metropolis m

During my studies, Groys was an important thinker because he was articulating the possible end of the value of art. His thesis at the time was questioning what is valuable and what is not, and what the meaning is of perpetuating these systems of value in art. I am not interested in newness per se, but I’m interested in what it provokes, which is an existential question of our present times. If there is a standard for newness, then we must be old or we must no longer be new? That is a provocation. That the new, the newness of a concept arises affecting not only us, human beings, but everything that constitutes the “human” in this age. Retail Vérité was an exercise on elasticity, to see how far we are able to handle this existential question: that we are no longer new, but we are not old yet either. We keep shopping for parts to make our lives tolerable, but to what degree? 

I realized early on that the history of art is not enough for me. Within art history there are several histories embedded; the history of art itself is a lens rather than a field, and many other histories are filtered through it. I like to think art through the social, the economic and the geopolitical, because these disciplines govern our lives. And that’s why for me, navigating between a shopping environment, or an art space, or going from the streets to a gallery was never intended to be a statement of high or low culture. They’re just public spaces that have been privatized by the state and by corporations, yet they’re made artificially public for us to walk through, to observe and witness public events that are highly commodified for us to consume. I engage with the elasticity of these disparate spaces because they’re a symptom of living in a state of manufactured renewal. 

I think it is, but my issue here is not the issue of accessibility. It goes back to who really values this Archive. If we break down art making as a space of meaning, you realize that we are not creative enough to understand that making meaning is not reserved to one single industry. And the fact that we attribute meaning making to one single industry just actually reveals how uncreative we are as a people. It also reveals a co-dependency to power structures rather than meaning itself. We should be asking who is creating avenues for meaning? I have a love-hate relationship to the archive, but for better or worse it is the document of humanity’s intellectual production over centuries. And I think to ignore the precedent is very dangerous. We have seen this with our postcolonial amnesia and we’re seeing it now in Palestine – to ignore this as a colonial relationship is to ignore the archive.

‘In the American context you can definitely say that because of their race relations; the industrialists who constructed the museum would identify as white. In Europe, whiteness is not as clear amongst European classes. And I think that makes it a bit more challenging if you want to impose a certain sense of whiteness on European collections. It just feels inaccurate to me.

In the 19th century there was an emerging non-white bourgeoisie in imperial colonies, because of centuries of colonial relationships all over the world. This may not be dominant in the fine arts of that time, perhaps they didn’t commission paintings of their families or were too busy doing something else. Or their paintings were considered too “ugly” to show because they didn’t comply to white beauty standards, but that doesn’t mean that those representations do not exist. The racism at the time was not more sophisticated than today! The problem with race is that people tend to forget that thinking along the axis of race will lead to racialized collections and museums. This is very tricky because to identify race is not an end goal, it is actually the beginning of a process of racialization.’

I have to actively engage with not seeing Race all the time. I have to undress Race every moment I go somewhere. Having anyone identifying me as a racialized subject, a door opens for me to identify truly who they are. This is how I practice ‘not seeing race’, which is different from race blindness. It’s a constant deconstruction and recontextualization.

We started this interview talking about value and what is valuable, but the trickery with race is: race is an empty value. It just was birthed as a necessity by colonizers to organise slave labour. But it means nothing, and I refuse to apologize for its existence. Race is a process of dehumanization that only serves capital. It literally serves Capital. And it’s ongoing.

I started this in 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter movements after the murder of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor in the US. Around the same time in Portugal, a Ukrainian seasonal worker was beaten to death in the airport in Lisbon by Border Control officers. His name was Ihor Homenyuk. During a dinner with the producer of a project space where I was supposed to have a show, he used a racial slur to describe my achievements as an artist. This made me look into why a “leftie” colleague would do this to me. I wanted to understand Portuguese colonial history and national identity, and to identify racism through that history. That led me to write a response, the essay A Shit Show (2023), in which I question what does it mean to be left and to be a so-called antiracist but then still use racial slurs against someone in private? Who gives you the agency to do so? My essay just wanted to profile such a person, not to identify him per se but to describe a type that is populating our industry.

Because I’m a sculptor I think a lot about form. I look for forms that can offer an aesthetic experience, but also convey emotions and a point of view of my place in the world. For someone who had been just subjected to a racial slur and to what I call this ‘economy of race relations’, I thought that the experience needed to be recorded in writing in order to depersonalize what happened to me. Because what happened to me happens to millions of people every day. The reading list on my website is an ongoing compilation of sources that support this research. 

I have been asking myself whether is possible to separate artistic practice from a civic practice. I consider this archive belonging to my civic practice. I’m still Bruno, the artist, who makes contemporary art. But my work is not about this archive. My work is not about racism, it’s not about colonialism, it’s not about the history of Communist Party in Portugal. But nonetheless I have these interests as an individual because I am a citizen – of Europe, of Portugal, of the Netherlands. And I am bound to these histories. I find in civic action a much more insurgent form of political activity as part of our daily lives. Civic action means to enact politics of care that we keep talking about, instead of making banners about them.

Yes, they have. They deserve to be. That’s what I’m pushing for in my Chisenhale publication. I want to skip the artist monograph format and turn it into a publishing project, the first of, hopefully, many readers that tackle the skeleton of these systems set by racial capitalism that we are part of. This will be a reader engaged with a materialist reading of the world through a postcolonial lens. It is a book that has nothing to do with my art, but to my civic commitment. Does an exhibition publication need to publish art or to publish anything art related? Maybe not. I want to use the publishing tool privileged by the art industry to distribute text to a larger audience. As an art maker, I have no message to share. My work means nothing.

It’s hard to call the show at Chisenhale an installation, because it’ll be besides that. Instead it will be presented as an exhibition model. I’m very interested in commercial media, interior design and photography. Through them, I think about capture and consumerism. I started organizing exhibitions at my parents’ store seven years ago, and I’m realizing maybe there’s no need for art, but there’s a critical need for aesthetic experiences. That’s what all these places, galleries and shopping environments, provide: aesthetic experiences that move you. In shops, they move you by confirming your desires, and at art shows they move you by spotting connections you haven’t made before.

Some decor will differentiate each room, but they won’t show any art, or signalled as art. We don’t need art, we need something else. And what could that be? It’s not up to me anymore, it’s up to us, you, the visitor, reader, watcher, observer, witness of the world. Victim, oppressor, consumer, seller, alien. Son, daughter, mother, father. It’s up for you to deal with how unbearable that demand is. Or choose to leave.