Paulo Mendes

Fevereiro 2011

Engines for a precarious revolution
A comment to the work of Susana Gaudêncio

A factory.
A white sheet of paper on a modernist white room in a factory that manufactured weapons.
Black, black graphite, consecutive parallel lines that produce buildings, timeless buildings, construction of revolutions and utopias, utopian spaces.
Lumière returned to us the real, Méliès dazzled us with the fantasy - the fantasy that naively follows the real revolutions.
Illusory buildings, places for an abstract construction of power - economico political - the figures of representation. The architecture as the arena where conflicts succeed...

Artworks are diagnostic of our contemporaneity. The artists ask questions but it is not their job to provide answers. Sometimes we can ask questions so as to provoke a certain response, although keeping free the flow on discussion channels.
Often contemporary artists appropriate forms or formats of pre-established models to decode and produce other lines of reality and alternative narratives.
Artistic creation is historically linked to a desire for change and to the reconfiguration of aesthetic and social paradigms. A continuous development reflected by the artistic avant-garde ways of expression of modernism . With the failure of this project what is left is to interfere on a smaller scale, and at the level of the collective experience and participation. From universal utopia to local intervention.

(...)

An insurrection, we are no longer able to see where it all starts. Sixty years of peace making, suspension of historical turmoil, sixty years of a democratic anesthesia and managing of events that has weakened us in a way a more abrupt perception of the real.
The impression of living a lie is still true.
When we speak of the Empire, we named the power devices that preventively, surgically, retain all the possibilities of a revolutionary situation. Thus, the Empire is not an enemy that confronts us. It's a rhythm that imposes a way to actualize reality till its exhaustion.
More than an order of the world this is about its sad, heavy and military depletion.
Two centuries of mercantile capitalism and nihilism resulted in the most utter sense of estrangement, in relation to itself, to others and to the worlds. The individual, this fiction, decomposes at the same speed as  it becomes real.

Excerpt from the text read/performed by Paulo Mendes / February 2011

ENGINES FOR A PRECARIOUS REVOLUTION was the title of a performative presentation by Paulo Mendes that involved the reading of a text which was simultaneously accompanied by a video projection.


CV