"this obsession with the real, this feverish desire to “make” something that is a solid object, an effective action or a testimony about the state of the world, also reflects the unique position of artistic activity in a world where not only the great revolutionary projects tend to fade away, but also the very forms of political conflict. The emptiness of the political scene prompts artists and actors in the art world to use their means and their places to bear witness to a reality of inequalities, contradictions and conflicts that consensual discourse tends to render invisible and to oppose their proposals for intervention to the reigning fatalism."
S. AVELAR - You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to tell my daughter who's a psychologist and she's going to explain to me what you're trying to do. This is a job I never thought I'd do in my life. It's beautiful, you know? I think it's really cool. But you're going to pay, you're going to spend your money and you're not going to sell anything or call people to the museum?
ANA - No, Mr. Avelar, I'm not.
Quote from Ana Teixeira's Master Thesis
"practicing the city is taking it as the subject of the action, while practicing in the city is taking it as the support of the action"
Programa/Ações Cariocas
To approach strangers and ask: “Will you trade something with me? I give you something of mine, something I’m wearing or carrying, and you receive it. You give me something in exchange, and I receive it.” The action is only finished when I have traded everything I had in the beginning.
Let me explain: a reaction, by definition, is an action in the opposite direction from the one that caused it. Thus, it mainly operates by inverting the direction of the force that it reacts against, but it does not change its quality, pattern or mode. It is a retaliation, not a subversion; a revenge, not a promise. Only strategic insubordination (instead of impulsive retaliation) will allow for new modes of action to be conceived (or even be conceivable). In other words: it is absolutely legitimate, certainly, to act reactively against what weakens, corrodes, kills, but perhaps this might not be sufficiently efficient. After all, to react to something is to recognize the existence of that something, while overcoming a logic by proposing another logic is to surpass it, to delegitimize it. The proposal is to conceive non-escapist escapes, to activate strategic lines of flight; to create fighting instruments that enable combat in ways that matter, to fight subverting the logic of violence; to operate changes of values in propositional, vitalist and experimental ways so that body and performance continue being born, one through the other
Eleonora Fabião
In this way, her body questioned not only quotidian relations between stone and flesh, but the ways our spaces script us and become us as mutual constructions – we are the buildings we build; we are the sidewalks we walk; and they are us.
[...] a built environment is a kind of instruction as well, as if to say, “Put your body in relation to stone in this way.” Of course, Valie Export draws attention to the score that is architecture, or the score that is a traffic median, by playing the score against the grain of habitus. She publically presses her body into architectural spaces in ways contrary to the norm, illustrating, in that way, the norm that otherwise goes unremarked.
Let’s think a little bit more about scoring. A “score” pronounces a possibility for a performance yet to come. It is a blueprint for an action deferred into a future when it might appear, being realized in a space become public by virtue of the appearance of the action. A score contains a “not yet” aspect in that a score is a set of instructions for actions. The score itself is not entirely, or at least finally, the artwork it gestures toward. As any score pronounces both a “not yet” and a “might be,” any action that takes place via a score is, much like a script or a blueprint, necessarily cross-temporal in that it realizes a score that comes to the moment from another time.
Rebecca Schneider