A CHAIN REACTION WITH VARIABLE EFFECT
A CHAIN REACTION WITH VARIABLE EFFECT
Multitalent Carla Zaccagnini
Artist, curator, magazine editor: the São Paulo-based Argentinean Carla Zaccagnini (1973) wears all hats simultaneously. Carefully interweaving a broad variety of activities, she always leaves a decisive task up to the viewer.
Your practice is a multifaceted one. You are an artist/curator/critic/magazine editor all rolled into one and you also integrate these roles with each other. This past year, you have been a curator at Centro Cultural São Paulo, the city’s most interesting contemporary art venue – which you recently left. How would you describe your position at the moment? What kind of projects are you currently working on?
‘The year at Centro Cultural was hectic, with a lot of work and a lot of pressure, too much information at once and not enough time to digest it before having to respond. It was an intense and interesting experience, but made me realize that I prefer positions that are closer to the actual result. As head of the curatorial team, many of the decisions I had to take were at a larger scale, which is interesting, but the end of the chain you set in motion is always very far off. A big part of the energy gets lost along the way, as if you started pushing an elephant and the thing that eventually falls is a domino piece. I like working inside restricted areas, delimited by rules and circumstances, but I think I need a larger space than the one I had at the Centro Cultural São Paulo.
You are right when you say that all my practices are integrated. My experience as a curator informs my artistic practice and vice-versa. I don’t see a dividing line there. Even as an artist, I always like to have other people making the objects, drawings, texts or whatever is the concrete form taken by an idea; in other words, I like to have other people taking the decisions. As a curator, or magazine editor, you also step back and let artists or writers handle the problem you want to investigate. They decide what eventually will be made public.’ You are right when you say that all my practices are integrated. My experience as a curator informs my artistic practice and vice-versa. I don’t see a dividing line there. Even as an artist, I always like to have other people making the objects, drawings, texts or whatever is the concrete form taken by an idea; in other words, I like to have other people taking the decisions. As a curator, or magazine editor, you also step back and let artists or writers handle the problem you want to investigate. They decide what eventually will be made public.’
What kind of projects are you currently working on?
‘At this moment, I am trying to understand everything I learned this last year, especially about the role that culture plays in politics, which goes much further than I had originally thought. I am sure this is rich material for future projects, whether they be texts or exhibitions. I am also working on a catalogue for a show I did last year at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto.1
It’s an exciting time for me, because I feel that some things are being finalized and others are starting. I have been thinking quite a lot – and researching less than I would like – about art-related crime (robbery, falsification and vandalism) as ways of relating to art that go beyond those that are accepted, codified and regulated by society. I think this is going to be my next field of research, which can end as a series of artworks, a publication, an exhibition or perhaps a PhD thesis.’ It’s an exciting time for me, because I feel that some things are being finalized and others are starting. I have been thinking quite a lot – and researching less than I would like – about art-related crime (robbery, falsification and vandalism) as ways of relating to art that go beyond those that are accepted, codified and regulated by society. I think this is going to be my next field of research, which can end as a series of artworks, a publication, an exhibition or perhaps a PhD thesis.’
Some of your works directly derive from existing game formats, such as Jogo de Memoria (2004), Jogo Transparente (2006-7), and Rompecabezas (2007), of which you keep the rules intact but tamper with their essential nature. Your contribution to the last São Paulo Biennial was also play-related: you realized a playground outside the Biennial building, where the simultaneous use of all its rides set a fountain into action. Is there a ‘homo ludens’ idea of play-as-the-basis-of-culture present in these works that could trigger a kind of social critique? How would they relate to the social and participatory concerns of the Brazilian Neoconcreto movement?
‘Games are social activities in which rules are known and have to be obeyed by all players. It is a territory in which the agreement to follow established arbitrary rules is not only very clear but also a departure point. This is what interests me. And also the possibility to change the logic and strategies of the game without changing its rules. In Jogo Transparente (transparent game), the cards are transparent, which takes away the possibility of bluffing. One has to rethink one’s behaviour inside the same set of rules without being able to lie. In poker, for example, this changes the whole logic of the game, leaving it all to chance. Reação em cadeia com efeito variável (chain reaction with variable effect) from 2008, the work I presented in the last São Paulo Biennial, was related to this same idea. All the rides were familiar and required recognized actions and behaviours. Each one of them activated one stage of the mechanical hydraulic system that made the fountain function. The simultaneous use of all of them completed the chain and generated a transparent drawing in the water. The idea of shared responsibility was central to this work.
I think, and this might be a very personal reading of art history, that the participatory element of Neoconcreto was already present in Brazilian Baroque. Baroque art trusted the ‘viewer’ to complete the image, giving it meaning and life. There is a lot of trompe l’oeil in Brazilian Baroque, a certain taste for lying, as if testing how far viewers will go in this game of believing not so much what they see, but what they might be able to see. Some months ago, a foreigner curator asked me about political art in Brazil, noticing that in comparison to other Latin American countries it is practically absent. I think that the political premise in Brazilian art is primarily in this participatory strategy. Creating objects that need to be completed by someone’s perception and action is a matter of trust. It shows belief in shared responsibility, in a relationship in which everyone has an equally important role for the construction of meaning. It has to do with being conscious of our actions and interactions and the results they can produce in the world. I think, and this might be a very personal reading of art history, that the participatory element of Neoconcreto was already present in Brazilian Baroque. Baroque art trusted the ‘viewer’ to complete the image, giving it meaning and life. There is a lot of trompe l’oeil in Brazilian Baroque, a certain taste for lying, as if testing how far viewers will go in this game of believing not so much what they see, but what they might be able to see. Some months ago, a foreigner curator asked me about political art in Brazil, noticing that in comparison to other Latin American countries it is practically absent. I think that the political premise in Brazilian art is primarily in this participatory strategy. Creating objects that need to be completed by someone’s perception and action is a matter of trust. It shows belief in shared responsibility, in a relationship in which everyone has an equally important role for the construction of meaning. It has to do with being conscious of our actions and interactions and the results they can produce in the world.
Another subject that interests you is ‘translation’ –the way language structures our thought processes and our actions. How has the idea of translation come to influence your work?
‘Of course, my interest in translation has a lot to do with having moved to a different country (from Argentina to Brazil) with a different language and having to find out the similarities and differences in these tongues in order to communicate. But it also has to do with my interest in discourse and the way it structures and reveals ways of thinking – which is very much due to having been raised by a Lacanian psychoanalyst mother. Apart from these biographic reasons, my interest in language also relates to a broader field of interest in which translation also plays an important role: the idea of incompleteness, intangibility, things that are always lost, that can’t be grabbed, this sort of constant frustration. Because translating is an activity characterized by this impossibility of exactitude, with its attempt to get as close as possible to the original and the certainty of never getting there.
Each catalogue in the series comprises texts published in the language in which they were written. Different texts by different authors about the same selection of works. Instead of translating the Portuguese edition (Rio de Janeiro: Capacete Entretenimentos, 2003), I commissioned new ones in Spanish (Miami: CIFO, 2006), English (Miami: CIFO, 2006) and French (Toronto: AGYU, 2008). The growing collection forms a network of references and interpretations for an equally growing selection of works. In the Portuguese edition, there is a text by Brazilian writer Bruno Zeni about the pleasure of reading; in the Spanish one, a text by Catalonian artist Javier Peñafiel about the era of the book. The English edition starts with a text by British writer/artist Douglas Park about the act of writing and the French one with a text by Canadian artist Carl Trahan about translation. The more languages one can read, the more comprehensive the work becomes. I can’t wait to publish one that I myself am not able to read. The publication is also about my interest in language, its relationship to politics and the role it plays in bilingual countries. The decision to print the French version of the catalogue in Toronto and the English and the Spanish ones in Miami has to do with that.’2 Each catalogue in the series comprises texts published in the language in which they were written. Different texts by different authors about the same selection of works. Instead of translating the Portuguese edition (Rio de Janeiro: Capacete Entretenimentos, 2003), I commissioned new ones in Spanish (Miami: CIFO, 2006), English (Miami: CIFO, 2006) and French (Toronto: AGYU, 2008). The growing collection forms a network of references and interpretations for an equally growing selection of works. In the Portuguese edition, there is a text by Brazilian writer Bruno Zeni about the pleasure of reading; in the Spanish one, a text by Catalonian artist Javier Peñafiel about the era of the book. The English edition starts with a text by British writer/artist Douglas Park about the act of writing and the French one with a text by Canadian artist Carl Trahan about translation. The more languages one can read, the more comprehensive the work becomes. I can’t wait to publish one that I myself am not able to read. The publication is also about my interest in language, its relationship to politics and the role it plays in bilingual countries. The decision to print the French version of the catalogue in Toronto and the English and the Spanish ones in Miami has to do with that.’2
Xander Karskens is curator at De Hallen, Haarlem.Xander Karskens is curator at De Hallen, Haarlem.
Xander Karskens
