SUFOCO [2021]

CISTERNA GALERIA [Lisbon, Portugal]
Text by João Macdonald
Ana Velez | Joana Gomes | Maria Sassetti | Xana Sousa

The work by these four artists from Atelier Contencioso [in existence since 2015] has emerged from the lockdown and is an engagement with the idea of the unheimlich, a proposal based on Sigmund Freud’s 1919 text [furthermore published towards the end of the pandemic of his day]: what is simultaneously not familiar or familiar, triggering our own sense of uneasiness. The setting for our discomfort is within our own home - the limit [in all senses of the word] of where we have tried to re-exist in recent times.

[...]

The repetitive act of taking 45 Polaroids from the same angle has the assumed intent of guiding viewers towards finding something they recognise in them, not intended by the artist [in other words, as opposed to showing a single, dictatorial image from the same perspective]. Which leads us inevitably, to the following paradox: the chosen perspective was obviously at the artist’s behest, what’s more [yet another paradox] conceived to reflect its domestic setting: we have here a view from a window of her home, taken during the first confinement. In a certain sense, it is a means of confining the confinement [as did much of the population by undertaking similar acts]. It is impossible however to control everything [notwithstanding the fact that, as was already said, the ulterior motive is to condition the process of looking].

Each photographic object, even if captured on a rigorous daily basis, is subject to different light [whether night or day]; which a Polaroid will pick up - even if black and white was chosen as the best means of capturing the Moment [as opposed to a more mundane colour image]. Before it, or in spite of it, is a drawing made up of extensive layers of indian ink and graphite. As science has told us, graphite is a mineral that has the potential to become a diamond, and the artist [who usually produces work in series] seeks to find out which is the halfway point for attaining “diamond quality”.

João Macdonald