Since your first works, it is possible to perceive an interest in images produced in different media contexts, from the fragment in which you use the juxtaposition procedure. The work of association and articulation of these signifiers, by the logic of selection, brings, in all cases, new possible meanings to particulate images. Nicolas Bourriaud, in his book Post-production (2009), detected this type of methodological approach in contemporary artistic poetics. In the subtitle of his book, Bourriaud states that artists and art reprogram the world in this way. In retrospect, do you recognise your production within this conceptual framework?

 

Tom: I believe that this is a characteristic that accompanies my entire production. I am a photographer who had never heard the question, ‘What camera did you use?’  In general, I hear more often ‘How did you do that?’, which reveals a curiosity about the interferences I make in obtaining a certain result. And, when I refer to image post-production, I am not talking about Photoshop treatment, but expanding the idea of ​​photography to other areas, formats, and materials. It is a process of transformation. In The Commuting (2019) I embarked on a traditional street photography theme, namely, the subway environment. The idea was to translate my visual exploration inside these carriages. According to Jacques Aumont, visual exploration is something we build up over time, after looking at successive fixation points. Following this argument, what we understand as memory is a recollection of the integration of these points. This explains why our perception is incomplete. The Commuting was my first experience with collage and also the first time that I manually interfered in the image. Each work in this series consists of four to six photos from a certain angle inside the carriage. The photos were printed on white postcard paper. After this, I punched-out each photo, searching for characters and situations that I recorded during my journeys. Finally, I overlapped and glued these photos, so that I could only visualise the details drilled. The result is a photocollage in which we can see only what has been excavated through the layers and the rest remains inviolable because all the photos were amalgamated into a single piece. In the case of the sculptures of Street Topographies (2010), photos went through a rigorous editing process before I superimposed them on the acrylic sheets that gave them volume and a sensation of three-dimensionality to the urban space. In addition to that, the connection between photography and urban intervention was fundamental because each space inspired me to create certain photographic objects. I can mention Blow up (2007), which was carried out in parks in Curitiba, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires (during the Festival de La Luz, in 2008). In this series, I produced ‘grass magnifying lenses’ that alluded to the eponymous film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Other than that, unlike the film, by enlarging my photos, I did not reveal the outline of a corpse, but the pixel, which is the smallest element to which a colour can be attributed in the digital photo. In Closer (2018), I hired the photographer Guilherme Pupo to take photos with a drone. The difference is that I did not want to see the city from above, but to approach monuments that were far above our eyes. With these photos in hand, I produced cardboard totems that brought these statues into large dimensions and then exposed them at street level. In fact, post-production is a feature of my process, which took me away from Henri Cartier-Bresson's tradition of the ‘decisive moment’. In series like The Commuting and Street Topographies, what interests me is how the various moments presented are connected, emulating an almost cinematic experience. In works such as Blow up and Closer, photography interacts with the urban environment, creating a scenario that interacts with the viewer.

 

I was referring to the fact that you compile everyday images, especially from the mass media, to compose your works. In this sense, the work ends up being configured as a kind of mosaic, a kaleidoscope of images that were not produced by you, but that gained new possibilities of existence when they were selected and juxtaposed in your works. Above, you mentioned another procedure that seems to be present at different times in your artistic trajectory, which has to do with the generation of palimpsests. How and why do you mobilise this layered operation?

 

Entendo, mas esse trabalho de pós-produção ao qual me referi também se aplica às I see, but this post-production work I mentioned also applies to the images of the mass media. I create new layers of interpretation for them. Palimpsests, a term that refers to the process of erasing a text so that another can be written over it. It is even the name of a series of videos that I have been producing since 2008. To create them, I look for a coincidence in the layout of the newspapers. I need to find a photo in which, on the back, there is an article related to that image. It is rare, but it happens. Basically, what you see in each video is me, slowly erasing the text in front of that photo with a wet brush. It is possible to read the news, make the visual relationship with the photograph, and, slowly, see these connections being broken. Text and image have always had an intimate as well as a conflicting relationship in photojournalism. Palimpsestos (Palimpsests) series emphasises this issue when I overlap these discursive forms and interact with them. Working with layers and juxtapositions helps me to place photography in a place of self-criticism, almost a disappointment. Curator Peter C. Bunnel once said that, in general, what is meant by photography are two dimensions passing through three and an image clipping representing life itself. Much of what I do is deconstruct the traditional photographic process so that we become aware of certain pitfalls.

 

This intention to deconstruct the photographic process becomes really evident in (in)visible polaroids (2005), in which it is not possible to define where exactly the photograph takes place: if on the polaroid-shaped paper, where there are inscriptions / geographical orientations to the participant; if in your eyes, which cuts out the urban context; if in the landscape itself and in its details, which would require a very close look from the person for it to be seen; if in the framework of the panorama suggested by you, but probably configured with “registration errors” by the participants. Here, as in other works, there seems to be a philosophical concern about the nature of images. Are we in the scope of the phenomenology of photography?

 

Yes, (in)visible polaroids represent this phenomenological idea very well. The technology I use is even more rudimentary than the analogue because it does not involve any equipment. My polaroids are small pieces of yellow paper, with dimensions very close to a real Polaroid, where I replaced the image with a text that instigates the viewer to look around and rediscover the space in which they are inserted. Everything is experience in this series. It has a lot to do with Lefebvre's theories about perceived, conceived, and lived space and also his analysis of rhythms and everyday life. To write the texts of the polaroids, I have to travel around the city, stop at several points, observe details and establish a very intimate connection with the place to write the messages/directions in each work. Subsequently, the viewers will relive my work by reading these texts and “seeing my polaroids” with their own eyes. However, between my moment and that of the other person, there are many differences. Even though my texts are clear and objective, there is always room for improvisation or error, a freedom that the reader has to add or misunderstand the information. The lack of a camera was also fundamental. Without the technical apparatus, the connection of the (in)visible polaroids with their surroundings is more natural, closer to life.

 

Speaking of (in)visible polaroids, and you being a “photographer who does not use apparatus like a camera or film” when presenting works and proposing poetic problems, connected to the field of photography, what represented for your reputation winning the important Porto Seguro Photography Award in 2005? What kind of repercussion was there at that time?

 

The Porto Seguro Award was really relevant in the history of (in)visible polaroids. My polaroids began as a geographically limited urban intervention. I remember spending only R$15 (about £2) to produce the 20 works that were set at three squares in Curitiba. However, the idea of ​​these polaroids without images, but which could still be seen by the eyes of the viewer, was quite impactful at the time. Until then, this award had recognized only clearly visual works. I believe it was good for me and also for the award because other photographers felt encouraged to propose works that challenged the photographic language. I was selected three more times for this award, but never with “real” photography. Palimpsestos (Palimpsests) are videos; Still Life is a web animation, and LUGAR (LOCATION) urban action is a kind of performance. Another important repercussion was the inclusion of my polaroids in the book Geração 00 – A Nova Fotografia Brasileira (Generation 00 – The New Brazilian Photoraphy) by Eder Chiodetto. In that publication, he listed the main contributions that emerged in the country during the first decade in this area. In addition to that, the polaroids were recreated for the spaces of SESC Campinas, SESC Belenzinho, and Caixa Cultural Curitiba, which took part in the Circuito SESC de Artes (SESC Circuit of Arts), inspired a workshop that I carry out until today and have been done in about 30 cities.

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With this work, I also learned two important things. The first was the creative freedom I had from working on a low budget. Spending only R$ 15 and getting the results I achieved was surprising. This eventually gave rise to May interventions, a project that went on for almost 15 years. They consisted of creating a new urban intervention in Curitiba every May with a maximum of R$ 300, a figure that I had never readjusted in all that time (2005 to 2018). The city was and still is my main art gallery, a place that inspires me and that I use without ceremony and with a lot of responsibility. The second thing was that I felt comfortable playing with the photographic language in multiple ways. When you have nothing to lose, taking risks and being able to make mistakes are the main compensations. The camera was not and remains not being something of importance in what I do. I use the technology I have available and invent others when I need to. Maybe without the (in)visible polaroids, it would have taken me a little longer to have these insights.

 

With the (in)visible polaroids development, there seems to have been an intensification of the co-authorship role of people who decide to take part in your artistic propositions, performing actions, and contributing to your image collection, as in the case, for example, of LUGAR (LOCATION) urban action (2008). How did this transition process, in which your position as an author gives more space to other people, happen?

 

In the (in)visible polaroid urban intervention, the image is already a co-authorship between me, the text writer, and the viewer, who reads it and sees the image. Later, in 2006, I had my first experience in which the viewer could also be an intervener. In (in)visible polaroids - private interventions, I created (in)visible polaroids in 15 languages to be printed and placed in bathrooms of museums and galleries around the world. Since I couldn't travel as much as I would like to, I started to suggest that friends helped me do this job. Initially, I printed them at home, using the characteristic yellow paper of the polaroids, my friends would take them in their bags and intervene in the cultural spaces.

As time went by and more people became interested in participating, I developed the Manual do interventor privado (Private intervention manual), which provided instructions for anyone who wanted to perform the intervention, as well as a link to download the polaroids in one of the available languages. Altogether, about 15 people helped me to spread polaroids in more than 40 museums across 30 cities of 16 countries. Everyone received credit for the intervention, and the photos are on my website.

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With the Private Interventions, I discovered that the public not only appreciates art but also likes to take part in it. Sometimes they just don't know how and what to do. Two factors helped a lot. First, the fact that most of my works use basic materials or are carried out virtually. Secondly, just like in a game, I establish rules for participation, rules that permit everyone to exercise their creativity but allow me to keep the concept of my idea intact. I have several online collaborative works, such as Curto Circuito (Short Circuit), VAZIO (VOID) off Biennial and Cowtadinhos (an exhibition parallel to Cowparade). I also made another unfolding of the (in)visible polaroids called Self-portraits, which took place at SESC Água Verde and Centro Banco do Brasil Cultural in Rio de Janeiro (CCBB RJ). The fascinating thing about these self-portraits is that they all had as origin a single text. What was proposed was something like “Imagine your face being positioned in this part of the polaroid. What would be in the background if the photo was taken now?" Over 400 people participated in the exhibition at CCBB RJ, and it was amazing to see the profusion of outcomes that a single text can bring out. LUGAR (LOCATION) urban action was also very successful. Since 2008, there have been almost 500 people, including myself, who have visited approximately 100 cities in 15 countries.

The most recent project was carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic and was called Linhas de Horizonte (Horizon Lines; 2020).  Since the window became a boundary between our space and the outside world in this period, I started asking people to send me pictures of their views. There was only one condition: in the landscape, there should be a line that started on the left side and ended on the right side of the photo. The reason for this demand was that I wanted to build a single, long line by concatenating these images. The final work is over 40 meters long, and consists of almost 320 photos of 199 people in 82 cities across 22 countries. The feedback I get is always very positive. I could establish a network where people are reunited with the pleasure of undertaking an artistic action. Overall, I think that around 3,000 people have already participated in my open calls.

 

Revisiting Johan Huizinga, and his Homo Ludens (2012), I remembered that the author attributed a high degree of playfulness to art forms in which action is an intrinsic part of the work, such as music and dance, for example. To the Fine Arts, he attributed a low degree of playfulness, and one of his arguments for his judgment is related to the fact that "Fine Arts are linked to material and formal limitations", which according to him, would impede the game. But Huizinga did not achieve the establishment of the contemporary artistic languages. In his work, especially in urban interventions, I realise the presence of a vigorous playful factor, produced by the games you propose to the participants. Is this, in fact, something that you pursue and understand as an intrinsic part of your work?

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As I said, I like to propose this openness so that the game can take place. With (in)visible polaroids, I had great feedback from the monitors of SESC Belenzinho. They told me that the kids loved the polaroids because it became a competition between them to see who would find the image first. I think it is part of human behaviour wanting to complete something that is missing. In LUGAR (LOCATION) urban action, I draw these L-shaped paths on the city map, mark the points in which the photos have to be taken and leave the participant free to choose the technique and content during the tour along this route. In some cases, people ask me to choose the photographs which will be on the website or Instagram of LUGAR (LOCATION). But I emphasise that it is their choice and that being in the selection process is a learning experience. On other occasions, I am surprised because the photographer subverts my own expectations. Once I was asked for an L-path in Paris. It would be the first one in the French capital and was curious to see the images. However, Dani Busarello, who had asked me for the route, chose to photograph a non-Paris. The photos were of cigarette butts on the street, a shadow on the sidewalk, leaves in a puddle, and other images that were purposely out of focus, to the point of not characterizing any specific place. I loved her essay, and other photographers also had similarly unexpected attitudes.

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Another strategy is to open calls on a certain theme, announce them, and wait for the results. In these calls, there is no judgement of good and bad work, nor awards are given. Just by following the specified rules, the person is already taking part in it. In these proposals, seeing the achievement of the group is more important than highlighting a specific work or choosing a winner. That was the case of the VAZIO (VOID) Off Biennial, a call that I created in parallel to the São Paulo Biennial that had an entire empty floor, in 2008. That emptiness was receiving so much attention from the media that I decided to invite the audience to build a model of a void proposed by myself, take a photo of it, or anything else that represented emptiness, and sent it to me. The diversity of works I received was absurd. Another proposal was (un)fortunately, where the intention was to create a database of non-curricula. A non-curriculum is a collection of all the negatives we receive in our artistic trajectory, that is, the reverse of what we usually celebrate in our curriculum. I was willing to create a database on that topic, a large catalogue of our failures, so we can see how they could have affected our career. For instance, my option for urban interventions was not by chance, but a consequence of not being able to enter the circuit of museums and galleries. I think that the non-curriculum is a subject that we have learned how to overcome, but it should not be ignored. Mine is relatively updated.

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I can also mention Visita Premiada (Awarded Visit), in which I shared 30% of the commission I received for being selected for the Salão Paranaense de Arte (Art Salon) with the audience. Visita Premiada (Awarded Visit) was a word search game, where the audience could find terms related to the contemporary art market and, at the same time, suggest a five character word to complete the puzzle. The suggestion had to be placed in a ballot box, and for three or four months, I offered five bank cheques of approximately R$ 300 (£50). Nowadays, I understand Visita Premiada (Awarded Visit) as a double game: with the audience and the artists (who, like me, are seduced by the prizes offered by the lottery called Art Salon).

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Finally, I think it is important to mention another game I created, which was called Estado à Parte (State Apart). That was a critical response to the exhibition O Estado da Arte: 40 anos de arte contemporânea no Paraná (The State of Art: 40 years of contemporary art in Paraná), curated by Maria José Justino and Arthur Freitas. Using a memory game design, 30 artists with relevant art production trajectories in Paraná and that were not included in the exhibition O Estado da Arte (The State of Art) answered my convocation. In my opinion, it was a necessary reaction to create a panorama that was representative, comprehensive, and complex about the visual arts in our state. Without Estado à Parte (State Apart), the alleged The State of Art (State of Art) cannot sustain itself because there are many missing pieces. The memory game is still are available for download on my website.

 

I know you are a voracious reader of fiction. How do authors such as Nabokov, Proust, Machado de Assis, Cortázar, among others, and their respective literature influence your work?

 

I love literature because each book is like a bomb that needs a reader to ignite it. It is the combination of the author's voice with mine that will detonate the landscapes, the faces of the characters, the sensations, everything. I also think that time and feelings are more revealing when written. I now remember a description of the character Miss Tonica, by Machado de Assis: “She was 39 years old and had black eyes, tired of waiting”. I think there is such strength of visual, emotional, and temporal synthesis that my photography work does not reach. I still have an appreciation for writers who subvert the language, such as Júlio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, or Alejandro Zambra. Cortázar claimed that it is part of the writer's role to destroy literature. Maybe that is why I love using words in some visual works and destroy photography a little bit. In 2010, I created caractere(s): retratos em preto e branco (character(s): portraits in black and white), an exhibition of portraits of characters of Brazilian literature from the early 20th century. It was an installation that was set up at SESC Paço da Liberdade, in Curitiba, with 64 portraits written in the words of the authors themselves but edited by me. Firstly, there was the impact of not meeting the expectations of the visitors who wanted to see portraits. The black and white were those of words written on white backgrounds. The visualisation happened only after reading each text. Finally, we realized how our language had changed over 100 years. Many expressions were outdated or have fallen out of use and resulted in "bugged" views. One of the male portraits, for instance, said that the character had mutton chops. As I did not know what it meant, I had to consult a dictionary to be able to imagine it correctly. I also remember another exhibition where literature was determinant for the creative process. In 2004, I developed a curatorship for BrasilTelecom based on a haikai by Alice Ruiz: "inside sleep / the body discovers itself / without an owner". Paraná artists were invited to visually recreate that sensation, and the combination of those images with the original text ended up enhancing each other.

 

In M(USE)U (the Portuguese word for museum is ´museu´), that you developed for the 66º Salão Paranaense de Arte (66th Paranaense Art Salon), in 2017, the intention was to call people’s attention to the cultural equipment, right there, next to the sidewalks where they circulate, daily. Accordingly to the statistic you collected from Fecomércio, in 2015, most of the population does not attend art exhibitions. Interestingly, one of the strategies that you used to draw the attention of the inhabitants of Curitiba consisted of hiring a publicity announcer for street commerce offers and placing him in front of the building with the use of a microphone and a loudspeaker, to invite the population to enter the museum.  From my point of view, in this work, the intention to show the problematic situation of public policies for culture is clear. Also, there is an allusion to the opposition between the elitist and the popular culture. In the case of the geographic space in question, they face each other.  How was the creative process for the execution and presentation of this work?

 

In the last years, when I took part in art salons, I produced works that problematized something related to the event itself. In 2015, with Visita Premiada (Awarded Visit), I shared part of my commission with the public through raffles, for example. With M(USE)U (M(USE)UM), I had a feeling that the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná -  MAC-PR (Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná) , which houses one of the oldest art salons in Brazil, was a building that few passers-by in the city centre knew that it was a museum. For that, I needed to test my hypothesis. One day I went to the front of MAC-PR and, for an entire afternoon, I asked several people: "Do you know what this building is?" About 70% did not know about it, and, of those who said it was a museum, they first looked at the building and then pointed the door that had written above it ‘Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná’. On another occasion, I did another experiment, only a couple of blocks away from MAC-PR. This time, I asked for directions to that museum. More than 90% of the interviewees did not know how to give me any guidance. I then had the idea of ​​giving visibility to the museum by writing the word MUSEU (MUSEUM) on its facade in bold letters (and in blue, to contrast with the burgundy-red colour of its walls). It was perfect due to an architectural coincidence: the three windows in the middle of the building highlighted the verb USE, which is inside the word MUSEU (MUSEUM).  Visually, I was already satisfied with the project, but I could not see how a sign would make the public enter that space. It is about the clash between the elitist and popular culture, which you mentioned. The project would need to speak the same language of those who walked past that space every day. One afternoon, while I was conducting the interviews, I saw Leonardo Lemes at XV de Novembro Street, and I liked the way he advertised the products of the stores nearby. At that very moment, I understood what was missing to complete my project. We talked for a while, and then Leonardo agreed to participate in the project, even not understanding what exactly it meant. First, I showed him the museum, and then I trained him with important information about the free activities that were available there, such as exhibitions, guided tours, book collections, CDs, magazines, and much more. Finally, I let him free to improvise and deal with the audience in whatever way he considered appropriate. If I am not mistaken, there were ten performances of three hours each. In one of his performances, he convinced more than 100 people to visit the museum. It was wonderful. Leonardo has the same skills as a cheerful TV show host.

 

In addition to the dialectic elitist culture and popular culture, exemplified by the work M(USE)U (MUSEUM), it is possible to foresee a clear opposition in some of your works: nature x culture. For instance, in works such as Mirando(a) (2009), Still Life (2009), Blow up (2007), Cinématographe project (2006), nature is mediated by a sort of technological artifice and, thus, the images end up suggesting a kind of bewilderment in the audience. Could you expand this theme?

 

What bothers and fascinates me about photography is its ability to deceive us. We easily take up that a sheet of paper is capable of emulating the three-dimensionality of life. From my point of view, what happens is an imperfect, limited, and always biased translation (even when it is a work with excellent intentions). Those series you mentioned purposely have something wrong, incomplete or strange. Instead of creating an image to believe, I prefer to produce doubtful images. Photography is like an engraving by M.C.Escher, a distortion that seems natural to us. If you have a glance at it, it all fits together, and the landscape looks credible. On the other hand, if we examine them more carefully, they are like a puzzle where, although all the pieces are connected, they do not portray a coherent whole. It is necessary to pay attention to details to realize that the photograph is a puzzle with some swapped pieces. Mirando(a) is an urban intervention where photos of birds were framed and hung again on trees. Here I try to explore some contradictions, such as the contrast of what is natural and what is artificial and the strangeness of space-time discontinuity between one image and the other. Still Life is, in fact, a puzzle in which I decompose a landscape into four fragments, and each of them shows the passage of time at a different speed. This manipulation of time confuses the actions, the hours of the day, and during this continuous shuffling, the original landscape will never be noticed again. In the Cinématographe Project, I discuss the issue of framing. In a playful way, the coloured frames that can be manipulated by the audience simulate that inside that rectangle, as well as in the camera viewfinder, there are many other possibilities of clipping the world. Again, as it happened with the (in)visible polaroids, I switch the role with the viewer and place her/him as responsible for obtaining the final image. I believe that, along with these destabilizing activities through error, distortion, and role reversal, our gaze may be reorganized in another way. They are stimuli in the opposite direction to those of commercial and easy-to-read images that oversaturate our daily lives.

 

The philosopher Vilém Flusser pointed out that the technical photographic image established new forms of thinking and even ways of being, in a society in which the importance of information is crucial. In fact, Flusser seems to have used photography as a metaphor to refer to something much broader, the capitalist production system, and the stage it was at the time he wrote his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2002). When manipulating the "device", whoever intends to generate a photographic image thinks that he/she dominates it; it would be enough to press a few buttons and, eventually, prepare the device to get the best possible performance from it.  However, the user is insidiously dominated by it, by presenting itself as a "black box" type technology, which hides the program of which it is constituted.  To stop being a mere "employee" at the service of the program/device, the user must sabotage or subvert this program/device, to overcome this limitation and achieve new possibilities of creation or use. In this way, the once called employee would become a photographer, an artist, a revolutionary. In Brinquedografia (TOY-OGRAPHY), from 2013, you seem to demonstrate, in a playful way, Flusser's philosophical manifest. But, there are some nuances in this work, such as the fact of using a popular toy that is a poorly-finished simulacrum of a camera; the erasure of ready-made images that were "programmed" in the toy and their replacement by phrases of authors who criticised the artificiality of technical images; and that the work possibly reaches an audience that is not very recurrent in the enjoyment/participation of its proposals, that is, children. For the implications and conceptual folds intrinsic to this work, including the operation of opening the "black box", showing the manipulation of the device, and its content, performed for the user's awareness, which may eventually lead to an airtight character for some "users" not very familiar with contemporary art, is it possible to infer that you have produced a "program" and placed them in the position of "employees"? 

 

The inversion you are proposing is interesting. That by interfering with the equipment, the artist creates a new pre-programmed machine. It is quite ironic in the end. In the case of Brinquedografia (TOY-OGRAPHY), the option for the toy camera lay beyond the playfulness and being a poorly finished simulacrum. The main reason was that the audience, whether being adults or children, already anticipates the type of image that comes inside of it. In general, there are drawings or colour photographs that rotate when the button is pressed. Themes change, but they are always forms of illustration, and never, under any circumstances, a text to be read. Even more texts by Susan Sontag, Vilém Flusser, Júlio Cortázar, Lucia Santaella or Roland Barthes. Children may not have understood the depth of some quotations, but they were not the only audience I explored. I left the cameras in bars, cinemas, theatres, universities, and on benches of squares. Regardless of the age of the person, I am sure that I frustrated the initial expectations of everyone who took the cameras because normally they are objects to see, not to read, let alone texts that question photographic making and the image in general. The interference I made in that everyday object was more than evident, because it did not correspond to the dominant production available in the market. Altogether, I distributed sentences from 13 authors in 100 toy cameras. Some of the phrases were: “Photos can lie” (Umberto Eco); “Controlling images is a potential form of power” (Lucia Santaella); “Images are mediations between man and the world” (Vilém Flusser); “Image is a place that doesn't exist” (Ananda Carvalho); “Every gaze is summed up in falsehood” (Júlio Cortázar); "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph" (Susan Sontag). If, on the one hand, I created a new "program", on the other hand, I freed the public from the position of "employee" because I think that the critical reflection on the apparatus is liberating. This type of black box does not blind us. It is quite the opposite.

 

In 2018, you were busy completing the formalities to obtain a place in the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. You were successful and attended it during 2019. How was the selection process and living in England until obtaining the degree? What difference did you notice in your artistic practice in London, compared to the production carried out in Brazil?

 

The selection process you mentioned was the Chevening Awards, a master’s scholarship program that the United Kingdom offers annually to students of approximately 160 countries. There are nearly 1,500 scholarships for something around 50,000 applicants. In general, the candidates who benefit most are lawyers, architects, administrators, or journalists, but there is no restriction on the area of ​​expertise. I believe I was the only artist selected in Brazil in 2018.

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I chose to pursue a MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Unusually, this course belongs to the Sociology department rather than the Arts, an area in which I did not have much experience. In my opinion, there was a perfect exchange between that institution and me. Sociologists, at least in that country, have a conflicting relationship with the image. Strongly based on the written word, they even created Visual Sociology, precisely so that they could use photographs, graphics, and tables with more freely. Even so, photography, when used, is very technical, illustrative, and strongly concatenated with the story to be told. You see, I do not say that as if it were a problem. It was just the opposite of what I was used to producing until then. Technique is something that I, for instance, never took very seriously. This new experience took me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to get closer to the human aspects of the course and topics such as Gentrification, Communities, and Gender. In Postcards for the Future, for example, I developed a series of six postcards to preserve the memory of Red Gallery, a cultural centre that, after reinvigorating a Shoreditch region for eight years, had its demolition decreed to be replaced by a luxury hotel. Although all its accesses were prohibited, I was able to register the façade of the gallery that was still intact, as well as details and marks that time left on its walls. The postcards had an edition with six different photos, and on the back, I printed testimonials of people who used to attend the gallery. In all, 300 units were printed that I distributed to people, including Ernesto Leal, creator, and manager of the Red Gallery. He was surprised by the initiative once they had left that building shortly before and he was still processing what had happened. That was around October 2018. When I left London in March 2020, there were no remains of the gallery. I also had the chance to write about Brazilian photographers that I admire, such as Alexandre Sequeira (where I explored the relationship he establishes with different communities, people, and places), and Fabio da Motta (who has an impressive work with bonding and flowers with the LGBTQ+ community). By the same token, teachers have always been very receptive to my most experimental proposals. The (in)visible polaroids were highly praised, and I even developed a series for the ground floor corridors of Goldsmiths. Similarly, the photo collages of The Commuting series, which I did on the London Underground, completely ran away from the general standard of the course, and it was rated as "surprising and disturbing". For my dissertation, I chose to write about the time sculptures of Street Topographies, a theme closer to my trajectory and dialoguing with the theories of everyday life and production of space by Henri Lefebvre and Charles Baudelaire's flânerie. In fact, it was not just written work. I created ten sculptures, among the more of 30 possibilities that I had available. For almost five months, I explored London in-depth, always looking for different situations, characters, and landscapes. Generally speaking, I am a photographer more aligned with Garry Winogrand. He used to say that he could go anywhere and start taking pictures, and that “he did not need to know how to speak the language or where to buy a cup of coffee”. In this case, navigating the city is faster and based on intuition. It works well with me most of the time. However, I do appreciate it when I have the chance to get involved with the environment, the rhythm of the city and explore it with more attention. Having lived in London for a year and six months, having had a bank account and an address to receive the mail, used the NHS health services, studied at a university, worked, visited pubs, and made friends, for sure added a new dimension to my London time sculptures.

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Finally, during my master's degree, I realised the relationship of my work with street photography. I was lucky to have Paul Halliday as a teacher, an excellent street photographer, and who always brought references to this practice to his students. I have always associated my photographic production with a kind of intervention, or urban action, but now I see it has a lot more to do with poetry and experimentation of street photographers. Many times, I was criticised for not producing more socially engaged work, but in fact, it has always been. The difference is that instead of being more journalistic or direct, it is more metaphorical and needs another type of interpretation, perhaps more subtle.

 

In your trajectory, you have been working with some proposals that unfold over time and gain new contours, in rhizomic articulations that associate geographical places and photographic records, exchanges of impressions and sensations between you and the participants, in different manifestations of mail art. In New Maurílias - an allusion to the city of Maurília, "the city of postcards" from the book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (1990) - you resume some of your practices on epistolary forms associated with photographic images developed in previous works, such as in Mando Lembranças  (Sending you my memories; 2014), or in the dissemination strategy of the exhibition caractere(s): retratos em preto e branco (character(s): portraits in black and white; 2010), when you published and distributed in the catalogue some of the works presented in the Paço da Liberdade gallery, in Curitiba, in the format of detachable postcards.  Could these different works and proposals be understood and grouped as an especial category in your poetics?

 

In fact, I think we can understand art, generally speaking, as a type of postal art. It is something that you put into circulation in the world, and, as time goes by, a painting reaches new walls, a film is released on screens of different countries, a photograph is printed on varied media, and a book goes through several shelves. The artist is always sending messages with uncertain destinations. However, we do not need to put a stamp on the message all the time. I have always liked postcards and collect the ones I receive. Almost 90% of what I have was sent to me by Vicente Frare, to whom I dedicated this book. He is a great traveller and mailed me not only postcards from different countries but also hotel vouchers, a cut-out of a cookie box he bought in Singapore, and many other things he found along the way.

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caractere(s): retratos em preto e branco (character(s): black and white portraits; 2010) was the first time in which I used the postcard as part of an exhibition. Originally, character(s) was an urban intervention that I reorganised to the format of the Paço da Liberdade gallery. Therefore, while adapting it to a private space, I did not want to break the link with the city, where it had started. Printing duplicate works in the catalogue, one to keep and another to be detached and sent by mail, was the way I found to take the works out of the gallery and put them into circulation again. In the case of Mando Lembranças (Sending you my memories) (2014), there was a different reason. It was a work of the May interventions, which I had been doing out annually in Curitiba since 2004. But I spent the whole month of May of 2014 travelling through the countryside of São Paulo, attending an invitation from SESC-SP to join the Circuito SESC de Artes (SESC Art Circuit).  The option for postcards happened when I discovered an iOS app that transformed any photos stored on the phone into real postcards and dispatched them by mail. I was going through a moment of discoveries, with super talented artists, exploring the most different landscapes in São Paulo, and the postcard appeared as a way for me to transform my travel into the content for this action. I opened a call on Facebook in which I asked who would like to receive (free of charge) my memories. Altogether, I distributed 100 postcards with 100 memories to 100 people located in different Brazilian states. The photos were as varied as possible and ranged from news published in local newspapers to a special meal I had, a show a watched, or even details of the city I was visiting at that time. This app, which I use until today, breaks that tradition of the touristic postcard, which limits the city to five or ten points of interest that are almost always seen from the same angle. In Mando Lembranças (Sending you my memories), I chose to show daily life through its diversity and as a result of something actually lived. Those postcards were my memories and not those to be bought in newsstands with photos taken by other people.

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In New Maurílias, I gather references from several other works, and not just those you mentioned. Just like in LUGAR (LOCATION) urban action, where I visit cities intending to walk on an L-shaped path previously drawn and discover what exists on that route, I have an exploratory mission to achieve. I also see a lot of the (in)visible polaroids and the curiosity I have in investigating urban space. The book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, has always been a great reference, and Maurília, the city of postcards, caught my attention because of the nostalgia embedded in each one of them. As the author himself said, through the postcards, “the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was”. The New Maurilias that I present in this book are the ten smallest municipalities in Paraná. They are young cities, founded between the 1960s and 1990s, with a population between 1,400 and 2,500 inhabitants and without any printed postcards. How these locations will be in 50 or 100 years from now, only time will tell us. Much is debated about the dissolution or creation of development policies that would avoid the implosion of these towns. Will they be invisible (remaining only in the memory of the people who once were there)? New Maurílias is a collection of images, testimonies, and feelings that I am encapsulating to be reviewed in future times.

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References

 

BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. Pós-Produção: como a arte reprograma o mundo contemporâneo. São Paulo: Martins, 2009.

 

CALVINO, Italo. As Cidades Invisíveis. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990.

 

FLUSSER, Vilém. Filosofia da Caixa Preta: ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2002.

 

HUIZINGA, Johan. Homo Ludens: o jogo como elemento da cultura. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2012.

 

LISBOA, Tom. SIMTOMNIZADO. Disponível em: <https://www.sintomnizado.com.br/>. Acesso em: 12 ago. 2020.

 

Tânia Bittencourt Bloomfield

Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Geography of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) - 2012. Master's in Geography by UFPR - 2007. Specialist in Art History of the 20th Century by the School of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná (EMBAP) - 2000. B.A. in Art Education by UFPR - 1995. B.A. in History by the University of Brasília (UnB) - 1987. Professor at the Arts Department of UFPR since 1998. A visual artist with several exhibitions in Brazil, and abroad. A researcher with interest in the interfaces between the fields of Geography and Visual Arts, especially concerning artistic practices in urban and contemporary artistic languages.