novo site/new site

www.marialusitano.org

The gardener who had no plans

Split-index: a time/space dislocation

P74 Gallery, Prušnikova 74, Ljubljana
Opening View: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 at 8 p.m.
paula roush/maria lusitano

Video, photography and social actions, duration and sizes variable

Conceptual art follows the structuralist split between language and the optical, going sometimes as far as suggesting that the visual unconscious is structured like a text.
To test these ideas in a contemporary social situation we engaged the people of Ljubljana in an art research experiment. Using a 1980s Portuguese literacy kit found in the private library of L. Santos, in Lisbon, we asked our collaborators to reindex the photographs into Slovenian concepts. This reenactement resulted in some moments of transcultural recoding, and in others of untranslability, a hibridity that reflects everyday life.

Orphan papers

Now it was just make believe and:

http://mkc.botkyrka.se/utstallningar/black-box

Now it was just make believe and: is a film diary from Maria Lusitano, that deals with the psychological aspects of moving out of your country, through an approach to filmmaking based in shared filmmaking techniques.This project is made for a video installation of two screens, but that can also be seen as a film. It was drawn from an archive of 4 years of clips of a videodiary. In it , the various intervenients experiencing different life stages (childhood, adulthood) engage in conversations and film each other, trying in this way to reflect on the various challenges and psychological aspects of their diasporic experience in Sweden. The question of the utopia as a project versus a constructed reality is also explored.

intimate tv - forward:delete (wayback safari)

intimate tv - forward:delete (wayback safari) by webcam operators (paula roush & maria lusitano)
cyberformance/performative-lecture, kunstverein harburger bahnhof (hamburg) part of the programme channel tv, december 10th 2010

exploring links between the traces of webcam data found in the wayback machine archive and the ethics of logging and forgetting in network culture, fw: delete (wayback safari) is a performative presentation, in which images from the camgirls archive are re-activated and re-enacted by the webcam operators to explore the semiotic/ scopophilic implications of social life casting. the performative presentation debates the persistence of life traces in the network and the integration of technologies of surveillance/sousveillance into the structures of desire. it reflects upon the (re) construction of the self, within a networked offline/online linked existence, where the possibilities of organically editing (though selecting and deleting) our online biographies, shape and challenge our construction of identity.

Project VAST

The video The war correspondent was shown in Oslo, in the context of VAST PROJECTION

VAST PROJECTION is an independent screening program presenting international and local artists. The aim is to cover and discover turbulent tendencies of interconnections between creativity and violence, as both driving forces and tools of resistance.
The program is initiated by Christina Leithe Hansen and Synnøve G. Wetten.
It takes place in Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.

classop (varied papers)

classop (varied papers) by maria lusitano & paula roush
published for the exhibition classop (varied papers) in the sput-e-nik (Porto) between the 6th and the 27th nov 2010

by maria lusitano & paula roush
Publicado por ocasiao da exposicao classop (papéis varios) no sput-e-nik (Porto) entre 6 e 27 nov 2010

The book-archive classop (papers varied) presents itself as literature2, ie, two stages of a loop in the visual and semantic field of reading, in the flight from paper to electronic literature.

The first stage of this project consisted of a residence in the archive of l. santos in lisbon. The resulting artist’s book, later bound in malmö by a traditional bookbinder. Titled classop (an abridgement for the two portuguese words classe operaria / ‘working class’), it is a sampling of a unique library specialised in the so called PREC - the period after the 25th april portuguese revolution. An archive of texts and images from books on architecture, urban planning and education, it reveals the influence of the historical events that marked the anti-fascist, May 68, student riots, and 1974 revolution of the carnations.

The second phase contains the virtual experience of the book, and this has been developed in working sessions using Skype and webcam. The networked library has expanded to create its own place based on a methodology of online meetings.

A book about a library is an index which is also the construction of an epistemology about the book and the state of not-knowing. It is a fiction-book based on fragments of multiple realities, rehearsed representations of concepts in a state of flux.

One gets there traveling through the documents, from one shelf to another, following the call of the book spines, the attraction of the bookbinding and above all the materiality of the paper.

Feeling the entropy of the shelf, visible in its organization as an organic body, an accumulation of the now classic texts, mixed with icons of decades past, shrouded in the dust later entered through a window and testimony that life outside goes on.

This layer of dirt gives the shelf a second skin, that makes my fingers dirty, contaminating my body with this biography which is the library’s biography, the personal narrative of its creator, now part of me, spot-map, a key for that labor intensive process of accumulation that resulted in this monument-archive, rhetorical and idealized.

The library as place and non-place, site and non-site, relational space where the conversation is started, questions are raised, memories activated the myth of a country unfolded and entwined with that of others, in a critical and political intertextuality, made out of subjectivities and ideological representations. The cumplicity, the intimacy of that encounter that carries the bibliographic corpus from historical data into ghostly pixels.

Foreword by Louise Michel

Louise Michel (1981) is a writer and theoretician based in The Isle of Dogs. Michel is known for her theory of the book-archive, in which she makes the distinction between the book-book and the book-archive, connecting these to a meta-generation of books or literature2 and examines the transition from the historical book to the optical book that circulates in superstructural rhizome of the Internet.

Visit classop online reading room

1.
In October, the female bus driver thought she had had enough. And abstractly smiling at the family that was buying her a ticket, she decided that the moment, so meticulously planned during the past months, had finnaly arrived.

By the cemetery, she did not turn to the right. The tape recorder kept announcing the wrong stations, but the bus just kept being driven to a predestined direction. The bus driver, amazed, noticed that no one was saying anything.

In october, the little boy entered the same bus, holding his mother's hand, and two thin paths of dried dust, made by two tears, were drawn in his little face. A terrible pain had broken his heart into little pieces, some minutes before, just one day after a solemn declaration on how good it felt to have good friends, best friends.

Last November, that is, one year ago, it had been mörke, that is, dark, outside the window. The same little boy, one year younger, had looked out of the window, and had said to his teachers: "it is dark now", and then, he looked back at them: "my father, sometimes, goes and buys pizza at night."

It had been a terrible year, but now everything would be ok.
that is

Participação na 29a Bienal de São Paulo

Participo com vídeo : "O Correspondente de Guerra" na 29a Bienal de São Paulo

Videoscreening at Goethe Institute-Lisbon

Participation with video: "the gardener that had no projects" at video screening at Goethe Institute in Lisbon

Exhibition: "A culpa não é minha" - Museum Berardo Collection

I will be participating with 3 videos in this exhibition, of António Cachola's collection, shown at Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon

VideoChannel Cologne 2010/ New Media Fest

From the first of September it will be online the session: "Videoart From Portugal" included in the VideoChannel Cologne 2010, that is part of the New Media Fest, where I participate with a video project.

Moderna Utställning 2010

I will be participating in the exhibition Moderna Utsälling 2010, with video "Moving Away From Home".

Happiness

singing in the rain from Maria Lusitano on Vimeo.

I was observing my kids, these two kids, and my experiment, just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, was highly dependent on the observer- I was the observer and the manipulator of the experiment. An happiness experiment was going on. A little oportunity to spread and enjoy happiness.

Even if it was temporary. nothing exists forever,I know,but at the same time, everything exists for ever. For we are nothing. Are we? As the main character of the last Woody Allen film was saying: "we are just a bit of dust temporarily put together." But dust, I mean, dust, that will always exist. Then again, as Boris (the bitter physician in Woody Allen's last film) was also saying: "I hate happy new years celebrations...everybody desperate to have fun... trying to celebrate in some pathetic way...celebrate what? a step closer to the grave ?! that is why I can't say it enough times: what ever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can take or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works... and don't kid yourselves...it's not by all means all due up to your human ingenuity! A part of your existence is luck, you should admit it..."

I was in for trying to be happy. Happiness, dealt a lot with giving happiness to others. But happiness dealt also a lot with trying more and more to improve.

Holding trees in Japan

In a late night in a hotel in Sagani Ono I was zapping through an incomprehensible television.I was reading bits of news here and there from an old Spanish newspaper. I was hearing a XIX century romantic symphony in Spotify. And then,in the newspaper, I came across a story about a man, old man, that knowing he was about to die, started to say farewell to his friend trees of the southern village where he had lived all his long live. He would hold them, embracing their stem, and then, whisper to them his last secrets, his last affects.

I finished the article, and turned on the television again: an amazing bit of an anime, glued me to the screen. In it, there was also an old man, in a flight, but I couldn't understand a word. In it, people were embracing each other, or holding themselves. Some kind of farewell was going on also.

Today, I looked out of the window. I just arrived to this house, and my friend tree, the first one I met, is not anymore stretching her long flowered arm through the open window, as she used to do, as if welcoming me back. I look at the window and see a vandalized garden, put into pieces, destroyed. My friend tree is cut.

Nothing exists forever. Not even affects.

Portuguese Contemporary Art Exhibition: The age of micro voyages

Joao Tabarra, Maria Lusitano, Miguel Palma, Pedro Costa


the-age-of-micro-voyages





Joshibi University - Tokyo
Joshibi University Art Museum

(untitled) childhood

so: tell me about your house. How was your house?

there was a long corridor
there was a large living room
there was a beautiful library with lots of light and many books
on a wooden shelf.
and there was also_______ that was the

_____
sometimes. not due to his dna code of humanness.
___due to a linguistic social project
making him become:
human. male human.
a male human of his own time.

so: there was a childhood room filled with (not always)
sweet innocent pleasures. _______ toys.
flowered gardens
(a certain feeling of) deep
pain.happiness too
the pleasure of dolls being
(un)dressed from coloured self made clothes.
scattered through the grass of the
green garden.
(not this)
garden but:

the thrill of forbidden games.
boy's games and a
music box

and there was
again
the library____
____________
(no)knowledge.
trotsky, mao and other marxist sub products.
The plannification of an industrialized mankind. The plannification of
(what to do with)
serfs.
the education of citizens:
the ones who knew less then you.
because not well read yet:
primitiveness.
no (high) culture.

biological beings. just like me.
me.
me and them:
both:

bouncing in the swing

yet to come even with language
biological beings needing language to be
come
the future.
not her future though.
his future.
i wandered:
why would (s)he want me as his memorial ?
their memorial?

untitled childhood
because:
_________
there was no title for childhood


(no) ____hood
because:

i could not remember being a mean being.
just an illiterate one.
like in this photograph:

young scared little boy from the forties
__ dirty knees and a sad face

so: similar to my own
face and
??????????????
??????????????
this had to do with (we)man
that in hers essence bore the memory (memorial) of being.
the language we already possess and which possesses us:
i needed it now to articulate but:
the past was
(untitled)

.

invisible memories

Private Anatomies in Production #3/Lunds konsthall

Lunds konsthall

Moving away from home: 2008/2010

Moving away from home is an ongoing project that started in 2007, and that reflects through video-diaries, the experience of emigration and diaspora, and the sensation of unhomeliness that can happen while one lives outside of their country of birth.

In 2008 I did the first video: Moving away from home: 2007-2008 . In that video, I reflected my own experience of moving interwovened with the story of Samuel and Ercília Diogo, 2 portuguese emigrants that moved to Sweden 40 years ago.2 years after, I continue to reflect on that experience of moving around between different countries, languages and cultures through the story of Sergio.

Sergio is a Brazilian man and artist that moved to Sweden 10 years ago.

A field of interconnected realities

The project was shown in Auckland, part of the public art Project Living Room 2010. The webcam operators, Paula Roush in Auckland and Maria Lusitano in Malmo, collaborated through webcams in the development of a series of networked drawing performances, inspired in the artist’s book “A week of goodness” made by Max Ernst in 1934. In this collage book, Ernst had arranged and re-drawn cut-up images of women, men, animals, dragons, plants, and indoor /outdoor situations, to produce hybrid bodies and surreal landscapes, that presented a dark, surreal world addressing themes of sexuality, anti-clericalism and war. These collages, by dislocating the visual significance of the source material, tried to suggest what had been repressed. Revisiting these images, we produced new networked collages and drawings in a networked performative process that included a collaboration with the public. Relying on techniques such as hand drawing, drawing with the use of sketch-a-graph ( a machine that can both enlarge and reduce an image whilst copying it), water colour, acrylic painting and collage, we produced revised bio-tech versions of that book, addressing the new unconscious phantasies, dreams, fears and expectations of our zeit geist. The outputs of this project are the networked drawings and also the 5 films that resulted from documenting the production of each drawing.

This collective project, which placed drawing into a disruptive new situation, challeged the usual characteristics atributed to this medium. It addressed the dream fantasies of the past, placing them into the present (through the mashing up of Max Ernst’s images book with contemporary ones ), and revisited the various historical devices that have been commonly used to make drawings. The glitches, pixelisation and splitting of the images produced by the webcamstreaming device, introduced a new puzzling time/space dimensionality to this experience and served as a trope/interface to the production of a contemporary dreaming space where the new collages/ drawings revisit the collective unconscious fears and fantasies of today.

Loving "I"

there was this anthropologist that went to the tropiques. trying to find the pure primitive that was such a
good
good person but:
there were no proper names in that remote tribe.
that was forbidden
that was the law
just like the incest law.

No I.
I :
did not exist.

but kids, you know, they were always breaking the law
just like all the others. Us.
kids were there playing.
and when playing
they would get angry
due to property
and the struggles of the strongest
there was the leader
there was the subaltern
there was hierarchy because we
(them)
were all helplessly mammals
subjects of the milk law
of for such a long time depending:
on another provider

kids would use names to denounce each other
and in that way have access to justice.
order.

quickly
the anthropologist could understand which name belonged to each one
of them
even if there was the rule of no proper name.
No I.
Would there be love, in the land of no I?

those were the tristes tropiques.

Framtiden/in the future

See? in the future things were a bit different from now. We were all linked. The ego I mean. Or rather, we wouldn't speak about ego. It was a post-ego time . That's why if it would get pregnant in the future, it did not get pregnant. There was no self that would get pregnant. One would just transform her self. I multiplied, I was multiplying and that was a part of my body that was getting transformed, that was being created. That would show me-us, how I had been and how I would become. Then it turned out it was a he being built within me. I was having him inside of me.

How could this have happened? Maybe due to representation. ST scan and magnetic ressonance. The trip of representation had began actually, with Leonardo going to the cemetery to get bodies in order to draw them.

the fetus inside the womb. Do you know that drawing? is one of the most known and successful. It was the first drawing made of the womb.

Womb.

my kid/me, wanted so badly to tie up people. I had tied up people all over the house.

Was that our archetypal self just getting loose? The films of tied up people, tied up cartoonish figures being tortured. torcedere, meant to twist. And to be born one would have to twist,
Was that just a barbaric expression of our history?

In the womb you had to twist so badly in order to get out of the cage. sweet organic muscled cage.

We had to experiment, we had to cross borders. Boundaries. The boundaries of the body. I was a woman, so I did know and understood the boundaries of the body, and the transformation of the same body. And in the beginning that was so uncanny. Although it was not uncanny at all. So: What was the story of the I? Ich, Jag, Je, Eu, Jo ?

When had the I happened? We had no idea. I just new that when I was transforming me into a he, because he was inside of me, if I had that type of language, you see? the language of the future, the framtiden, the time ahead, I would be a different person. He would be a different person. What would we be?

So: I was trying to make a story: in the beginning, there was no separation between representation and being. But when we started making representation, when we started to make language, a way to be inside the picture, and take a prespective look at it, at the picture, we started immediatly to be transformed. And the picture got transformed. Then we had the bearded guy that evented the ego, the supra ego etc.

And now, in the future, w just could see so well the interior of the body.

what was going on?

Ok:

So, this was the future, and in the future there was all this new type of language, a new type of language that enabled the people to communicate in a different way. That language had been developed also due to the developments in the techniques of represesentation. So, it was possible , when one would get pregnant to monitor and see what was going on inside of one's body. Childrearing techniques had also encouraged one generation before, the empathic and permanent relationship with the baby, like the cangooroo mother. That had subtetly produced changes. Also in the language. You and I were getting out of use. The mirror phase was different. Even if there was a mirror phase the language made it different too. Because you were looking at an other being that was saying we! your mother wasnt saying you! baby me mother. She was saying we. Mamma ment the other, the carataker, but it also ment the newborn being.

Speed/Sight

I was invited by msdm to participate and collaborate in a webstream performative lecture done by her at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the 20th of November of 2009.

Living History/ e-book

In 2006 I did a research-based project that dealt with history. That project consisted of a photographic installation, that had been the result of interviewing twelve people from the Portuguese ex-colonies. Those people had experienced in their lives a period of war when the decolonization process and the ensuing independence of their countries had happened. I wanted to reflect upon the impact of macro history on micro history, or the personal history of ordinary people who had witnessed a historical moment for their countries. It was quite interesting to notice how history considered war as the most crucial event for the construction of history itself. I listened to their stories, and interviewed various members of the same family. I had for example a sixty-year-old engineer that had been living in East Timor when the Indonesian invasion happened, and the testimony of his daughter, ten at that time. And I photographed a place in Portugal called Portugal of the little ones, built during the fifties, under fascism. In that place, built to serve as an illustration of our country to our children, were models of all the typical houses of the various regions/provinces of Portugal. And also houses typical of the colonies considered at that time to be the “overseas” provinces of Portugal. In this project I was starting to explore the borders of fiction intertwined with history and I was also exploring the possibilities of history as storytelling. I wanted to contest this necessity of war happening, in order to produce events that were considered historical enough to be written down in the historical canon.
And I was exploring and looking for the effects of war events on the private lives of people, as well as the way people remembered the facts, and transmitted them. That was as diverse as it was influenced by age, political positions, gender etc. So, after the interviews, I started to write down the events that they had told me, in a literary way.
Intertwined with this photographic project I imagined the story of F., a very old historian. This aged historian was being interviewed by a journalist. And he would only speak through the words and quotations of others. Never referring the source of the quotations, he would just adopt them as his own. His quotations had been the result of research I had done into historians reflecting upon their own subject. So, he would say stuff like: “History doesn’t do anything, It’s the man, the real living man, that does everything.” Or: “The most beautiful law of our species is the one that dictates the forgetting of what we cannot appreciate.” Or “But the faculty of apprehension of life, that is in fact, the master quality of the historian. It is known that it is very difficult to reanimate the affective life of a period, but the wise man doesn’t have the right to desert!".
On the day of the opening, all the participants were invited along. And some were quite appalled seeing that their words had not been transmitted precisely. That they had been reinterpreted. Just as in the story of the wise old historian who spoke through the words of the others, with this project I was reflecting on what I would be deeply working with the following two years: this notion of the permanent construction of a fiction within the historical telling of events. With what strategies did we represent that past moment, that we could not grasp anymore? Within which documents would we search for the best way to tell that history? What kind of selection would we make, when looking for the testimonies of the witnesses of the events? Would we look amongst the ones that professionally were judged more able to speak up, or the ordinary people? After all, history was just a story. And as my old fictional character F. would say, “History doesn’t do anything, It’s the man, the real living man, that does everything.”

The war correspondent - video

The war correspondent, HD, colour, sound,46´53´´(2009)

The doll's house or rather the story of an unhappy family

So: there was a young Hungarian woman, and a not so young man, and three children all sharing a not so happy household. There was also an obnoxious little grand-mother in that not so fortunate social unit of a living together type of family, and that was ok, actually really quite ok, because, as Tolstoy would say, happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way Russian way. That's what Tolstoy would say, and myself, I would say, that I would probably not so much agree.



So: there was a young woman that was specially gifted to play around with little toys while analysing little kids, searching for their unconscious mental processes of becoming. This is a story happening a long time ago, so, a story where young women did possess a stable self, a stable and formed identity, on the contrary of the little so so sweet children, still facing up the painstaking process of becoming, still, existing within an unformed polymorfous perverse draft of a self. Eventually even playing with their little dicks, so supposedly willing to smash the big ones, or rather, not so much playing with their castrated holes, rather with their beautiful victorian doll houses.

But let's go back to the point here: When she was really young, her younger sister used to masturbate, do you know what that is? Childwise speaking? That was not ok in Hungary, or in any part of the (western)world, and a worried mother asked her warm doctor what to do. She would even come to detailed exemplifications of the in(situ)ation while laid in the sofa, speaking up her dreamed and complicated true self (back then, you still had a self, it was not as today that we all were within a process of identification, as no man is an island, you know?)And she would say: "she would crawl to a fetal position, and while sucking one thumb, put the other tiny one in a special pleasurable hole. Her chicks would get red, and she was such an adorable (poor) sweet baby. And we were supposed to regularly take a look at the baby while she was asleep. She should not do this." "Why was all that so impressive?" would the doctor ask. And she would look at the pattern of the persian tapestry and take a second for herself before answering.

Sopa de tretas

No, this is not the uncanny at all. It's just the human brain being made up. Neurulation.

I didn't even noticed it could be scary. I had no idea, as I was used to medical stuff. When I studied embriology, I used to think that it was so beautiful! There was the clay, and the clay was a mass of body, being shaped, into us. A human being. Little sweet baby becoming little Jesus. About to show up. One bloody day. When I was pregnant there was a neurulation going on, even if un-neurolation was little by little happening also in my own headworld. Backwards Neurulation. That was ok. Neurulation is a part of organogenesis in vertebrate embryos. Steps of neurulation include the formation of the dorsal nerve cord, and the eventual formation of the central nervous system. The process begins when the notochord induces the formation of the central nervous system (CNS) by signaling the ectoderm germ layer above it to form the thick and flat neural plate. The neural plate folds in upon itself to form the neural tube, which will later differentiate into the spinal cord and the brain, eventually forming the central nervous system.