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I LIVED AN UTOPIA
Workshop/ artistic immersion - Tours, France, 2023.
In May 2023 I experienced a utopia. The YES (Young European Sculpture) program, a program promoted by a partnership of four colleges in Europe, promoted an intense week of exchanges and artistic/social immersion. The project brought together several points that directly dialogue with my work, especially on the theme of materiality and sensorial experimentation. Organized in a workshop format, YES took place in the city of Tours in a natural and collaborative environment next to the Loire River, a river in France where nature manifests itself in a more natural and free state. This freedom permeated our experiments and exchanges that expanded based on the proposed approach to the four elements: water, fire, earth and air.
The classes from the four participating countries (Portugal, France, Latvia and Italy) merged into smaller groups and cultural, linguistic and interpersonal interaction became a structural part of the program that flowed between the investigation of the territory and its context, of sculpture techniques (material or not), Landart, flâneur, multisensoriality and the freedom of creation and speculation. Integration between participants became of central importance, whether they were students or teachers and collaborators, all work was deeply influenced by collaboration between individuals, without hierarchical imposition or excessive rules and norms that could negatively influence artistic production, be it individual or collective.
As a result, the experience was deeply linked to the concept of relational aesthetics defended by Nicolas Bourriaud, which refers to an artistic approach that emphasizes the relationships and interactions between viewers, works of art and the surrounding environment. This aesthetic values the creation of social situations and human interactions through works, promoting active public participation and the construction of collective meaning. The focus is not just on the work of art itself, but on the way it creates connections and dialogues between people, generating shared and collaborative experiences. And this week demonstrated the effectiveness of this concept as it resulted in a search to understand how artistic methodology is capable of promoting social innovation, contributing critically to the construction or remodeling of spaces and, consequently, transforming the lives of people and the community.
From my own experience and that of colleagues with whom I interacted more personally, the result was the emergence of a mini-utopia, something like a brief example of how, even in an era of volatility, technology and instability, it is still possible to create and experience an ideal world. And through this ideal, I proposed in the land workshop a fusion of the identities that participated in this experience. I collected the fingerprints of each colleague, teacher and collaborator using clay. I invited each person to press their fingerprint against a small piece of clay where they were standing at the time I found them, and the print thus captured the place and the individual, symbolically. The circle, a symbol of continuity and cycle, was used to bring together all these identities, symbolizing the connection we establish with each other. To finish, I positioned the work Our identities on the banks of the river, and let it dissolve the clay and transform it into a memory of this utopian week.
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