PANDEMIC!
I don't know
Karate but I know
Ka-Razor!
To live in a continuous state of uncertainty is perhaps one of the most complex tasks that human nature has to face and, ironically, it is — just like contradiction — what may define our condition as a species.
PANDEMIC – I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor is the response from artist Filipe Marques to the invitation made by the Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2019 to explore the viral concepts that permeate his work in an extensive speculative exercise which, in the current context of the global pandemic crisis that we are facing, exerts itself as necessary, collective and political.
How to defend ourselves from our own rivalry? How to embrace our fragility? How to accept what surpasses us? What resources do we have? What kind of violence should we use to react to the violence of the world we inhabit?
In a self-reflective exercise, which the artist extends to each one of us, this exhibition is an uncomfortable encounter revealed by different densities and degrees of perception that imposes a very specific temporality, one that requires our total availability to confront frailty, disease, failure and self-destruction. But also all its contrariness. This is how the exhibition space opens up to the possibility of a construction with numerous layers, where each of the elements and their interpretations sometimes contribute to a sense of wholeness, sometimes grasp the abyss of the unknown, where reason and uncertainty meander in constant transformation.
The acceptance of fragility and the burden of all its marks and wounds, which expose us as subjects that face an imminent disaster, appears in the constant resorting to philosophy and its stimuli, signs and metaphors. Through concepts like Weltschmerz, coined by the German writer Jean Paul Richter in his most pessimistic novel — Selina, 1827 — and literally translated as the great pain or weariness of the world, the artist leads us through the tormented and violent experience of life.
But this profound sadness and nihilistic aversion to the present, which underlies the layers revealed by the subtle movements of each element in space, entails an undeniable thirst for revolt. I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor is this spasm that takes us out of the stagnation to which the deep cultivation of the anthropocentric ego seduces us. A turning point that awakens us from melancholy, and assures a future fantasized only by ourselves.
I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor was taken from the song The Payback, from James Brown’s homonymous album from 1973. It was composed for the soundtrack of the film Hell Up in Harlem and after being rejected by the film’s producers, James Brown released it autonomously, transforming the musical theme into one his major hits.
Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso
Curators
Filipe Marques in a conversation with Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso
Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso: In the exhibition “PANDEMIC: I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor” you analyse many of the concepts that underpin the genesis of your artistic production. Do you want to talk about some of them? When did they start to “contaminate” your artistic practice? Have they acquired new meanings in the wake of the global pandemic that had an impact on this project (and on our lives)?
Filipe Marques: “Contaminate” is indeed perhaps the right term to describe my consistent transgression of margins - the margins of my heart. Art is essentially the sensitive representation of ideas. At least me, the starting points for representation the most faithful records of philosophy and the creation of concepts. Philosophy guides me and ensures that my work precludes any hypothesis of reducing an object to being a mere object and helps me incorporate within my artistic practice the experience of feeling and thinking as marks of the individual. This completes me, by helping me organise my chaos and materialise it in my work. But this does not mean subordinating my work to any hierarchy of goals. Likewise, in the “Pandemic” exhibition there is a continuation, as an “endless end” or — how can I put this? Perhaps first of all understand this — in the way that the “endless end” is articulated with my chaos and my anarchic autoscopy, of unstable clinical origin. In this confrontation, I search for a so-called new artistic praxis, claiming a permanent domain of art. Tension and combat. In this process I believe that philosophy favours me. Through my frailty. Of course, my projects are never dissociated from my choice of materials. But the relevance of this choice is always undifferentiated. My choice of materials is not a question of doxa, but of paradox. The materials and supports that I choose always avoid making opinions. I believe that my work does not allow itself to be captured by “inter-digmatic” or paradigmatic lines of enquiry. It is a semiotic material, that is composed of various types, vehicles and signs. With the aid of this set of signs I can create the intended and concise type of images or objects, or that are of interest for exhibitions. My work proposes to be similar, while using different media. Dissimilar media are those that always have an affective and perceptual dimension, which helps us, as a reflex, to see things and not discuss them. They may or may not help us achieve a better understanding. Take it or leave it. They always promote a critical dimension, and never purely an argumentative dimension. Everything was suspended in the wake of the pandemic, but something nonetheless remains. And it did. The pandemic has directed us to a new reality, a void that belongs to everyone and no one. A periphery of the centre. And how having nowhere to escape has had consequences for my work, and perhaps for everyone else, yes. Due to the two contexts in which we live. It made us rethink the difference between art and life. Above all, it enabled us to persist, to insist that absence persists in time, in order to exceed any end. It made us think about the rest and the whole of life, and of our work. To be more precise, these two contexts were the insistence of a remainder within a whole. Our life and our work came to transport nothing but the formative force that had no forms. The whole was always open or prevented from totalising itself. It made me persist when confronted by so many indifferentiations.
IS and JLT: The subtitle of the exhibition, “I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor”, is taken from the lyrics of the song, The for are Payback, by James Brown that was released in 1973 on his album of the same name.
The song was initially composed for the soundtrack of the film, Hell Up in Harlem (1973). After it was rejected by the film’s producers, it became one of James Brown’s biggest successes and an argument for the need to build different forms of self-defense as concrete gestures aimed at the reactive and/or preventive protection of a person, collective or organism. How do the gestures that you propose to us through your work, relate to the collective (‘pandemic’: from the Greek, “of all the people”) and the struggle of these social movements?
FM: That which keeps us apart is not what defines us today. What keeps us apart is what the people of yesterday haven’t yet succeeded to be. I believe that another dialogue would not be possible and even though I am aware that I can incur serious inconsistencies as a result of this crossing of disciplines, this is also a form of suffering. I struggle to persist, and survive in the world, in this process of disembowelling, overflowing, in this liquefying of all the compossibilities of anomie. With pessimism and disgust. I insist. I fight. My life has been a small insignificant tragedy, that will end with a significant and inevitable death. A culmination of humiliation. It is impossible to separate ethos and pathos from the relationship that I have with art. My finitude as a being is emptied in the desire for the (in)finitude of my work, of my labour. Art results in a legitimate penetration and apprehension of meaning. The exhibition’s subtitle is its parti pris, in which its multiplicity and broad intervention is not linked to me, but to the approaches by which they are manifested in meaning and through it. The approaches of this work go beyond me as an individual. They mobilise parts or aspects from various fields, perhaps even from all of them, without claiming to be a chapter, synthesis, or assumption. That is important. This work provides conditions for multiple paths to meaning. It raises and makes possible the denial of misery, abjection, subjection, everything that closes, fills, unifies or crushes. This work gives me the possibility to live, without wanting to give my life meaning or truth. This work endows contour and structure to my inner void. In the centre of this void, this work resists, due to the simple fact that it is art. This is the same thing as saying that if there were no persistence, now or in the future, this wouldn’t be achieved with a supposed work or with an introduction of a work in art, however good the intentions. The void represents nothing more than the character given to persistence. A void caused by an emotional and social unevenness or a splitting asunder, that can be distinguished with consistency and sharing, because it has the ability to disconnect me from the immeasurable. This void has been accentuated. This parti pris of the anguish that generates persistence has been emphasised. My confusion and infusion have been further intensified. All the denunciation, lying, humiliation. Without failing to highlight an obvious before and after the pandemic, of trying to clarify the possibilities in art, but in the same direction as that what it already meant to exist and live. In a context of life that is already at the moment of death. It helped me to think beyond the anonymous, impersonal self. It helped me think about the immanence of art itself. Looking ahead, in which the immanence of art is opposed to chaos, thereby began to support me in a plane of consistency. To persist is always about fighting chaos. To persist in multiplicities in order to escape and survive chaos. We all need a plane of immanence. We live in a chaotic world that presents itself as an impediment to persistence. This helped me structure a new perspective, as a critical selection of data, restoring meaning to the world and to our action. We all stopped believing. We need faith, not in another world, but in this world, which also includes idiots.
IS and JLT: How can we defend ourselves against our own rivalry? How can we embrace our fragility? How can we accept what surpasses us? What resources do we have? What kind of violence do we exert in order to react to the violence of the world we live in? These seem to be questions that we have to face throughout our lives, without necessarily finding a definitive answer. Do you think of your artistic practice as a constant attempt to answer these questions?
FM: That which happens to someone who loves, who is moved by the idea of love,
is often not knowing how to love, just as a doctor or a soldier doesn’t know how to act if they are only moved by the general idea
of good. And to confuse a doctor with a soldier or a soldier with a doctor would not be a beautiful thing to see. The same thing happens with love. Death is a fruition for my work, perhaps an inadequate inspiration, but it is always there. A distinct anti-eudaimonia reasoning. We proceed towards death. With my constant agony, my guilt complex, my lack of love and feeling of injustice, my work takes on an imperishable dimension. It becomes an enunciation and expression of that which I aim to be, or become, cease to be or empower myself to cease to be. Always in a constant process of deconstruction and construction. It works as a practice that prepares us for death, to face it. Anticipating things through acting, and acting through anticipation. This becomes a form of leverage for my work, eliminating the difference between the persistence of the external world and the persistence of death, as Schopenhauer remarked. But it also appears in my work as an immediate desire to die. A hedoné, because we all die. There are those who believe in the non-existence of life before death and it will be here, when we land, that we may be able to be erect thought.
IS and JLT: This exhibition was built under a singular time frame that required our complete availability... Nonetheless, we still have the feeling that something evades us. As if there were other, inaccessible, layers. Is there, in fact, an intention to create a tension between that which is presented, what is said and not said?
FM: Not saying things is also a way of saying them. Not acting is also a way of acting. Not wanting is a way of wanting. Not desiring is a way of desiring. And even not going some- where is a way of going where you are going, ensuring that non-places still exist in the world, where we can become non-persons. Hence, in short, it is preferable to assume error on our own behalf and at our own risk. When the stick moves back and forth, our backs are relaxed. Layers of inaccessibilities of upheaval, caused by traumas that have unfulfilled mourning. Released from abandonment. A disposition of abandonment, of unhappiness, mourning, tears and humiliation, wherein joy is also possible, incessantly leading me to scrutinise the echoes that continue to emanate from this destructuring process. My work blooms in its interior, in a place beyond nature, as it tries to unite the divided spaces. Gradually revealing issues that have been hidden in the artistic statements that I have made up until today. I have been trying to create a new sense of preciousness, a new sense of intimacy. An intra-exogenous intimacy. From the outside to the outside. I perhaps define myself through the use of strategies that explore the boundary zones between art and my daily exterior life, post-upheaval. Trying to shape my self-conception as an author, thereby originating a different absolutisation of the artistic object. A kind of attempt to glue together, piece by piece, the fragmentary outpourings from my own life. To create a referent of possibility and of absolute ob- jectivity, a cure. The origin of my failures has no resolution and the destructuring of the wound, the gap, is also an incision that has no possible return. I don’t have the capacity. It isn’t my fault. I try to build bridges, to transmit difference and allow the heterogeneity of society to manifest itself in the search for an unshareable absolute; in a distinct rationale that is capable of moving towards the unlimited, i.e. towards a rule of a rationale that becomes a horizon of common sense for all of us, but that no one can exhaust or define in a definitive and normative manner, since access to its dimension is disseminated in the infinite multiplicity of admissions that the group of those who participate in it represent. And that will help me.
IS and JLT: In one of our conversations about the exhibition project, we talked about “the exhibition as a mirror”. In one of our joint visits to the exhibition, Sérgio Fazenda’s interpretation was that its spatial experience proposed a kind of alternate game of inside/ outside, spectator/protagonist; where, in certain works, we felt inside or outside “the scene”.
FM: The crossing. You look to the past and think about what might have been. You look to the future and think about what might have been. And from that point, everything becomes labyrinthine. I like the Adamic myth and don’t dislike the idea of being a son of Adam. But it was with Tantalus that we truly started to be human. Yes. This could also be the expression, the otherness. Tragedy, Character or Choir? In the absence of an objective principle that distinguishes my artistic work, space is objectively opened up for the appearance of a subject, who does not distinguish one thing from anything else. The crossing. The violence. A crossing. It represents a debate, sometimes with limitations that can’t always be overcome. With a fruition or presence that becomes difficult, about the various unavailabilities, with superlative approaches and devastating accompaniments. The singularisation of my artistic choices by individual determinations in the face of my frailty causes within me the collapse of dialogue, artistic discourse and, consequently, of critical discernment, even between individuals who live in the same space. All are suspended in apnea. Without breathing. In a crossing. Without rarefying reflection and sensitivities, experiences, pre- venting the society to which we belong from becoming atomised, from straightening up, from gradually avoiding wandering around in a lotophagous state, made up of people who are increasingly left to themselves and are consciously and forcibly unaccompanied. Deep down (although it may also be on the surface) we should also face life as if we were sculptors: we should see it as a huge block of stone and always, always, always remove that which is excessive, until I can finally turn off the lights in my studio and fall into the eternal sleep.
Now the hero is strangely sobbing
Eduarda Neves
a general immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of ‘religions.’ It demands that one transcends all pre- vious distinctions between the self and the other. This dissolves the classic distinctions between friend and foe. Those who continue in the line of previous separations between the self and the other produce immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves.(1)
no one dreams of becoming something, because they are already there (2)
Frailty is an integral part of day-to-day life. At home and on the street. Without comfort or catastrophe. Disenchantment officially becomes the place of radicalism and annihilation. As the power of a system increases, it places decreasing importance on the shortcomings of its own members. They no longer seem dangerous or subversive, as Nietzsche once remarked. Another ars vivendi. It is through this understanding of an imperfect existence that the works of Filipe Marques claim the experience of a lived body, in its dual condition of memory and finitude. While affirming the need to draw closer to a certain intensity of the event, the body seems to try to resist. The exhibition space - transformed into a voyeuristic and psychosocial observatory - imposes itself as a scopic device. The gaze that undresses. The gaze that dresses. To look and to be looked at. The risk is outside. In the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control, the rhetoric of interiority is integrated into economic circuits, articulating the body with the knowledge and powers that are exercised over it. Power as a producer of truth and truth as a producer of power. The glorification of the naturalised agreement between objective structures and cognitive structures. It is this body, in fact, which, by nature, and depending on itself, can still be constituted as an animal force, or, if we want to think along Deleuzian lines, a delusional formation that appropriates different media and moments, connecting them, leading them to the limit. In writing and in art:
Everywhere there is a microscopic transsexuality, that results in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering - men with women, women with men - into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not just about becoming one, or even two, but becoming a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines, or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. [...] n... sexes in a single person, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on him and that he himself attributes to his sexuality. (3)
This exhibition returns to us these resonances of an intimate adventure, the courage and the challenges of an epoch that is simultaneously individual and collective. Its driving force — almost scenic and tactile, almost a worldly sign — has a capacity for fabulation, for ritual perfection(4), formalised in a programme that proposes to short-circuit any totalising category or relationship of control.
Plunged into the shadows of an atmosphere that moves us towards the image of an underground – perhaps a studio or a house? — and to the characters of Emir Kusturica’s film, Underground, the story reveals itself in its poetic and tragic condition, with no end in sight. It’s impossible to have a hero without fatality. Or destiny without irrationality.
The violence that is democratised in the order of things or, to use Saint-Just’s expression, the “struggle between the demon of hope and the devil of the irremediable” configures the intentionality that underlies the iconographic representation that is presented to us. The impossibility of finding any reassuring programme in the territory that emanates from this exhibition project, which is not erased by the green chromatic dissemination, spreads, like a virus, to the set of works and multiple meanings that objectify it. The critical appropriation of images and texts that reveal the degradation of the experience is still marked by the flow of unusual sounds and devices, which, sometimes collapsing, sometimes reorganising themselves, produce a certain spectacular shock. We find Nietzschean echoes and life on the high wire:
One always finds in immanence wires with sufficient tension to support the steps of those making the crossing. [...] Each step on the high wire must be practiced ten thousand times and, at the same time, each step must be taken as if it were the first. Whoever trains for the high wire is subjected to a paideia that takes all its foundations from habits on the ground. Walking on the high wire means putting in the present everything that has happened. That is the only way to be able to transform the imperative “You must change your life” into a series of daily exercises.!”. (5)
In a kind of dramatisation and spatial plasticity, through which light itself seems to objectify itself as a manifestation of different states of mind, it is moving images, and sculptural and sound forms, which, by establishing a sphere of transgression, denounce cultural, anthropological, political and identity-based orthodoxies. The artist confronts these ortho- doxies by citing several critical statements from the history of philosophy.
Leading us to a certain romantic affiliation, that aspires to the idea of unspoilt nature, art, in the form proclaimed to us herein, is still inscribed within the field of anthropological liberation and mediation between nature and culture. Exploring a certain political tension, between the ruins of nature, the fleeting nature of the epoch and the seclusion of the individual, that results from exhaustion, Filipe Marques could have responded in the same way that Caspar David Friedrich did when, in 1821, he refused an invitation from the Russian poet, Vassily Zhukovski:
I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.(6)
Abandonment as an analogon of a world that is potentially doomed to failure. Or, on the contrary, relentlessly shifting the system to a theatre of cruelty. Artaud-style writing about life and blood. Immanence as opening. The unfettered. When it comes to excavating the chain of signification, it is the structuring fiction of language — that which always is — which opens the way to the real.
In terms of the relationship between the image and the object, the works evade merely descriptive or illustrative words: solipsism, libido, pandemic, are just some examples of our organised and standardised grammar that I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor proposes to explode. A measurement of the crash. Individualising classifications are replaced by dispersions of different events and words. It is not about reintroducing linearity but, rather, the untimely.
Weltschmerz.7 Solitude in the violence of a razor. I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor. The probability of not having understood any signs. when all fails, you want to be alone for a while.
1. Peter Sloterdijk, Tens de mudar de vida (You Must Change Your Life) Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 2018, p. 553.
2. In February 2007 the back cover of the newspaper La Vanguardia published the interview that Víctor Amela conducted with a Tuareg tribesman. The Tuareg is a nomadic people in the Sahara desert, that constitutes one of several groups that make up the Berber population of North Africa. They are considered to be nomadic and free, without owners and without leaders. When the journalist asked another question, the respondent, Moussa Ag Assarid, replied: “You have the watch, I have the time.” In “La entrevista a un hombre del desierto: Tú tienes el reloj, yo tengo el tempo” (“The interview with a desert nomad: You have the watch, I have the time).
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, O Anti-Édipo. Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia 1 (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1) Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2004, p. 308.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Proust e os Signos (Proust and Signs) Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2003, p. 5. And later: “The worldly sign does not refer to something, it “stands for” it, claims to be equivalent to its meaning. It anticipates action as it does thought, annuls thought as it does action, and declares it to be self-adequate:. [...] The worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them.”
5. Peter Sloterdijk, p. 259.
6. Caspar David Friedrich quoted by Simón Marchán Fiz in La diso- lución del clasicismo y la construcción de lo moderno, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2010, p. 334.
7 As mentioned in the room sheet that accompanies the exhibition, it is a concept from the novel Selina (1827) by the German writer Jean Paul Richter, whose translation can be “the great pain or weariness of the world”.
PANDEMIC!
I don't know
Karate but I know
Ka-Razor!
To live in a continuous state of uncertainty is perhaps one of the most complex tasks that human nature has to face and, ironically, it is — just like contradiction — what may define our condition as a species.
PANDEMIC – I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor is the response from artist Filipe Marques to the invitation made by the Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2019 to explore the viral concepts that permeate his work in an extensive speculative exercise which, in the current context of the global pandemic crisis that we are facing, exerts itself as necessary, collective and political.
How to defend ourselves from our own rivalry? How to embrace our fragility? How to accept what surpasses us? What resources do we have? What kind of violence should we use to react to the violence of the world we inhabit?
In a self-reflective exercise, which the artist extends to each one of us, this exhibition is an uncomfortable encounter revealed by different densities and degrees of perception that imposes a very specific temporality, one that requires our total availability to confront frailty, disease, failure and self-destruction. But also all its contrariness. This is how the exhibition space opens up to the possibility of a construction with numerous layers, where each of the elements and their interpretations sometimes contribute to a sense of wholeness, sometimes grasp the abyss of the unknown, where reason and uncertainty meander in constant transformation.
The acceptance of fragility and the burden of all its marks and wounds, which expose us as subjects that face an imminent disaster, appears in the constant resorting to philosophy and its stimuli, signs and metaphors. Through concepts like Weltschmerz, coined by the German writer Jean Paul Richter in his most pessimistic novel — Selina, 1827 — and literally translated as the great pain or weariness of the world, the artist leads us through the tormented and violent experience of life.
But this profound sadness and nihilistic aversion to the present, which underlies the layers revealed by the subtle movements of each element in space, entails an undeniable thirst for revolt. I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor is this spasm that takes us out of the stagnation to which the deep cultivation of the anthropocentric ego seduces us. A turning point that awakens us from melancholy, and assures a future fantasized only by ourselves.
I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor was taken from the song The Payback, from James Brown’s homonymous album from 1973. It was composed for the soundtrack of the film Hell Up in Harlem and after being rejected by the film’s producers, James Brown released it autonomously, transforming the musical theme into one his major hits.
Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso
Curators
Filipe Marques in a conversation with Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso
Isabeli Santiago and Juan Luis Toboso: In the exhibition “PANDEMIC: I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor” you analyse many of the concepts that underpin the genesis of your artistic production. Do you want to talk about some of them? When did they start to “contaminate” your artistic practice? Have they acquired new meanings in the wake of the global pandemic that had an impact on this project (and on our lives)?
Filipe Marques: “Contaminate” is indeed perhaps the right term to describe my consistent transgression of margins - the margins of my heart. Art is essentially the sensitive representation of ideas. At least me, the starting points for representation the most faithful records of philosophy and the creation of concepts. Philosophy guides me and ensures that my work precludes any hypothesis of reducing an object to being a mere object and helps me incorporate within my artistic practice the experience of feeling and thinking as marks of the individual. This completes me, by helping me organise my chaos and materialise it in my work. But this does not mean subordinating my work to any hierarchy of goals. Likewise, in the “Pandemic” exhibition there is a continuation, as an “endless end” or — how can I put this? Perhaps first of all understand this — in the way that the “endless end” is articulated with my chaos and my anarchic autoscopy, of unstable clinical origin. In this confrontation, I search for a so-called new artistic praxis, claiming a permanent domain of art. Tension and combat. In this process I believe that philosophy favours me. Through my frailty. Of course, my projects are never dissociated from my choice of materials. But the relevance of this choice is always undifferentiated. My choice of materials is not a question of doxa, but of paradox. The materials and supports that I choose always avoid making opinions. I believe that my work does not allow itself to be captured by “inter-digmatic” or paradigmatic lines of enquiry. It is a semiotic material, that is composed of various types, vehicles and signs. With the aid of this set of signs I can create the intended and concise type of images or objects, or that are of interest for exhibitions. My work proposes to be similar, while using different media. Dissimilar media are those that always have an affective and perceptual dimension, which helps us, as a reflex, to see things and not discuss them. They may or may not help us achieve a better understanding. Take it or leave it. They always promote a critical dimension, and never purely an argumentative dimension. Everything was suspended in the wake of the pandemic, but something nonetheless remains. And it did. The pandemic has directed us to a new reality, a void that belongs to everyone and no one. A periphery of the centre. And how having nowhere to escape has had consequences for my work, and perhaps for everyone else, yes. Due to the two contexts in which we live. It made us rethink the difference between art and life. Above all, it enabled us to persist, to insist that absence persists in time, in order to exceed any end. It made us think about the rest and the whole of life, and of our work. To be more precise, these two contexts were the insistence of a remainder within a whole. Our life and our work came to transport nothing but the formative force that had no forms. The whole was always open or prevented from totalising itself. It made me persist when confronted by so many indifferentiations.
IS and JLT: The subtitle of the exhibition, “I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor”, is taken from the lyrics of the song, The for are Payback, by James Brown that was released in 1973 on his album of the same name.
The song was initially composed for the soundtrack of the film, Hell Up in Harlem (1973). After it was rejected by the film’s producers, it became one of James Brown’s biggest successes and an argument for the need to build different forms of self-defense as concrete gestures aimed at the reactive and/or preventive protection of a person, collective or organism. How do the gestures that you propose to us through your work, relate to the collective (‘pandemic’: from the Greek, “of all the people”) and the struggle of these social movements?
FM: That which keeps us apart is not what defines us today. What keeps us apart is what the people of yesterday haven’t yet succeeded to be. I believe that another dialogue would not be possible and even though I am aware that I can incur serious inconsistencies as a result of this crossing of disciplines, this is also a form of suffering. I struggle to persist, and survive in the world, in this process of disembowelling, overflowing, in this liquefying of all the compossibilities of anomie. With pessimism and disgust. I insist. I fight. My life has been a small insignificant tragedy, that will end with a significant and inevitable death. A culmination of humiliation. It is impossible to separate ethos and pathos from the relationship that I have with art. My finitude as a being is emptied in the desire for the (in)finitude of my work, of my labour. Art results in a legitimate penetration and apprehension of meaning. The exhibition’s subtitle is its parti pris, in which its multiplicity and broad intervention is not linked to me, but to the approaches by which they are manifested in meaning and through it. The approaches of this work go beyond me as an individual. They mobilise parts or aspects from various fields, perhaps even from all of them, without claiming to be a chapter, synthesis, or assumption. That is important. This work provides conditions for multiple paths to meaning. It raises and makes possible the denial of misery, abjection, subjection, everything that closes, fills, unifies or crushes. This work gives me the possibility to live, without wanting to give my life meaning or truth. This work endows contour and structure to my inner void. In the centre of this void, this work resists, due to the simple fact that it is art. This is the same thing as saying that if there were no persistence, now or in the future, this wouldn’t be achieved with a supposed work or with an introduction of a work in art, however good the intentions. The void represents nothing more than the character given to persistence. A void caused by an emotional and social unevenness or a splitting asunder, that can be distinguished with consistency and sharing, because it has the ability to disconnect me from the immeasurable. This void has been accentuated. This parti pris of the anguish that generates persistence has been emphasised. My confusion and infusion have been further intensified. All the denunciation, lying, humiliation. Without failing to highlight an obvious before and after the pandemic, of trying to clarify the possibilities in art, but in the same direction as that what it already meant to exist and live. In a context of life that is already at the moment of death. It helped me to think beyond the anonymous, impersonal self. It helped me think about the immanence of art itself. Looking ahead, in which the immanence of art is opposed to chaos, thereby began to support me in a plane of consistency. To persist is always about fighting chaos. To persist in multiplicities in order to escape and survive chaos. We all need a plane of immanence. We live in a chaotic world that presents itself as an impediment to persistence. This helped me structure a new perspective, as a critical selection of data, restoring meaning to the world and to our action. We all stopped believing. We need faith, not in another world, but in this world, which also includes idiots.
IS and JLT: How can we defend ourselves against our own rivalry? How can we embrace our fragility? How can we accept what surpasses us? What resources do we have? What kind of violence do we exert in order to react to the violence of the world we live in? These seem to be questions that we have to face throughout our lives, without necessarily finding a definitive answer. Do you think of your artistic practice as a constant attempt to answer these questions?
FM: That which happens to someone who loves, who is moved by the idea of love,
is often not knowing how to love, just as a doctor or a soldier doesn’t know how to act if they are only moved by the general idea
of good. And to confuse a doctor with a soldier or a soldier with a doctor would not be a beautiful thing to see. The same thing happens with love. Death is a fruition for my work, perhaps an inadequate inspiration, but it is always there. A distinct anti-eudaimonia reasoning. We proceed towards death. With my constant agony, my guilt complex, my lack of love and feeling of injustice, my work takes on an imperishable dimension. It becomes an enunciation and expression of that which I aim to be, or become, cease to be or empower myself to cease to be. Always in a constant process of deconstruction and construction. It works as a practice that prepares us for death, to face it. Anticipating things through acting, and acting through anticipation. This becomes a form of leverage for my work, eliminating the difference between the persistence of the external world and the persistence of death, as Schopenhauer remarked. But it also appears in my work as an immediate desire to die. A hedoné, because we all die. There are those who believe in the non-existence of life before death and it will be here, when we land, that we may be able to be erect thought.
IS and JLT: This exhibition was built under a singular time frame that required our complete availability... Nonetheless, we still have the feeling that something evades us. As if there were other, inaccessible, layers. Is there, in fact, an intention to create a tension between that which is presented, what is said and not said?
FM: Not saying things is also a way of saying them. Not acting is also a way of acting. Not wanting is a way of wanting. Not desiring is a way of desiring. And even not going some- where is a way of going where you are going, ensuring that non-places still exist in the world, where we can become non-persons. Hence, in short, it is preferable to assume error on our own behalf and at our own risk. When the stick moves back and forth, our backs are relaxed. Layers of inaccessibilities of upheaval, caused by traumas that have unfulfilled mourning. Released from abandonment. A disposition of abandonment, of unhappiness, mourning, tears and humiliation, wherein joy is also possible, incessantly leading me to scrutinise the echoes that continue to emanate from this destructuring process. My work blooms in its interior, in a place beyond nature, as it tries to unite the divided spaces. Gradually revealing issues that have been hidden in the artistic statements that I have made up until today. I have been trying to create a new sense of preciousness, a new sense of intimacy. An intra-exogenous intimacy. From the outside to the outside. I perhaps define myself through the use of strategies that explore the boundary zones between art and my daily exterior life, post-upheaval. Trying to shape my self-conception as an author, thereby originating a different absolutisation of the artistic object. A kind of attempt to glue together, piece by piece, the fragmentary outpourings from my own life. To create a referent of possibility and of absolute ob- jectivity, a cure. The origin of my failures has no resolution and the destructuring of the wound, the gap, is also an incision that has no possible return. I don’t have the capacity. It isn’t my fault. I try to build bridges, to transmit difference and allow the heterogeneity of society to manifest itself in the search for an unshareable absolute; in a distinct rationale that is capable of moving towards the unlimited, i.e. towards a rule of a rationale that becomes a horizon of common sense for all of us, but that no one can exhaust or define in a definitive and normative manner, since access to its dimension is disseminated in the infinite multiplicity of admissions that the group of those who participate in it represent. And that will help me.
IS and JLT: In one of our conversations about the exhibition project, we talked about “the exhibition as a mirror”. In one of our joint visits to the exhibition, Sérgio Fazenda’s interpretation was that its spatial experience proposed a kind of alternate game of inside/ outside, spectator/protagonist; where, in certain works, we felt inside or outside “the scene”.
FM: The crossing. You look to the past and think about what might have been. You look to the future and think about what might have been. And from that point, everything becomes labyrinthine. I like the Adamic myth and don’t dislike the idea of being a son of Adam. But it was with Tantalus that we truly started to be human. Yes. This could also be the expression, the otherness. Tragedy, Character or Choir? In the absence of an objective principle that distinguishes my artistic work, space is objectively opened up for the appearance of a subject, who does not distinguish one thing from anything else. The crossing. The violence. A crossing. It represents a debate, sometimes with limitations that can’t always be overcome. With a fruition or presence that becomes difficult, about the various unavailabilities, with superlative approaches and devastating accompaniments. The singularisation of my artistic choices by individual determinations in the face of my frailty causes within me the collapse of dialogue, artistic discourse and, consequently, of critical discernment, even between individuals who live in the same space. All are suspended in apnea. Without breathing. In a crossing. Without rarefying reflection and sensitivities, experiences, pre- venting the society to which we belong from becoming atomised, from straightening up, from gradually avoiding wandering around in a lotophagous state, made up of people who are increasingly left to themselves and are consciously and forcibly unaccompanied. Deep down (although it may also be on the surface) we should also face life as if we were sculptors: we should see it as a huge block of stone and always, always, always remove that which is excessive, until I can finally turn off the lights in my studio and fall into the eternal sleep.
Now the hero is strangely sobbing
Eduarda Neves
a general immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of ‘religions.’ It demands that one transcends all pre- vious distinctions between the self and the other. This dissolves the classic distinctions between friend and foe. Those who continue in the line of previous separations between the self and the other produce immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves.(1)
no one dreams of becoming something, because they are already there (2)
Frailty is an integral part of day-to-day life. At home and on the street. Without comfort or catastrophe. Disenchantment officially becomes the place of radicalism and annihilation. As the power of a system increases, it places decreasing importance on the shortcomings of its own members. They no longer seem dangerous or subversive, as Nietzsche once remarked. Another ars vivendi. It is through this understanding of an imperfect existence that the works of Filipe Marques claim the experience of a lived body, in its dual condition of memory and finitude. While affirming the need to draw closer to a certain intensity of the event, the body seems to try to resist. The exhibition space - transformed into a voyeuristic and psychosocial observatory - imposes itself as a scopic device. The gaze that undresses. The gaze that dresses. To look and to be looked at. The risk is outside. In the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control, the rhetoric of interiority is integrated into economic circuits, articulating the body with the knowledge and powers that are exercised over it. Power as a producer of truth and truth as a producer of power. The glorification of the naturalised agreement between objective structures and cognitive structures. It is this body, in fact, which, by nature, and depending on itself, can still be constituted as an animal force, or, if we want to think along Deleuzian lines, a delusional formation that appropriates different media and moments, connecting them, leading them to the limit. In writing and in art:
Everywhere there is a microscopic transsexuality, that results in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering - men with women, women with men - into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not just about becoming one, or even two, but becoming a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines, or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. [...] n... sexes in a single person, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on him and that he himself attributes to his sexuality. (3)
This exhibition returns to us these resonances of an intimate adventure, the courage and the challenges of an epoch that is simultaneously individual and collective. Its driving force — almost scenic and tactile, almost a worldly sign — has a capacity for fabulation, for ritual perfection(4), formalised in a programme that proposes to short-circuit any totalising category or relationship of control.
Plunged into the shadows of an atmosphere that moves us towards the image of an underground – perhaps a studio or a house? — and to the characters of Emir Kusturica’s film, Underground, the story reveals itself in its poetic and tragic condition, with no end in sight. It’s impossible to have a hero without fatality. Or destiny without irrationality.
The violence that is democratised in the order of things or, to use Saint-Just’s expression, the “struggle between the demon of hope and the devil of the irremediable” configures the intentionality that underlies the iconographic representation that is presented to us. The impossibility of finding any reassuring programme in the territory that emanates from this exhibition project, which is not erased by the green chromatic dissemination, spreads, like a virus, to the set of works and multiple meanings that objectify it. The critical appropriation of images and texts that reveal the degradation of the experience is still marked by the flow of unusual sounds and devices, which, sometimes collapsing, sometimes reorganising themselves, produce a certain spectacular shock. We find Nietzschean echoes and life on the high wire:
One always finds in immanence wires with sufficient tension to support the steps of those making the crossing. [...] Each step on the high wire must be practiced ten thousand times and, at the same time, each step must be taken as if it were the first. Whoever trains for the high wire is subjected to a paideia that takes all its foundations from habits on the ground. Walking on the high wire means putting in the present everything that has happened. That is the only way to be able to transform the imperative “You must change your life” into a series of daily exercises.!”. (5)
In a kind of dramatisation and spatial plasticity, through which light itself seems to objectify itself as a manifestation of different states of mind, it is moving images, and sculptural and sound forms, which, by establishing a sphere of transgression, denounce cultural, anthropological, political and identity-based orthodoxies. The artist confronts these ortho- doxies by citing several critical statements from the history of philosophy.
Leading us to a certain romantic affiliation, that aspires to the idea of unspoilt nature, art, in the form proclaimed to us herein, is still inscribed within the field of anthropological liberation and mediation between nature and culture. Exploring a certain political tension, between the ruins of nature, the fleeting nature of the epoch and the seclusion of the individual, that results from exhaustion, Filipe Marques could have responded in the same way that Caspar David Friedrich did when, in 1821, he refused an invitation from the Russian poet, Vassily Zhukovski:
I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.(6)
Abandonment as an analogon of a world that is potentially doomed to failure. Or, on the contrary, relentlessly shifting the system to a theatre of cruelty. Artaud-style writing about life and blood. Immanence as opening. The unfettered. When it comes to excavating the chain of signification, it is the structuring fiction of language — that which always is — which opens the way to the real.
In terms of the relationship between the image and the object, the works evade merely descriptive or illustrative words: solipsism, libido, pandemic, are just some examples of our organised and standardised grammar that I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor proposes to explode. A measurement of the crash. Individualising classifications are replaced by dispersions of different events and words. It is not about reintroducing linearity but, rather, the untimely.
Weltschmerz.7 Solitude in the violence of a razor. I Don’t Know Karate but I Know Ka-Razor. The probability of not having understood any signs. when all fails, you want to be alone for a while.
1. Peter Sloterdijk, Tens de mudar de vida (You Must Change Your Life) Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 2018, p. 553.
2. In February 2007 the back cover of the newspaper La Vanguardia published the interview that Víctor Amela conducted with a Tuareg tribesman. The Tuareg is a nomadic people in the Sahara desert, that constitutes one of several groups that make up the Berber population of North Africa. They are considered to be nomadic and free, without owners and without leaders. When the journalist asked another question, the respondent, Moussa Ag Assarid, replied: “You have the watch, I have the time.” In “La entrevista a un hombre del desierto: Tú tienes el reloj, yo tengo el tempo” (“The interview with a desert nomad: You have the watch, I have the time).
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, O Anti-Édipo. Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia 1 (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1) Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2004, p. 308.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Proust e os Signos (Proust and Signs) Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2003, p. 5. And later: “The worldly sign does not refer to something, it “stands for” it, claims to be equivalent to its meaning. It anticipates action as it does thought, annuls thought as it does action, and declares it to be self-adequate:. [...] The worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them.”
5. Peter Sloterdijk, p. 259.
6. Caspar David Friedrich quoted by Simón Marchán Fiz in La diso- lución del clasicismo y la construcción de lo moderno, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2010, p. 334.
7 As mentioned in the room sheet that accompanies the exhibition, it is a concept from the novel Selina (1827) by the German writer Jean Paul Richter, whose translation can be “the great pain or weariness of the world”.
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