Spinning around [à nora]
Estúdio UM - Universidade do Minho (PT)
In 1996, the Portuguese pop band Diva sang: “I’m spinning around, I’m spinning around, lost in myself; I’m spinning around, I’m spinning around, without foreseeing the end.”
The aesthetics of the disoriented and of the impasse does not appear out of the blue in the Portuguese pop music sensitivity. It is anticipated by sensitivity towards transition, uncertainty, and absence that defines a great chunk of Portuguese literature. That can be noticed in the preference for transitional spaces, balconies, windows, folding screens, glass, blinders, grids, fences, hallways, fog, nomadic experiences, vocabularies mobilized to the peeking and hiding of the interior of the subjects.
In “Spinning around” I present a series of drawings of grids, fishing nets, structures (that serve both to protect and hold as to enclose and restrict) which morose, repetitive, exhausting making – sometimes so long it numbs the maker through the making – either depicts structures that wrap around something, or compositions that see its organization disrupted, directions or contexts that have not yet a meaning.
