PIIGS Interview #3

Considering the socio-economical situation of your own country, which were the real employment prospects you had when you first undertook your studies in curatorial practices?

PT:In Portugal, as in other countries, we do not have many employment prospects in curatorial practices. Apart of some small projects inside universities or small galleries, it is very difficult for young curators and other art professionals to find a job and apply all their acquired skills.
In our country, we have some opportunities together with private institutions, that provide few scholarships for projects annually, but when we came across the offer in public jobs or public support for the arts, the landscape is very different.

Something about the non-exhibition strategy

Thomas Hirshhorn, Too Too – Much Much Necklace, 2010, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Courtesy the artist

We are strictly convinced that a main curatorial ethic should became a theme of our project (see Manifest). This is also relative to our exhibition. That’s why we invited each group (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) to propose one project that integrates with others in order to create a big one, where a multitude of voices will not only reflect about political, economical and cultural conditions which join us under a common umbrella term like PIIGS, but try also to turn-over such colonial logic reinventing our common identity projection in support of particular political theses, like solidarity to what is judged to be “the poor and mistreated”.

PIIGS Interview #2

2- Do you think that quality in art and curatorial projects may only be achieved in main art centers? Artist, curators, gallerists, and other “art workers” use to migrate permanently or temporarily into art centers, places in which they can see great exhibitions, attend fashionable events and meet the “right” people. Is living in peripheral areas actually an hindrance to the development of curatorial and artistic projects?

PT: It is not our conviction that high quality art can only be achieved at main art centres. Although, considering capitalism as our economy system these places achieve a greater relevance, due to its better offer in practical conditions and therefore public attention and funding, when compared to other art exhibit locations in peripheral areas. This fact can be observed, mainly, around the strong economic countries. This can be justified probably because on these countries there is a greater support of the arts, either public or private, hence creating greater possibilities to transpose “barriers”, that without it, one probably couldn’t.

PIIGS Interview #1

A short interview: five questions, five answers to each question. One question each article, with five answers: a first real discussion.

Is there a common ground between all the PIIGS Countries? If Yes how would you describe it?

PT: The main reason why the PIIGS countries were grouped together is the substantial instability of their economies, which was an evident problem in 2009. All had experienced a severe economic downturn, budgetary and debt crisis, and intervention by international institutions.The five countries present high levels of unemployment and a very high proportion of those who are unemployed are long-term, indicating that the problem is becoming structural.They show increases in income poverty, with childhood poverty a particular problem in each and showing an increase in all countries since 2007.
All of the ‘PIIGS’ experienced increased emigration with the crisis. In all these countries social risks are increasing, social systems are being tested and individuals and families are under stress.Once the size of the PIIGS’ debt has become clear, investors are getting more and more reluctant to buy bonds from European countries, since many of those countries are heavily in debt — and the ones that aren’t in debt look like they might have to assume responsibility for the ones that are.

Dubai versus Rodos – Giandomenica Becchio

Giandomenica Becchio, economist  and photographer, has been focusing her attention on the connections between individualities and social/economic contests in a global perspective which privileges the human dimension in describing social transformations of our time.
Dubai versus Rodos is part of this project. Cleaning Glasses reveals the condition of dozens of workers who daily hang from the tallest skyscraper of the world in order to earn a living, while dozens of business men are dealing with financial stuff inside the building. Old Time Sake represents the struggle of an old man, an artisan working in his small and full of memories studio, in Rodos  (Greece) where economic crisis has inexorably been spread up and left hopeless most young people.

Carla Filipe

The work of Carla Filipe (b. 1973), in the words of the portuguese curator Pedro Lapa, was one of the most significant projects to emerge in Portugal towards the end of last decade. She undertakes an archaeology of the lifestyles and the attendant questions raised during the course of modernity: certain forms linked to expectations of a new world, one whose realisations proved to be extremely diverse. Many of her works expose an autobiographic vein; some deal with episodes in micro-narratives, others with history itself, concerning the effects of economic and social development and the state of the nation. Constituting all of Carla Filipe’s works is a narrative structure, whose mediums are, recurrently, objects, drawing, words and installation.

“Merry crisis and happy new fear”. Ideas running through the walls.

“Merry crisis and happy new fear”, was written on a wall a few years ago, it was 2008, in Greece. First visible traces of a discomfort growing over and over, until the brutal events that in the last few years shored up not only in Greece, but in several European countries harshly bitten by the economic crisis.

IS MY MANIFEST ALSO YOURS?

Cover of the album Manifest by Lyapis Trubetskoy

I was thinking a lot about PIIGS_An Alternative Geography of Curating last days and some considerations comes to my mind. I see them as a sort of suggestions for our common project as well as my personal curatorial ethic for the moment. I called it in a provocative manner a Manifest and would like immediately to share it with you. (Soundtrack)

context instead of work

engagement instead of participating

attitudes instead of form

values instead of costs

Giovanni Leghissa – The loss of something: the neoliberal condition as a melanchonic one.

The neoliberal condition as a melanchonic condition; as a loss of an object we can nearly define. This object is the ability to distinguish between politics and economics. It is indeed the idea that politics can’t be divorced from economics any longer, defining the former as the setting of individual and collective actions, of ethics, of the pursuit for happiness, and the latter as the logic of production’s efficiency and wealth’s accumulation. We feel gloomy and this feeling is due to the loss of freedom we experienced, because the lack of a political sphere whipped away the chances we had to negotiate our own liberites and, as a consequence, to enhance our ethical wealth. Since economic logic stands as the one and only triumphing rationality, prevailing on the political logic, we give well-being an economical value: we naturalize profit-oriented thinking. This is where the questions from the critique arise: can this human, all too human, condition – the neoliberal one – occur as the natural order?

It is within the dominant economic dimension that individuals identify themselves; through specific subjectivation’s processes, submitted to the neoliberal bio-political governmentality.

Spain’s corner: Artists who work on the PIIGS’s issue.

Carlos Spottorno (Budapest, Hungary, 1971). The photographer Carlos Spottorno goes into the origin of the term PIGS and travels all along the four PIGS countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) to discover through his lens if we are really pigs, and how is like to be a pig. Spottorno tries to interpret in some way the images taken in that journey. So, he finally gets a collection of clichés about the condition and reality of these countries. In the same way that a travel guide tries to avoid all the unattractive things to the human eye, Spottorno’s pictures on the contrary show crudely what we could find shameful, sometimes politically correct, sometimes not: postcards showing empty yards where nothing grows, mountains of rubbish in the streets of Athens, unfinished buildings, are some of the examples collected in the project. Spottorno presented this work as a publication, taking over the finances publication The Economist logo for the word PIGS. This photobook was awarded with the Paris Photobook Awards and Photobook Awards of Kassel, both in 2013. Later in 2015 it was once again honoured with the World Press Photo with the project At the Gates of Europe, making obvious the immobility of the greatest European politicians towards immigration as well as the refugee’s crisis, which have been filling of death the Mediterranean coast. Europe once again has shown weakness when considering situations of real emergency regarding human beings.