages. A plethora of artists come to mind, such as Joseph Beuys (1921-2986, Germany), Allan Kaprow (1927-2006, USA), Yves Klein (1928-1962, France), Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Japan), Yoko Ono (b. 1933, Japan), Vito Acconci (b. 1940, USA), Ana Mendieta (1948-1985, Cuba/USA), Zhang Huan (b. 1965, China), or Tania Bruguera (b. 1968, Cuba), between many others. They have emphasised the nature of the medium used and people's physical interaction with everyday objects in unexpected and occasional disconcerting ways. Sometimes inventing elaborated new identities; others while exploring conventions and clichés underpinning its medium, in particular the way in which those were constructed and perpetuated.

The liveliness of those images is combined with elements of performance that are generated and influenced most of the times from the theatrical world rather than from visual representations. Using the city as the playground, or as a performative stage, those artists have explored and balanced the chaos of places, devised landscapes and documented mundane details of everyday life to construct relationships that might had taken place. While doing that they had opened the field of possibilities for dialogue, experiences and for an understanding of identity politics. However, the system of intensive possible encounters derived from the complexities of the urban public space is no longer regarded as an interconnected network to be walked through, like an “owner’s tour”. Instead, it is “formed by inter-subjectivity”[i] imposed on people, as is defended by the French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. If we think about the operation of walking trough cities as being ‘pedestrian speech acts’ that begin on the ground level (with our footsteps), putting us as in a position of critical withdrawal, i.e. having a both critical and spatial point of view, as was expressed by the French scholar Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1988). “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.” [ii] The derived images accentuate the relationship between people bodies and the architecture of the city (an idea expressed following Walter Benjamin's mapping out of the heterogeneous texture of events and objects that where used to determine the early-twentieth century society, or, for instance, what we tend to denominate in the late-twentieth century as 'window shopping').

In terms of the realisation and of the representation of mapping we have moved from a transformative pre-Renaissance’s visual intersection combined by the elevation of distances (taken from a human level) into the exaltation of having god like utterances. Meaning, the same way we 'realise' the space that surrounds us it also 'makes' us. Equally, the same can also be applied to the way we treat the space structure as a provisional stage set, which is also defined by boundaries, physical limitations, and complex and carefully designed relations both with the spectator and the surrounding space. Nonetheless, in the present situation that is not happening. For example, the similarities between a building or new space that is been built in Dubai, Beijing or London are great. This equivalence is more to do with the representation of an optimal form to generate a building or space with the lower inversion, either by developers, architects, or urban designers, than with the representation of the public place as such. From this stand, public spaces, such as cities shopping centres, including car parks, streets and avenues, as well as those other structures that delimit and define it, such as buildings, apartment blocks, museums and white cubes are increasingly becoming more homogenised. This homogenisation of both the physical and virtual worlds has begun to make all statements equal instead of, experiencing and keeping an interrelated difference between them.

When thinking of contemporary artworks the act of walking unconditionally through streets, avenues, roads of cities, or moving in and out of arcades “takes being-together as central theme.”[iii] Just like in a Deleuzean reterritorialisation through means of the language of talking birds, or when hearing children acquiring the first verbal functions of spoken language, ensuring that communication is a reality and made possible. Where the “'encounter' between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning” that created “a mobile organicity in the environment”[iv] is no longer possible to be regarded as a space to be walked through. Furthermore, for de Certeau, the act of walking generates a space of enunciation, “a spatial order [that] organises an ensemble of possibilities … and interdictions.” Whereas enunciations, related with “the adverbs here and there, are the indicators of the locutionary seat in verbal communication.”[v] Those “enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail.” With the move from a visual perception to physical embodiment the choices that are taken while walking and inhabiting the world surrounding us create and will open to an array of possible universes. That is the role of art with its poetic faculties. Since streets' and roads' intersections or encounters with plazas and centres (to which we come upon), should build more of a looking like maze (where several possibilities emerge) than a labyrinth (with its' single-path course, aiming to make people feel small and powerless when faced with the Kafkaesque civic machine of governance or economics). Just like in Oiticica's open mazes of double-sided hanging picture panels of different sizes and close related colours (Núcleos, 1960-6), causing a disruption that instigated a reorganisation of bi-dimensional structures into a three-dimensional environment.

From a visual perspective we would continue to be like sleep-walkers enclosed within the walls of our ineptitude to the comprehension of the surrounding world. Individually, we are increasingly more focused in to the different levels of the unlimited diversity laid down to us, by means of the dispositions of theatrical events that take place as a reality. As in each of the nine individual video installations brought by Tatiana Macedo (b. 1981, Lisbon) with Foreign Grey (2014). As if being bi-dimensional theatrical representations of everyday life that never get in to the subjugation of the authority figures or in to the innate instinctive impulses; or as belonging to the mediated manifestation of constructed fantasies, and witty illusions reflecting social standards learned from parents, teachers, ideal models and friends. Considered from this framework we will be constructing an imaginary life, portraying experiences and relationships that never took place, i.e. the dream of 'becoming' and the associated illusion of 'being'. But if we think about the determination of engaging with the complexities of cities, from a Massey's perspective, we will be moving towards the theatricality of cultural democracy and the anthropological idea of participant-observation. Towards a participation in public life and, thereafter, in to the public share of knowledge as if in a democratic illusion and a voyeur-god like suspension.

© 2014 Tatiana Macedo (video-still)

Foreign Grey raises ironic questions about the nature of constructed and perpetuated ideas of identity. By creating an immersive space, the artist Tatiana Macedo invites us to visually 'walk' through her constructed illusory landscape, interfering with the other's space. Questioning the position of the viewer (walker) of either being inside or outside – we are kept inside the unlimited reservoirs of human subjectivity, as if we were physically exploring the possibilities existing in a city (Beijing), and approaching the complexities derived from a society (Chinese). Points of reference that are cultural and historical determined by induced perceptions and imposed perspectives to which we stand in complete oblivion.

Considering the video installation (brought about to us by the artist), on a first moment, we reflect on the limitations of the internalisation of cultural codes. On the embodiment of emptiness derived from those static movements generated by learned behaviours, associated with illusions and shackled by ignorance when seeing them from a lustful viewpoint and nothing more. Since, men, by nature, is satisfied with keeping always the same point of view on what is art and reality, she, nevertheless, plays into a counter-cultural need and extends space while showing the shared invisible and unspoken commonalities. By overcoming the usual limitations of an object-based work. In the whole, when looking down like a god we lay temporary suspended in de Certeau’s space in-between 'here' and 'there'. Beyond the ocean of ordinary viewpoints her works make time and space disappear.

To stay with and when confronted with Macedo's videos one is surrounded by an endless feeling of experiencing emptiness or being alone (as with her previous video narrative Seems So Long Ago, Nancy, 2012, filmed at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London, England). As an art object it ends up losing all it’s meaning while acquiring an intimate but overpowering significance. Both artworks’ visual propositions are caused by leaving behind old attitudes and habits and explore what is beyond our perceived limitations and restrictions. Such as enunciated with the dynamics of loss (see Carlos Palma exhibition) and being without (see Adam Chodzko exhibition). But, also, because she intuitively reveals the inner essence of its external reality: of a hand that forces the air to stand still; a hanged blouse that leisurely dance with the gentle breeze for us; for a rag to talk to us and say that there is beauty in the world. Instead of feeling the bliss when one is enlightened by imaginary god-created orders, Macedo keeps reversing the signposting, the enunciations that mark the crossroads between art and life. This demystification of art shows an increase reduction from form giving order to an on going and global mutation of the artistic language reshuffling the way one perceives art and the construction of reality. A twofold conception constituting an opaque and systemic past, the latest, and an uncertain and changeable future, the former work.

With this video installation and other video works, Macedo pronounces the simplicity of what is observed, as well as the phenomenological dualities inherent within many of the world’s cultures. Using the power of muted enunciations and their visual impact, she plays on the ambiguity of unspoken sentences. Between the visualisation of narratives and voicing out the ambiguity that art suggests. The artist gives objects and the practices of everyday life a chance to speak for themselves, in a need to feel more at home in contemporary's world being it while exploring the outside space when it rains, in A Few Coloured Tears I (2014), or being those detached inside views from an hotel room, in Entre-Dois (2014).

Increasingly, with the homogeneity of the public space, when we wander around on the periphery of things we are silently choosing the same subject-matters and objects for appreciation, and not the unpredictable and chaotic events that might arise from new encounters. The homogenisation of the public space has allowed to an internationalisation of the artistic discourse. Artists from different geographical places and cultural background play in or stage their discursive moments independent of the space location. Thus, the person who engages or performs an action when immersed in Macedo's video installations is confronted with a new space in ways that he or she did not have anticipated. Since the artist has created a unique enunciation within which that chosen particular actions can be performed. Simultaneously challenging the movements of the body and emphasising the succession of time. Her films have a double quality: they are enunciations about a physical role played within a moving image and a distancing from those while constructing a critical distance on the meaning of everyday life.

© 2016 Rui Gonçalves Cepeda

Bibliography:
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, Le Presse Du Reel.
de Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kester, G. H. (2013) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Retrieved February 26th, 2013, from http://www.kein.org/node/62

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Tatiana Macedo

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i Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Le Presse Du Reel, p 15
ii De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: Unviversity of California Press, p 97
iii Bourriaud, N. (2002) p 15
iv Ibid, p 15
v De Certeau, M. (1988) p 98-9