series Work in Space

Exhibition History:

• Open Studios at Casa Tomada residency, São Paulo, Brazil, 2013;
• Work in Space, solo project at Carpe Diem - Arte e Pesquisa, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015
• Saudade, Unmemorable Place in Time, group exhibition curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China, 2018 

Work in Space starts from a series of collages based on two different image archives: one of reproductions of etchings and drawings from the XVIII century, and another of photographic images of starry skies taken from the internet. The images of the universe are printed black and white by an office printer. They are cut and glued together, and this collage is photographed. The image of this collage – with xeroxian greyish layers where abrupt image splits are visible – is reprinted, this time with mineral pigment on cotton paper. The cut and painted reproductions of etchings and drawings from the XVIII’s century related to human labour are glued on top of the archival print. The images’s presentation varies: sometimes the original collages are shown, other times photographic prints of small scale or large format are presented, sometimes slide projections are chosen, other times digital projections of an immersive scale are selected.

Each image of this project is the result of a process of assemblage and manipulation of images. Photography is a means of translation, documentation, summarization and potentiation of a work that is based on visual material of different natures and paces. There is the universe’s time – the photographed night sky, the internet’s time – where those images were kept, the drawing and etchings’s time – from the XVIII century, reproduced on paper, the pictorial intervention’s time over those reproductions, and the final piece’s time, consequence of all these layers.

Work in Space is about the relation between human labour and the most remote nature we recognize – the universe. As Ilya Prigogine said, “we are not alone, we are part of a creative nature (…) there are two choices: either life and men are out of nature, or creativity is a general property of the universe”*. The project addresses the contact point between the slightest creative movement of things and the beginning of human making.  The Big Bang is a sort of creative breath – everything seems to move towards a definite direction, driven by that breath. Work in Space is about that force and movement inside techné, inside human making, that leads to poiesis, an action that transforms and continues the world.

* Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist to Ilya Prigogine, 1999

images © Pedro Guimarães