A conversation with Guilherme Teixeira

Something that draws attention in your practice as a curator is the rupture with what we institutionally, or traditionally, know as curatorship in Brazil. There is a search for curatorial and expographic solutions that go beyond traditional exhibition thinking. Can you elaborate a little on that? If you can, tell us a little about your different projects.

GT: An example that occurs to me when thinking of the potency of different curatorial constructions is the exhibition “Começo do século” [Beginning of the Century], a curatorial proposal by Germano Dushá in which I collaborated as a curatorial assistant. An unusual “happening”, from the format itself to the way we wrote the text with four hands. It occurred at dawn on a Tuesday in November 2019 at Galeria Jaqueline Martins in São Paulo, from midnight to three in the morning, and consisted of a chain of actions, performances and works that built a one act show on the possibilities of the moment in which we live.

In a later discussion with the curator of a large institution in São Paulo, he told me how he had seen several problems in our proposal, and that the way we talked about the body there was nothing new, that in fact it was repetitive. This left me thinking a lot about how institutions and a whole generation think about the place of bodies in an exhibition, especially when we talk about black, peripheral and transgendered bodies. What is the measure that traditional spaces have developed, and still apply, to define the validity of a body existing in its artistic action? What is this canon that dictates what the potency of this body is? Can a body only exist in a gallery space if it serves the historical purpose that institution has? Can’t it enunciate itself?

Your projects follow an extremely integrated logic: we can see how the concept of the exhibition goes from the selection of artists to the design, which is implemented in the exhibition space and in alternative reproductions of the curatorial text. I am thinking, for example, of the curatorial text of “O grande susto” on a brick, where, in addition to evoking the material gesture of the impact of the brick, you also embrace the eventual crumbling of the text, which over time becomes unreadable. In other words, the text becomes physically part of the exhibition, not just conceptually, but almost as a work in itself. Can you talk a little about this integrated logic?

GT: I believe that the exhibition does not exist in a space, but with a space, and that the works consequently do not exist in a curatorship, but with a curatorship. The ways in which this relationship happens is multiple, but it passes through two essential points: first, the text, and second, how the curatorial proposal takes place in the exhibition space. In both points, the design becomes a fundamental piece for the realization of what is stated there.

I have been thinking about this relationship with my friend and work partner Will Cega for a while now, reflecting on these points of contact, and for us the physicality of the text is essential. The exhibition “O grande susto” discussed the specific place that exists between sculptural discourse and architecture, and the idea of using a brick as a support for the curatorial text came from the possibility of the discourse being able to underlie that space between construction and ruin. The materiality of the brick also becomes essential when we think about what the visitors take from an exhibition nowadays: we are more than used to the compression of critical speech and research, a very common movement that reduces these two very important instances to something that will be forgotten in the bottom of your bag after visiting a gallery. That is how the ‘becoming physical’ and the weight of the brick operate: in giving form to the discomfort that accompanies the visitor after going to an exhibition.

You recently founded, with designer Will Cega, a newspaper called “O Turvo“, focused on critical artistic thinking. Can you tell us a little about this project?

GT: “O Turvo” is a project that Will Cega and I have been working on for about a year, but it is only  within the recent adversities that it became public. Our initial intention was to build a space that somehow tried to counter the erosion of political and poetic imagination today, to build a place where criticism could align itself with poetic issues and propose long-winded discussions without having to stick blindly to an academic speech.

It is a bimonthly newspaper, and presents themes inherent to the construction of current discourses. The design, headed by the studio AÇO.ORG (composed by Alexandre Ruda and Willian Cega) is also an essential part of the proposal. We wanted, from the beginning, that the physical format of the publication resonate with the theme it addresses, bringing the discussion regarding function of form in the ways we deal with objects today. For the first edition, “Confinamento e colapso” [Confinement and Collapse], we invited several artists, critics, writers and thinkers to speak on how issues related to the current COVID-19 pandemic were affecting them. The newspaper is in tabloid format and presents, in its layout, a movement of closing in on the essays, poems and images presented, seeking to echo the sentiment that guided the edition.

With an open call for contribution, the second edition, “Regimes de conexão” [Connection Regimes] focuses on discussing ways in which we connected yesterday and today. The edition brings in its physical version a comment on the evolutionary future of our thumbs, reproducing the “infinite scroll” like a fax sheet, building a vertical reading that is parallel to the version that exists on our website. This second edition is in the process of being finalized, and should be launched by the end of June.

We are also thinking of ways in which to expand the newspaper as a platform, and have therefore launched the À Residência [To the Residency] space, in which an artist or writer will develop a project on one of the publication’s pages that will span three consecutive editions of the newspaper. The first resident is artist and writer Ana Matheus Abbade. 

For the third edition we will address the theme “Quando corpos erodem” [When Bodies Erode], bringing discussions about policies that are forced onto our bodies and our desires, in addition to reflections on the necropolitical regime in which we find ourselves increasingly drowned.