Organized around five short-form videos, This Must Be The Place reads as a playlet for hospitable practices and socialities, ways of welcoming difference during heterogeneous experiences of lockdown: in vitality and transformation, through ritual, matter and exchange.
The playlet
Joana da Conceição’s practice is concerned with processes of worldly formation, from the moment organisms become forms to how they subsequently manifest as matter in flux. Departing from watery beginnings, Conceição’s video incorporates music, digital animation and documentation of her painterly practice into a gesamtkunstwerk that brings together previous series of paintings of child spirits—a concept borrowed from Umbanda cultures—to processes of masking, the grotesque, and the ornament. In the last years, the artitst has unearthed a rhizomatic network of connections between feminist anthropology and biology that she uses to expand ideas of painting in the digital sphere, often weaved with spiritual and shamanistic evocations to narrate the formation of the world in multiplicity rather than separation.
Transformation with Joana da Conceição
Diana Policarpo and Josep Maynou became interested in the process of transfer from one organism to another and its ensuing forms of conversion. Building on her exhibition Overlay at Lehmann + Silva, Policarpo presented a moving image work composed of research materials on the use of cowrie shells in colonial trade and indigenous gift economies as modes of economic exchange. A spoken word narrative written in collaboration with Lorena Muñoz-Alonso is overlaid with images that span Google Earth expeditions and virtual museum tours, speaking of forms of syncretism and conversation that go beyond dominant views of economic exchange.
Inspired by the Swiss artists, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Maynou developed a series of Instagram video performances using objects that gained unexpected value during the pandemic to plot various causal chains. In one video, toilet paper become an economic symbol evoking stoicism and chocolate, an energy link between the inner and outer world. Evoking the pleasures and arts of living, Maynou playfully explored the ghosts of our present, mischievously captured in the spectral voice that sings, ‘What to do?’.
Exchange with Diana Policarpo and Josep Maynou
João Gabriel and Alice Morey found themselves wandering the wastelands and forests in the vicinity of their homes, where life grows in all directions. Their videos depict scenes of nature, slowly unfolding in the tradition of landscape painting. Flowers became a central subject in Gabriel’s studies of stillness, moving from subtle details—such as a vase on a nightstand—to occupy a prominent place in the artist’s gaze. Morey, who uses organic matter in her sculptural and painterly practice, became interested in capturing forms and outlines into drawing and their contours into cyanotypes. Whilst exploring our unrelenting uprooting from this world, Gabriel and Morey emphasize our haptic relation to vegetal life, its processes of development and the sensations of slowing down to the pace of their growth.
Vitality with João Gabriel and Alice Morey
Dayana Lucas and Lorenzo Sandoval created works that allude to ritual, transformation, and the possibility of change. Drawing from mystical traditions and iconography originating in ancient Egyptian and China, Lucas and Sandoval explore the potential closing in on a predative and exploitative form of cognitive capitalism.
For Lucas, the ouroboros is an important symbol, variously appearing as traces or in full circle in her drawings and paintings. Adopted in the western tradition most notably in alchemy, the symbol depicts a serpent devouring its own tail, alluding to the cycle of birth and death. Self-isolating in her ancestors’ island of Madeira, Lucas collaborated with a local blacksmith to produce a series of keysets. She considers this collaboration as the closing of a personal life circle, when Lucas threw the keys to her home into a river as an offering before crossing it. In a gesture of recognition and complicity with the waterways of hers and her ancestors’ life’s journey, Lucas positions the present in a circular and ever-churning movement between memory and imagination.
Over the years Sandoval has been collecting images from film and photographic archives as well as daily YouTube and Instagram feeds. Invited to contribute to Klosterrüine’s online program ‘Times in Crises’ about artistic production during the Covid-19 outbreak, Sandoval edited these archives as a series of freeform associations based on a concatenation of words: cycles, rhythm, patterns, habits, routines, protocols and constellations. Inspired in the I-Ching, the classic divination text also known as the Book of Changes, this index became a space from which to negotiate the dialectics of cinema and photomontage, whilst providing a playful and open methodology for a series of new paintings exploring the conflicting relationship between work and idleness.
Ritual with Dayana Lucas and Lorenzo Sandoval
In the suspended time-space of pandemic, Richie Culver, Estefanía Landesmann, and Ramiro Guerreiro sought refuge in the precarity and plenitude of materials.
Stranded in Hawai, Culver explored the salinity of water on pieces of fabric that were readily available as curtains at his local supermarket. His video journeys the short trail between his holiday rental house and a random beach, which he paced back and forth to recover the pieces of fabric left overnight to be consumed by the ocean.
Landesmann probed her photographic archives for a different encounter with one same image. Her video intimates the reciprocity between stillness and slow movement, lingering on the details of a seemingly bi-dimensional image that seems to speak to an urban environment. Disjointed both from the apparent materiality of sound and surface, Landesmann’s still moving image deceives expectations and questions viewers about the central role mobility takes in the context of the pandemic.
Guerreiro, a keen collector of paper sheets of different sizes, patterns, grammages and epochs, found self-care in collage during lockdown. His video exercises a thorough, painstaking relationship to paper, which he sets in close relationship with cotton, rehearsing gestures of assemblage and encounter between the two materials.
Matter with Richie Culver, Estefanía Landesmann, and Ramiro Guerreiro
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Curatorial introduction