Joana Maria Pereira

In the last few months in the studio, while working on the writing, my gaze has been constantly directed towards two tiny pieces of paper stapled to the wall. It is the way the paper slightly folds, and how it seems to change depending on how the light strikes it, that catches my attention.

Before and After the National Archive (2019) was there already, right before me, when I moved to Ransome’s Dock. The work became about the invisibility of the work, about the possibility of exhibiting a work without producing any work.

I had photographed the studio wall in September 2018. In October 2019, by the time I visited the National Archive in Lisbon, the thought of the two invisible staples attached to my studio wall returned to my mind. The encounter with the archival material (in its diversity of sizes, colours, thicknesses and textures) marked by time, made me think that some images (documents) are also sculptural, in the sense that they stand in for the body, silently exposing the vulnerability of our own material existence.

Dancing Grains was inspired by Francis Alÿs’s animation Song for Lupita (1998), in which a woman pours water from one glass into another. The title, Dancing Grains (‘which are not made to be seen’), is drawn from a text in which Gilles Deleuze – describing the work of French filmmaker Philippe Garrel – points to the importance of a different mode of presence in modern cinema. A cinema, writes, Deleuze, in which ‘the problem is not that of a presence of bodies, but that of a belief which is capable of restoring the world and the body to us on the basis of what signifies their absence.’

My focus on dust relates not only to invisibility and mobility, but also to weight: the materiality of dust. A snowflake, a seed or a grain, a minor and insignificant detail: which is also the soil engraved in the bare feet of the old peasant woman, or ‘the seed which splits open the paving-stones.’

As Hélène Cixous suggested: to make art with the earth. 

July: it has been quite a hot summer. I visit the Alberto Sampaio Museum twice, alone. Almost inevitably I return to the same spot, I sit on the floor cross-legged looking at the big olive tree standing right in front of me. It feels as if the cloister that dates from the thirteenth century was built around it: as if the cloister is embracing it. From where I am, I can see little bits of archaeological fragments apparently left there at random, forgotten – and which maybe you don’t see until you sit down – but which punctuate the space in an unexpected way. But nothing strikes me more than the two workers, crossing my field of vision every fifteen minutes, pushing an improvised trolley with a rope. I think that would be enough: that trolley moving every fifteen minutes.