I – Practices versus processes

1“Artistic Practices with and within Anthropology” – Who is the subject of such practices? Artists? Anthropologists? Both? What exactly can constitute an artistic practice?

2This article is divided in three sections and intends to present my afterthoughts on the symposium “Ways of Doing, ways of Being: Artistic Practices with and within Anthropology” – that took place at the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon between the 9^th and 10^th of March 2017 alongside FACA – Festa de Antropologia, Cinema e Arte. Sections I and II question the notion of ‘practice’ versus ‘process’ and how a ‘process’ can constitute the core ‘text’ (both argument and object) of artistic and anthropological ‘practices’. Other processes show that reinforcing distance can actually create proximity. Section III will reference the exhibition project ‘Bela/Afri-Cola’ which I presented as a speaker at the symposium, drawing a parallel to the aforementioned topics as well as the idea of objects and images as migrant and mobile entities that ‘accrue their meaning’ over time and space.

3When thinking about what an artistic “practice” means, I instantly think of a long, on-going regular practice, training and inscription. This interpretation is connected to a continuous and informed exercise that is inscribed within an artistic context or community.

4And what exactly can constitute a “process”?

5Could it be an experience based on a reiterated methodology? The exercise of a certain way of thinking and practicing? Does it also entail continuity?

6Referring back to the title of the symposium “Artistic Practices with and within Anthropology”, one can firstly infer that the subjects are the artists who practice art (in all of its continued exercise and inscription) but whose work is in dialogue with questions raised within Anthropology. But as I read along the symposium’s program, I realise that what was being understood by me as “an artistic practice”, was in fact an “artistic process” or better yet, “processes”. Therefore, the subjects could also be the anthropologists who use “artistic processes” with and within Anthropological studies, fieldworks and ethnographies, using text, image, sound, performance practices and other forms / languages commonly understood as ‘artistic’.

7During the symposium someone in the audience mentioned “an artist who ventures into making an ethnography and an ethnographer who ventures into art making” which made me raise my hand and formulate the following question: – “If an artist ‘ventures’ into making an ethnography, is he/she still an artist or an ethnographer? And if an ethnographer ‘ventures’ into art making, is he still an ethnographer or an artist?”

8To ‘venture’ is perhaps an unfortunate expression in the sense that both practices require more than venturing (a certain degree of risk taking is certainly part of it) but they require a lot more ‘resilience’ – they certainly imply hard work, study, several experiments, failures, achievements, raising questions and experimenting solutions in a continuous practice. Also, an understanding of ‘making’ implies knowledgeable production, therefore, if someone ‘knowledgeably’ produces art, is he/she an artist? In the same way as if someone ‘knowledgeably’ produces an ethnography is he/she an ethnographer? An anthropologist? What or who accredits such titles? The academy or the reiterated practice inscribed within these communities? 

9Perhaps I am being too strict and old fashioned in my understanding of ‘practice’… where do my observations come from? I am both trained in art and anthropology, but most of all in art, where my continuous 17 years of practice lie. Having said that, my research leads me to anthropology and other disciplines in order to sustain an informed argument, informed thinking/questioning and therefore, an informed practice – using participant observation (a tool borrowed from anthropology) in some of my projects where I immersed myself in specific contexts, undertook interviews and developed interpersonal relations, but also thought through texts, films, essays, concepts introduced by the discipline of anthropology itself. I also believe knowledge via artistic processes can be achieved through exercising ‘contextual distance’ in many different ways – I will develop this idea in section II.

10Crossovers can be drawn between those who use ethnographic processes and those who use artistic processes. But to deeply understand what is happening, it is also crucial to differentiate both fields of action. Traditionally such differentiation would come out from the formats each one arises in the end – what the by-product will be and for whose audience. Again, from where do I exercise my observation? Which hat am I putting on? – The subject in the sentence being not only myself, but also whoever is willing to take the challenge of formulating such questions.

11A useful study could be to survey how many artists participate / attend symposiums such as this one and how many anthropologists go to art exhibitions, art talks, etc. When looking at the numbers one could then ask if there are that many crossovers in reality. In other words, if the ‘practitioners of art’ are not curious, interested, informed on so called anthropology topics (social, historical, philosophical, etc.) and on the other hand, if anthropologists do not visit art exhibitions and all sorts of artistic manifestations (talks, masterclasses, etc.) can we actually speak in terms of a broad crossover informed practice? 

12Anthropologist Miguel Vale de Almeida (also known for his interest in the arts, who regularly practices drawing amongst other creative forms of writing, known for his political engagement in the battle for the rights of gay marriage and as a politics commentator) in his presentation was one of the few who introduced the question of ‘amateurism and professionalism’. He introduced himself as a non-artist and the project he was about to present, as belonging to the realm of the ‘amateur’. The extended photographic series he introduced implied an ‘artistic process’ as an end in itself. The diary like close-up snapshots of the coffee table details at his local café (“Café Luanda”, also the title of the series)¹ – depicting the coffee cup/orange juice glass (cigarette packs, coins, coffee spoon and black tea here and there) on top of newspaper close-ups framed in a collage manner – were in fact an end in themselves, or at least this is how I perceived them. They were not a means for a longer textual based dissertation, but were ‘text’ themselves, simultaneously posing a question and answering it by pointing at certain directions. An essay-like collage, freed from academic constraints, nevertheless an exercise with its own set of rules allowing for total control or a certain degree of chance – the sequencing of the images in the author’s blog doesn’t appear to be randomly ordered, on the contrary. These rules enable the directions of the understated messages, hints of poetry, political affairs, world politics, the place – the coffee shop itself – its history within the city, its location, its relation with the country’s own History and a few self-referential insights.

Figure 1 – Pictures from the series “Café Luanda” by Miguel Vale de Almeida. Courtesy of the author

13Unlike this previous example, some of the works presented – on the process of becoming PhD dissertations – didn’t use or reflect upon the artistic process as part of a solution in itself, or as ‘text’ in their own right. They were instead introduced as questions with no solution or the possibility of finding an answer at sight. But answers can often be found at the core of the process itself, the way one uses languages and ‘writes’ with them, what each language (image, text, sound, gesture) can offer as a deeper meaningful experience, conceptual and sensorial, flesh and soul, matter and thought subjected to one another, in conflict or discomfort. What I observed was that the processes introduced by some of the speakers as artistic, were not helping on leading towards a direction in addressing the core of the questions enunciated in their abstracts – which lead me to assume that such direction would only be made possible later via an academic text. Even though there were attempts to implementing ‘artistic processes’ as part of a participant observation or visual research method, the argument as well as the conclusion would follow more academic and scientific approaches such as written thesis and dissertations. 

II – Distance and proximity

14The two-day symposium was followed by a one-day showcase of films that constituted part of FACA’s – (Festa de Antropologia, Cinema e Arte) program at the Cinemateca – Museu do Cinema. This showcase was also elucidative of the relations between process and end-result, as well as intention and substantiation/concretion. The co-relation or equation between ‘intention-process-end-result’ draws me back to my first question regarding ‘process versus practice’. It is interesting how in the German language ‘practice’ translates into ‘Trainieren’, which in Portuguese would correspond to ‘treino’ meaning ‘training’ or ‘work-out’. I conclude therefore that any practice requires training and work-out, learning and exercising. I understand that an ‘artistic practice’ implies the aforementioned but also an intention, the process and exercising from that intention towards the production of a body of work to be communicated/exhibited/screened/performed/experienced/discussed, etc. (the possibilities that artistic practices enable are endless). Even within the long tradition of Conceptual Art, the artwork is materialised in a meticulously process-driven communication of the idea by means of discussions/performances/actions/happenings/photo and video documentation…

15The group of films chosen by Steffen Köhn, directed by his students from the Freie University in Berlin, was concise as a group in the way their heterogeneous stylistic intention/purpose was made very clear in each film, their aesthetics was trained and exercised in order to present the narrative or theme each film was addressing, consciously using the language of film and visual images and their illusions to convey their narrative and grab our attention towards a particular subject matter/storyline. 

16The first group of films had somehow a recurrent subtext that had to do with different experiences of enforced displacement. All were very acute in the way they presented their subjects and the drama of those situations. The one that stroke me the most was entitled “Rattle Them Bars” by Nena Hedrick – a black and white film addressing death penalty in a particular State within the USA, particularly effective in the way it positioned us – the spectators. The film’s structure uses this condition of ‘exteriority’ to position us all precisely in the outside, which is the film’s interior, but far from the experience of its main character: a man who is condemned to the death row, and whose letters are heard in the off. The camera never shows the man, it never goes on site to the place where he is, never trespasses to the ‘inside’. The images we are presented with are from a radio station’s special radio program run by ex-convicts to communicate with the inmates, where their families can leave them a recorded voice message and where the radio hosts and anyone with a personal opinion on death penalty can speak their mind and address it directly to the ones inside the prison walls and the general community. The title also suggests a state of nonconformity via the rattling of the prison cells’ bars – “Rattle them Bars”.²

17At a certain moment there is a long shot of a panning movement over a blueprint drawing of the prison cell – the depiction of the confinement – the inmate is confined to his cell and his sentence. But the film’s structure is made of other confinements: the camera is confined to the blueprint and the radio station’s studio and the spectators are confined to the exterior, to the ‘land of the free’, and also the State that determines if a convicted felon lives or dies, to the silence that allows this ruling of law to carry on. We (the spectators) never leave that place, we are never eluded with the possibility of being on both sides, the film doesn’t attempt to put us in the place of the inmates, it doesn’t attempt for empathy as such. It rather keeps us exactly where we are – in the privileged space of freedom – and there lies its strength and our discomfort, for we are in the space of the perpetrator: the supposedly free society who decides if other humans should or should not live. By reinforcing this distance, it brings us closer to the problem, in fact we become part of the problem, we are also responsible in the way we exercise our citizenship. And it does so by focusing on those who opt to confront the issue, speaking their minds against it but more so, helping to connect with the inmates via the radio show, so they don’t feel abandoned by the entire system/society. Here lies a way of resistance, from the people who produce and take part in the radio show and from those who participate in it in their efforts to change things by means of appealing to a voting consciousness. Voting for a system that excludes the death row is pointed to be the ‘only way out’.

Figure 2 – Video stills from Rattle them Bars, by Nena Hedrick. Courtesy of the Director

18Could a similar gesture of drawing the distance between Art and Anthropology help bring them closer by means of bringing their audiences closer to their subjects? Could this gesture of positioning each one at the very place they occupy within their frame of action/inscription, help to acknowledge the greater distance between both? And by doing so pointing at the ‘experimentations’ each one needs to undertake in order to arrive at a ‘radio signal’ that can link them together in terms of enacting the ‘process as an end in itself’/‘process as language’/‘process as text’? Much like the aforementioned film that leaves the spectator out from the centre of the subject’s drama? 

III – Bela (2016)/Afri-Cola (2019). Migrant contexts, objects, images

19Here is a different example of the exercising of distance and proximity, through the migration of objects, images and contexts.

20Bela/Afri-Cola is the title of my exhibition project presented in two parts, the first part in Berlin (Bela, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien Gallery, 2016) and the second in Lisbon (Afri-Cola at Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art Gallery, 2019). The project’s core is a reworked private photographic album belonging to my aunt Isabel (‘Bela’ is her nickname). But unlike an amateur album, these are portraits of Bela when she was about 21 years old taken by a friend of hers, an Angolan professional photographer, in Luanda in the years of 1973 and 1974. Sadly the photographer died one year later in 1975.

21In the early 60’s my grandparents immigrated with my father and his siblings (one of which is Bela) to Angola, a former Portuguese colony, where my father and aunt grew up and started their own families (my mother is Angolan and my older sister was born in Luanda in the late seventies. In the early eighties my father was evicted for political reasons, forcing my parents to migrate to Portugal, where I was born shortly after.

22Exhibited for the first time in 2016 in Berlin, and under the title ‘Bela’³ this has always been a body of work that ‘thinks through’ the migration of its central elements (the private photographic archive and the beverage – Afri-Cola) – thus it was fundamental to have a second presentation in Lisbon, shifting the context between the different elements and their understandings.

Figures 3, 4 and 5 – Installation views from Bela at Künstlerhaus, Bethanien, Berlin, 2016. Courtesy of the artist

23In these installations I have transformed the original printed images into sculptural experiences, by scanning the timeworn photos, meticulously deleting all marks of deterioration in post-production and reprinting them myself in larger and smaller scales. In a gesture deprived of nostalgia, I erased the time-interval between the moment the images were captured and the moment of reprinting, as if I was to continue the photographer’s work from film – to print – to object – to installation – to ‘text’.

Figure 6 – The before and after post-production. Courtesy of the artist

24Afri-Cola is a beverage originated and registered in Cologne in 1931, which had its commercial breakthrough in Post-War Germany and which I came across in Berlin, in a stroll around the supermarket, whilst living there, in 2016, as an artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. This object acquires an ironic tone when we think about the cult advertising films of the beverage, namely the ones directed by Charles Wilp in the late 60’s and 70’s. These films explored the fact that the level of caffeine present in Afri-Cola promised on-going energy that could last all night long, at the same time it associated ‘Africa’ to an ‘exotic’ idea of body emancipation (male and female), sexual freedom without compromise (challenging marital conservative values) in a provocative, avant-garde, pop, futuristic style. Its irreverence is incorporated in the slogan: “und alles wird afri”, “and everything becomes afri”. Its soundtrack was conducted by Charles Wilp himself and comprised of a Dada like orchestral composition with Donna Summer’s erotically charged vocalizations – again, the black body is eroticised as an exotic cliché (see here).⁴

25Thus the apparently disparate elements that embody this project migrate in their multiple contextual, historical and cultural directions between Angola, Portugal and Germany.

26When presented in Lisbon, the images return to a context that is familiar to them, whilst the Afri-Cola drink migrates to an alien context. For the Lisbon public who is unfamiliar with the beverage, it may be perceived as an African product (with everything it may entail within the memory and critical thinking of each individual). But I made the decision to show an excerpt of a documentary behind the scenes of the production of Charles Wilp’s advertising film for Afri-Cola in order to contextualise it. Looking at the documentary makes me think how distant was Germany’s relation with the body and avant-garde advertising to the reality in Portugal in the late 60’s, still immersed in a censorship imposed by the dictatorship and its conservative values.

Figure 7 – Installation views from “Afri-Cola” at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea Gallery, Lisbon

27But what is the role of the project’s underlining text? What kind of captions can be added? These are questions that have also been occupying the debates of various institutions with ethnological collections, mostly constituted by objects that have migrated from a different culture. What sort of stories or narratives are told by these kind of mobile objects/artefacts? 

28One should not only tell the story of its usage, its geographical, historical, and ethnical origin, but also of its journey: trafficking, theft and colonization.⁵ Clementine Deliss, curator and researcher in Philosophy and Social Anthropology, says that ‘these objects are contaminated’ referring to the collections in Ethnology Museums.⁶ In fact, during the 2017 FACA and the symposium “Artistic Practices with and within Anthropology” I was invited to intervene ‘artistically’ at the National Ethnology Museum in Lisbon and in collaboration with curator Marta Jecu I installed three ready-made videos in three different locations inside the museum. The videos consisted of three excerpts carefully edited by myself and Marta Jecu from Clementine Delisse’s lecture at MACBA in 2014 and the HKW lecture “The Dictionary of Now. 100 years of Now” in Berlin in 2016 by Arjun Appadurai, Sharon McDonald and Tony Bennett.

Figure 8 – Installation views “Everything I’m gonna tell you today is contaminated” by Tatiana Macedo, curated by Marta Jecu, National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon, March 9^th and 10^th 2017

29In agreement with Arjun Appadurai and Clementine Deliss, I believe that the micro-narratives like these personal biographies are fundamental here, as much as who produced/manufactured them, who collected them, who trafficked them, what journeys have they incurred. 

30Of course nothing exists out of context. Our understanding of things will always depend on the ways we position ourselves, on our capacity for exercising our bodies and thought outside of these limits, assuming different angles and points of view. Such exercise will allow us to question what we have in front, above, below or behind us, today, yesterday or in a desired future.

31Quoting David Campany – a writer, curator, editor, critic, lecturer in Photography,

“Photographs are highly mobile images. Made at particular times, often for particular reasons they can reappear in other circumstances. Some of the most well known photos have had long lives and numerous manifestations – in magazines and books, on gallery walls, postcards and posters. Many are essentially simple, their meaning able to withstand the vagaries of cultural transit. Others are more pliable, yielding to different demands, shifting in meaning, lending themselves to different ends. Some become well known through a single, highly visible use (on television or on the cover of a newspaper). Others accrue their meaning over time.”⁷

32One thing I am certain of: these portraits of Bela were made by someone who was in love with what he had in front of him – subject and landscape – someone who, in the intervals of his profession, exercised his artistic freedom, inspired by his masters. I believe this is the case for one of the pictures of Bela with her friend, looking through the windows of an obsolete bus, where one can read “Autocarro do Amor”, (Love Bus), and which reminds me of Robert Frank’s portrait of racial inequality in the US, in that iconic front cover of his most famous monograph, The Americans (France, 1958). Another film comes to mind: “La Pyramide Humaine” by Jean Rouch (Ivory Coast, 1959) – a fearless exercise behind the limits of fiction and non-fiction through love, youth and an Abidjan colonized by the French (already living their Nouvelle Vague).

33The author of the images (deliberately left anonymous here for privacy reasons) exposes his emotional fragility as much as the territory that both of them stand in, is a fragile one. Any reading of a predator/prey relation is a limited one when speaking of a portrait. Even our positioning as spectators is complex and filled with fragilities.

34In the video-sculpture installation, everything is image and everything is landscape, in a perpetual travelling movement over a field of palm trees printed in Afri-Cola bottles.

35I hereby see myself, once again, ironically addressing the exotic experience in contemporary art – a “temporary praise without knowledge”, and a production of objects that perpetuate the exoticism that it promised to criticize in the first place. 

36But Bela is part of my biography and Afri-Cola is a ‘politically incorrect drug’, both object and image, permeable to the fragilities of their spectators – our own.