He works with photo researchs, installations and videos.
Elsa Sereia-Leydier is a french photographer graduated from Ecole National Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, currently based in Rio de Janeiro. She is interested in the concept of representation of identities and territories, especially in the latin-american continent. She will make an interview with Jonathas de Andrade a young artist from Recife and will ask him about the semantic ambiguities he creates in his work with his accurate use of words combined with photography.
How
did you come to be an artist, and to do the type of work you are
doing now?
I have always been interested in the arts, but it took a while for me to understand my own way of being an artist, to understand the kind of work I was interested in creating. I ended up studying law for 2 years and then quit. During that time I was able to study a bit of politics, criminology, to get closer to the students movements and also started attending classes of cinema, photography, psychology, checking out general interests I had. After that, I moved to Recife and studied Social Communication at the University, and I started being more experimental with photography and video. I thought I would end up working as a film maker, but in the end of my studies, as the final exam project, I ended up doing what became my first art project.
Since your first work, "Amor e Felicidade no casamento", you combined text with images, and we can see several examples in your work where you mix two or more media. Can you tell me about the relationship between writing and photography in your work?
This was my first experience with the combination of text and photography, and also the first experience of organizing these elements in space as an installation, which is something that I continued doing frequently in the next projects. I think art offered me an interesting position I can combine several roles, being not only the photographer, but also the researcher, the sociologist, the fiction maker. I think the relation between text and images help me a lot in this task.
For
example, in the project Ressaca
Tropical (Tropical
Hangover),
I was interested in depicting a city that confounds construction with
destruction, in a peculiar atmosphere of constant ruin where tropical
modernism is sometimes preserved by forgetfulness, and the presence
of desire and nature are strong signs for recreation on this
abandonment. This environment is created entirely with documents in
an ambiguous fictional articulation between them – photographs of
different archives of different decades of Recife, the city I live,
photographs I did of the local modernism, and a diary found by a
friend of mine in litter where I night guard notes daily his sex and
love adventures. The combination of these elements together for me
were fascinating.
So, for this project, you used a text that you found by pure chance. Do you sometimes write as well?
I
do write, but usually in collaboration. In “The Clubâ€, the images
of a club built by the sea in the 60s and abandoned in the 90s were
titled with paragraphs that are excerpts of Reinaldo Arenas’
biography adapted and rewritten by me to the fiction I wanted to
create. In the case of the piece 40
Nego bom é um real, the
text reveals stories of 40 characters where profession relations are
intimately mixed with personal relations. These stories were based on
real stories and adapted by me in collaboration with the writer
Esdras Bezerra de Andrade. Sometimes I am the author of what is shown
in my works, but I rarely clarify this status, letting the audience
get lost with what is documentary or not, and asking themselves if that
really makes a difference.
How do you start a piece or project? Do you start with images that you have or photographs you took, or when you hear a piece of news or a story that interests you?
I collect a lot of things, objects, photographs, lists and drafts for ideas which are not clear. Usually I work this over and over for quite sometimes, sometimes years, until I know what I should do with them, when something becomes urgent, or just connects aesthetically one thing to another. But taking over conversations with my friends is a powerful thinking channel for me, it allows me to express desire relating to the ideas, becoming a thermometer that tells me which idea is the most urgent to take. These conversations work to advise me, in a way they are my workshop. They allow me to test thoughts, things that are pulsating through my mind and that interact with my feelings.
Generally this process is also a kind of emotional test. This test relates to me, and usually to my apprehension regarding the world, and with the things I have in my hands at that moment, but also my aesthetic and conceptual interests. I rarely decide on a theme that I will approach in my work. Of course, I decide one a theme when the time comes to talk about it, but I never think ‘I will make a project about this or that’. Also because my works often address several topics at the same time. I really enjoy the power of double meanings the works can have, the polyphony they can carry and how surprisingly they can invite people.
And it seems you 'cultivate' this polyphony and this ambiguity people can experience when seeing your works. Is it important for you to create this space of ambiguity?
Of course, it is fascinating. And I work very hard to cope with ambiguity, to shape this equation in each work. Sometimes projects combine architecture with emotion, some other with some political issues. When viewing the same piece, some visitors discuss one specific topic, like architecture, and another group of people will ask about issues that are a very personal approach to the works. However, ambiguity can’t be total open and loose to dangerous interpretations, especially when involving images of those who are in the images. I can’t control it all, but I’m aware of my ethical responsibility when I deal with issues that are closer to the others’ life than mine.
Do you also use the format of the book for your work, which seems to be a relevant form for showing texts alongside images?
Yes, the book is a medium I am really interested in. I wish I could do books out of each project, but not easy at all. But I enjoyed a lot the ones I had done so far. 4000 disparos (4000 shots), Manual para 2 em 1, Catálogo for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, and now I’m working on the book Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover), that will be published later this year.
In many of your works, you go far beyond photography or the creative process in order to make your images. This was the case for example when you published adverts in a newspaper in order to find the faces of the people that would appear on the billboards of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, when you used the images you created in your piece entitled Educação para adultos (Education for Adults), as study material in the Portuguese classes that you gave to illiterate people, or even when you braved months of administration and bureaucracy in order to get around the law prohibiting the presence of horses in the city centre of Recife. Is this personal investment important for you in your artistic work?
Absolutely. When I told you about how I choose the themes I want to work with, I said that I contemplate the idea for quite a long time while I subject it to my internal understanding of urgency and desire. It all relates to the passion I feel about the subject, and about when I feel is the right moment to talk about something. I also consider how I think the topic or idea will evolve or be received at that particular moment. The Horse Race project in Recife (The Uprising) required complete dedication from my part in order to be successfully completed. It couldn’t have been achieved if it was done in a more procedural or predictable fashion, or without passion. This work wouldn’t have been accomplished, without all the passion and dedication that I put into it.
When in your work you investigate representations of historical or social events that have occurred in Brazil, or when you re-appropriate images that were used for state educational purposes (such as in Educação para Adultos), or even propaganda images (HoyAyer), as an artist do you feel a sense of duty or commitment to give a different perspective of these images that carry a certain power?
I think the word "commitment" is more related to some sort of political or ideological response, and I don’t understand my work as part of an activism. As I told you before, I look for a more ambiguous strategy. For me, it is important not to explicitly embed any kind of agenda or political positioning. Because if I were to do that, I would lose some of the possibilities of broader conversation that I can have with people who see my work. Sometimes, even when I have a clear opinion or position on something, I try to be more ambiguous about it, almost inviting people to feel a certain objection to the message of the work, because I’m interested in their reaction, if they might join my personal opinion or not.
So when I used political propaganda in HoyAyer (YesterdayToday), I included a Chilean pro-dictatorship text and switched the original images with photographs of a sun that never sets; a metaphor for a persistent and troubling memory. In this case, I don’t clearly state my rejection of the opinions in the text. Because I am more interested to see whether or not the public will experience a certain disgust while reading the text, and still feel, even decades later, the aggressiveness of the text. Rather than banishing this text or seeking revenge, I think that converting it into a neutral text is an interesting way to stimulate a response to its aggressiveness. So these are quite delicate strategies. I take the upmost care so as not to be misunderstood, or to be seen as frivolously using content that I disagree with. Nevertheless, I seek to create situations where this debate can provoke a visceral or emotional reaction. So, I don’t know if the word “commitment" translates my strategy well, because I am more interested in highlighting these kinds of contradictions, and from that stimulus observing the debate that this focus instigates.
Apart from the book of Ressaca Tropical that you are working on, what are your other works in progress, or projects that are to come?
I am now working on a video project called O Peixe (The Fish), which is a piece about a fishermen village what takes as ritual embracing the fishes alive when they fish it. It’s shot on 16mm, on a ethnographical aesthetics, not depicting an actual existent ritual, but an action I asked 10 different fishermen to perform to me. I’m editing at the moment and will launch it in the next Bienal de São Paulo, that opens in Sep 2016. Apart from that, I’ll participate in next Seoul Biennial, and I will soon be taking up an artistic residency in Mexico. So it will continue to be a very intense year as my projects are always very lengthy and require a great deal of research, but that’s what I enjoy doing.
Website
cargocollective.com/jonathasdeandradewww.elsaleydier.com/