Phone Tag: Interview with Pedro Wirz

Posted on August 28, 2019 by Linnea

Installation view featuring *My home is my dinner* (2018) and *Guard‘águas* (2017) at Centre Pasquart. Photo © Gunnar Meier

Pedro Wirz uses raw and discarded materials to create sculptures and installations that invoke a synthetic, decomposing natural world and a tension between man and nature. As a Swiss-trained artist who grew up in rural Brazil, he toys with the different mythologies and cultural tropes through which we encounter and understand such discordant ecologies. In this Phone Tag interview, Pedro talks about working from his gut, how he found his way to Europe and the visual arts, and the importance of maintaining a criticality toward the work.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West: What are you working on right now?

Pedro Wirz: I have my first solo show with Nagel Draxler Gallery, in Berlin, in September during Art Week Berlin. I’m producing the work for this show.

*Saci-Baldio*, 2019. Mix media on wood construction. 100 x 60 x 25 cm. Installation View at Kunsthaus Langenthal. Photo © Alex Kern

LW: One of the things that I thought was interesting looking at your work is the materials you use. Where does that come from? Does it feel natural and intuitive, or are you planning in advance the specific materials you want to work with?

PW: A lot of people ask that. It is intuitive. I grew up on a farm in the countryside of São Paulo. My mother is a biologist. My father is an agronomist. I understand soil, bees, animals… these were the things I learned about. I never had any sense of disgust toward things that make some people go, “Ugh.” The materials always seemed absolutely natural to me.

I’m working a lot with soil at the moment and I have my reasons, but I also just have to move forward. I’m just working and I do what is urgent. Intuition is a big part of us. Why not just follow it? Learn out of it. You cannot be blind all the time. It’s amazing to learn out of blind moves, but then learn how to deal with it. What is the answer behind it all? What is even the initial question?

*Ministério Morto* (*Dead Ministry*), 2019. Soil, red clay, twigs, chicken wire, paper mache. 27 x 24 cm (90 cm – plinth). Installation View at Kunsthaus Langenthal. Photo © Alex Kern

LW: You said that you first met [former Phone Tag participant] Beto [Shwafaty] in Europe. Of course, you are both Brazilian but you met working on different projects or studies over there. How do you end up in Switzerland?

PW: No one in my family is an artist, but I was long involved in theater and I was always making drawings. I never thought about whether this was art or not. It was just a sort of expression that I always had to practice. When I was growing up, in Brazil, I wanted to study music, actually, but then I didn’t get into the university. My girlfriend at the time said to me, “You should do what I am doing, studying public relations. It has a lot to do with you.” I see why she suggested this–I like to talk. So before studying art, I completed an education in Public Relations at the University of Taubaté in Brazil.

I went through some good jobs while studying communication and after graduating as well. I ended up landing a very good position in a big French company. However, I very soon realized, this was not where I belonged.

Well, I just quit. At that time, I was 23 and I told my parents, “I want to do photography.” I moved to São Paulo to work with the photographers Claudio Elkisabetsky and Moa Sitibaldi. They taught me a lot about thinking artistically, and especially how to be attentive to detail.

*Mãe do Ouro* (*Gold‘s Mother*), 2018 . Humus (black soil), wood glue, fired clay, plaster, twigs, wire. 120 x 50 x 50. Installation View at Swiss Art Awards, Basel. Photo © Alex Kern

After two years I decided to move to Europe. A young French man that I met while working at the French company had become a very good friend of mine. He said, “Why don’t you come to Europe and work here as a photographer?” I said, “OK, I’m just going to go.” By the age of 25, I moved from São Paulo to Nantes in northern France. I was trying to find work and it wasn’t happening, but I didn’t want to give up yet. I have Swiss roots, and my uncle in Switzerland invited me to stay with his family for a while so I said “OK.” I moved to Switzerland, and I started to work in whatever jobs I could to make ends meet. But I kept on working on my photography.

When I was living in Switzerland, in the very beginning, I moved out of my uncle’s place into a house with new friends. One was a singer, the other one was going to art school, and the third was a musician. As a 25 year old, who was artistically motivated but did not really possess any tool to express himself yet, to live with this constellation of people was fantastic! At the same time I also fell in love with a girl that was going to art school. I visited her at the school to see what she was working on and realized “This is what I want to do.” I prepared a portfolio and applied to all the Swiss art schools that I had heard of.

Long story short, two years after I moved to Europe, I enrolled in the art school in Basel, in 2007. I started going to school and doing more and more stuff. I studied one year in Stuttgart in Germany. I finished in 2011.

*Trilobites*, 2017. Rocks, bronze cast, paint. Dimensions Variable. Installation view at Cologne Sculpture Park. Photo © Pedro Wirz

LW: Across all of this time, was there a moment when you thought to yourself, “OK, now I’m an artist”?

PW: Honestly, I was thinking that from the very beginning when I entered art school. It’s terrible, but it’s true. I was absolutely convinced that what I was doing was amazing. I would talk to the teachers in my very bad German, asking “Do you get it?” Now, I realize this is pretty much a first-year bachelor student thing. It took me a long time to understand what my practice as an artist could be. Back then I thought, “OK. I’m going to the art school, people are teaching me how to be an artist, and when I finish school I will be an artist. I’m going to paint, and people are going to buy it, and I will be some sort of Picasso, I guess.” The reality is completely different!

It took me a long time to understand and accept what my practice is about. The route that led me here was one that took a lot of work and time. I think this is beautiful because artists are thinkers, and they have a responsibility towards what they bring to an audience. Alongside continuously working on my practice, I traveled a lot and found different ways to connect with people. It helped that I am good at communicating–at discovering different sources and not being afraid to establish a connection with them.

It isn’t long ago that I arrived at the work that I am doing today. That happened, maybe around four years ago. And from that very moment, many things followed in my career… I started to work with galleries, received bigger invitations for shows, etc.

*Consoantes Líquidas (Liquid Consonants)*, 2019. Cast beeswax, fabrics debris. Dimension Variable. Installation view at Centre Culturel Suisse. Photo © Pedro Wirz

LW: You say you met and spoke with a lot of people all over. Looking back, who do you think had the biggest influence on the work that you make now?

PW: I think criticality is very important. One of the most important people that I have talked to is a very good friend of mine, Gabriel Lima. He’s a Brazilian artist who studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He also studied at the Royal College in London. From the very beginning, I think by the age of five, he knew that he would be an artist. He’s a very virtuosic person. He can draw; he’s a fantastic painter; and he’s a brilliant mind. He had all this critical knowledge that I didn’t have–I just followed my gut.

He would be very hard toward the works critically, saying, “Man, why are you doing this? It’s not working.” I would be very angry with him because I was still thinking, “This is killer.” We had a very tight relationship, and he helped me a lot. I would go from residency to residency, and sometimes when I had no money, he would also help me.

My last residency was at the Swiss Institute in Rome. A place that afforded me time to work. I was just in the studio, working, working, working, working. Calling Gabi–Gabriel Lima–all the time. It was ten months of just working, and then I had my first show in New York with my first gallery. It went very well, but in the meantime the residency had finished. So I had to find a studio. I was asking myself “How do I do this? I have to pay for a studio. I don’t want to have any other job. I just want to do art.”

Gabi motivated me to move to Porto and was very generous, offering me a place to stay for the first six months. He knew I had no money. The first six years after graduation, I had been living on the edge. So I went to Portugal. I found a studio. I also sold some works at this time and everything started to roll, more or less. I start to work with Kai [Matsumiya] and do some fairs and group shows. Suddenly, other galleries began to show interest, and I got an invitation to my first big institutional show in Brazil. I was super happy.

What also happened around that time is that my partner, Leonie Thalmann, came into my life. Soon after we became a couple she became pregnant. At that same time I received an invitation for a residency in Berlin; someone called me and said something like, “Mr. Wirz, you’ve been accepted.” Then I was like, “Oh, I didn’t apply to anything. I’m not willing to move anywhere.” Then this other curator called me like, “Are you crazy? This is one of the best residencies in Germany. I am the person who suggested you.”

My plan was to move to Zurich, to be a father and to find a job, but Leonie said, “No. You should accept this offer.” So I went to Berlin for this residency. It was insane. I worked three months non-stop, not sleeping, just producing and thinking about the work. At the end, I started doing studio visits, studio visits, studio visits. Leonie had told me, “You go there, and you come back with something.” This was two years ago, exactly two years ago. So that’s what happened. I had to close this amazing studio that I had in Porto, organize my life, and come back to Switzerland, to find a new studio, to live in Zurich, the most expensive city in the world.

*Consoantes Líquidas – Notre Dame (Liquid Consonants)*, 2019. Cast beeswax, fabrics debris. Dimension Variable. 46 x 46 x 44 cm (150 x 50 x 50 cm – plinth). Installation view at Kuntshaus Langenthal. Photo © Alex Kern

LW: When you come into your studio, do you have a plan for what you are going to do? Do you just respond to what’s around? What is an ideal day like in your studio?

PW: I think this question has reshaped itself since I became a father. Now I have an ultra-tight schedule. The amazing thing behind the question is: how can you control creativity or tie it to a schedule? What I do is, I get all the juice out of the two hours that I have.

I think mostly all days in the studio are good days. I always think about the privilege of it. Growing up in the country where I grew up and the social level that I was raised in, I always keep this in mind while producing and thinking about art.

*Breastfed Tadpole* at Kai Matsumiya Gallery, New York City. Photo © Kai Matsumiya

LW: You’ve lived in different places and now you live in Zurich, a city and a particularly expensive city at that.

One of the questions I always like to ask is: Is it more important for an artist to be in a big city where you have galleries, where you have an art scene, where you have other people but it’s expensive and there can be a lot of pressure, or to be in a quiet place where you can really focus on making things?

PW: I cannot give you a black or white answer, but I can tell you what I have experienced because I have lived in many different places. During the art school, everybody was going to Berlin and I went to Stuttgart. Everyone was like, “Why?” It felt better. In Berlin, in big cities, people struggle so much to even be alive or be there. For myself, I had a lot of fears moving back to Zurich, but I love it. There’s a lot of culture here. The city is very small. I can get around quickly. In New York, I’m mad all the time; I’m lost all the time.

You do have to have a certain presence in cultural hubs. I don’t know how artists should manage this. I’m not saying they always have to have a gallery. I think artists have to understand that they are responsible for creating the economy that they are going to live in. That’s the most important thing. Once you realize that, then you’re free to go. I know people who are great artists, amazing painters, and they don’t have galleries. They have organized themselves in different ways. They get museums to pay them, or they teach. There’s no answer to say what is the best way, but I think in larger cities you meet people. It’s in these cities where you’re going to have the chance to see important artists or shows. Whereas small cities have treated me very well and have brought me to the place that I am in now.

But of course not only the place is important, but to meet the right mentors and peers. For me, for example, it was helpful to meet Rainer Ganahl, who was my teacher in Stuttgart. I met him because I decided to go there. His dealer is also Kai, my dealer in New York now. I told Kai and Rainer, “Well, I’m going to go to Portugal now, and everybody’s going to forget me.” Kai was like, “You should move to New York,” but Rainer said, “It doesn’t even matter. You have to go to a place where you can work. Is Portugal where it’s going to be? Just go there and work there. Work your ass off there. If it’s good enough, everybody is going to hear about it.”

Anyway, the most important thing is to work. That’s what it is. At the end of day, at the end of this era, what is going to matter is the work.

LW: That’s great. Well, thank you.

PW: It’s an honor talking to you. Thank you.

Burgeoning Forms: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Linnea

I feel astonished when I encounter powerful, oversized female forms in art; they are all too rare. In itself, that is a reason the exhibition of large knotted fiber works by Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee on view at the Met Breuer demands closer attention. Modernist forms expand freely across medium into humble and coarse textiles that recall their origin in a living world. Her hanging gods and goddesses invoke an experience of presence and awe, and they straddle (or collapse) ideas of Western and Indian art. All of which this concise exhibition of some thirty large textile sculptures, rippling with pockets and folds, and smaller groupings of Mukherjee’s ceramics and bronze demonstrates.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer — Fiber works made between 1982-1985. Installation view of *Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee* exhibition at the Met Breuer.

A strong hand in the design of the exhibition cuts the Met Breuer’s Brutalist interior into a serpentine path, lilac and neutral curtains delineating alcoves for groupings of the large hanging sculptures. Grouping the sculptures brings individual figures–created separately over many years–into tableaus that suggest narrative. Combined with the curtains, the effect is of refined theatrics. This might trivialize weaker work, but here each piece retains its gravitas. Their frontality, even in clearly three-dimensional works like the above, recalls the line up of a frieze or suggests characters on a stage. The exhibition text suggests that Mukherjee, although not religious, was inspired by Hindu temple carvings and paintings of gods and goddesses. The works are titled with names such as Yakshi (Female Forest Deity) and Rudra (Deity of Terror). Whether looking up at imagery in a temple or at Mukherjee’s larger-than-life sculptures, the intended impact is awe.

Mukherjee began working with rope while an art student in Baroda, India in the 1970s, under the guidance of K.G. Subramanyan. Subramanyan encouraged his students to abandon the Western divide between art and craft, and under his guidance she experimented with ways of braiding and knotting rope. Initial wall hangings quickly grew to embrace all the possibilities of this humble material as she developed ways of knotting that create internal support for her intricate and heavy organic forms. In works like Basanti (She of Spring), she brings a modern aesthetic (a turn to abstraction and an engagement with objecthood) to this rough material that recalls local craft traditions. Basanti was made in the 1980s, when Mukherjee was embarking on her most ambitious attempts to turn fiber into beings that hovered between the plant and animal kingdoms. She began to hang them from the ceiling so that they inhabited space as a free-standing sculpture rather than hanging flat against a wall. They spill out and over themselves, suggesting the growth of plants or the arrangement of organs as much as the human form.

As with flora and fauna, so with sexual organs, which the curator reads particularly in these two later works from the 1990s pictured above. One might understand Pushp (Flower) as one does many works by O’Keefe; in both cases representations of flowers begin to seem more and more like female genitals as you look. Here, it is many times larger than life-size. If Pushp is an enormous vulva confronting the viewer, it is one that exudes lifeforce and creates the sense of a powerful female sexual energy. A more complicated sculpture depicts a woman riding a peacock, that is, mounting a traditionally male animal in a union in which the female is the dominant force. This piece, her first fully free standing work, suggests a union not just of male and female, but human and animal, realms.

Mukherjee began to work more in clay and metal in the 1990s, spurred by a residency at a ceramics center in the Netherlands. She was also working less with rope; it had become more difficult to source and some dyes less available. Installations like the one above show her working with rounded, ribbed, and furled shapes, arising from the ground like plants in a garden. Even in smaller works, Mukherjee takes up space, and it is clear that the natural world is her main source of inspiration.

Mukherjee’s bronze palms likewise echo the natural world of plants and suggest fecundity pushed out to the limits of the natural, with thin leaves unfurling around long stamen. They are grounded in the natural world in their physical positions as well. They lie across the ground, preserved in the twists and furls of their making and with a soft sheen. These forms, much like those of nature, can seem grotesque as much as beautiful. Although concise, this exhibition overall allows one to see the artist expand, develop a mastery over form and material, and then continue on the next medium, from fiber to clay and bronze.

Muherjee’s practice of working in textile set her apart from many artists of her generation, as it has for so many who have gravitated to the medium of cloth and textiles, arts often associated with the home and the work of women. The scale and power of Mukherjee’s fiber works, combined with the controlled, elegant folds and braids that seem to hold them up, gesture to the type of world that might contain them. The phenomenological experiences of the fiber sculptures–how one feels in ones body in the presence of this larger, abstracted monstrous body–is that of an antediluvian past made present. It is well worth seeing in person to have that experience.

Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee is on view at the Met Breuer until September 29, 2019.

Phone Tag: Interview with Beto Shwafaty

Posted on June 23, 2019 by Linnea

Shwafaty Phantom Matrix — *The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories)*, 2016. Sugarcane wood mill* (150 years old), electrical motor and components. Variable dimensions. Context specific installation, commissioned by SITU Project, Leme gallery, São Paulo. Photo: Filipe Berndt

In this Phone Tag interview, I speak with Beto Shwafaty about finding his way as an artist, deconstructing rhetorics of Brazilian identity, and the inherently political nature of art. Beto has a research-based practice, investigating cultural questions through material forms. He lives and works in Brazil.

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Linnea West: What kind of work do you make?

Beto Shwafaty: The type of practice that I am developing has a direct connection with my education. I did a visual arts BA in Brazil, then I went to work in museums as an installer and as a producer. I worked for the São Paulo Biennial, too, and worked as an assistant to some artists. Later, I went to study for an MA in Italy. It was a hybrid program, mixing curatorial studies and visual arts. I started to have deeper contact with curatorial thinking, with more theoretical debates about display, the phenomenology of contemporary art, the art system and so on. I had also, in that moment, a broad interest in institutional critique and public intervention.

These inputs influenced me to, somehow, try to develop an art practice that is not based on a specific medium, but more on an idea of how certain questions and research can influence the materialization of a specific cultural situation. I do not want to position myself as someone who can give answers, because I think that is too much to demand from art alone. But I would like to rely on the freedom that art gives us to speculate about our current times and situations, looking to the past, to the present, and also thinking about the future.

Shawafaty Phantom Matrix — *The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories)*, 2016. Sugarcane wood mill* (150 years old), electrical motor and components. Variable dimensions. Context specific installation, commissioned by SITU Project, Leme gallery, São Paulo. Photo: Filipe Berndt

BS: I’m still very much concerned with the material presence of art. There’s a phrase—I think it’s from Donald Judd—that first of all, art must be something interesting, then you can go deeper. I still want to develop the material side of my projects, employing diverse artistic languages. So, some works may become a sculpture, an object, a video, a photo, but normally they work together inside a context or environment.

I create my own productions, thinking on how each piece can be understood as a certain chapter of a narrative, as a certain instance of an idea, or a certain moment in the space when the viewer will be confronted not only with the ideas, the things, and the content but also with the varying materialization and relations of those elements. And I always try to choose the materials, and every visual and material aspect of the works, in relation to the researched subject. If I chose a color to paint a wall, I try to choose that color because it will be connected to the subject I am dealing with, so it can add something. Even if it’s not explicit, it is part of the research.

LW: I like how you said that you don’t want the art to give answers, but to be a way to speculate and think about the future. Do you think in that way your work has an activist quality?

BS: Nowadays, we are facing very intense and strange times, everywhere, politically speaking. When I went to São Paulo in the beginning of the 2000s, the art scene was very different here in Brazil. We had fewer galleries and almost no public programs. The system was much more closed, maybe even more commercial and not so open to experimental work that would point to systems outside of the artistic one. Politics were not allowed to be touched, I can say. If you are an artist from the ’70s, maybe you had your “political phase” but in that moment, these approaches were almost dead. At that same time, you also just had documenta X curated by Catherine David, which was trying to reintroduce certain political debates in the mainstream global aesthetic and cultural arena.

I was part of a group of young artists in that time. We were not totally aware of these things, of course. Now I can talk about it in this way, but in that moment, we were more intuitive, feeling that something had to be done, both in cultural as well as in political terms. We organized a scene of collective groups, trying to work together with social movements and within urban spaces. Those experiences had an activist drive. From those experiences, I can say for sure that my works started to have deeper political concerns.

Also art, for me, is a political practice. It is because it exists only in the social realm. So I see any art piece as something political. It doesn’t matter if it talks about race, gender, landscape, or flowers. It is stating, defending, and presenting values—social, cultural, financial, economic ones– and it will be only understood as art because of social norms, agreements and also disputes that find their final existence in the collective thought of society. Some art may be more connected to certain political struggles and representation, but in the end, the very existence of art is a collective social endeavor, and so, broadly political for me.

Shwafaty Tomorrow — Installation views of *Tomorrow I will remember anything*, solo show at Luisa Strina gallery, São Paulo, 2019. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

BS: Later, I started to be more interested in history too. I started to look to the past, to the past of Brazil and to art history, to try to understand how we arrived in this current moment. Slowly, one big interest has started to occupy part of my practice: to explore how art was being used in political schemes, for example in national rhetorics of progress in Brazil, or as a symbol of counter-culture somewhere else, and even as tools to challenge certain situations–to try to emancipate the subjects involved.

Some people saw my most recent show at the gallery Luisa Strina in São Paulo as a quasi-activist thing. But it wasn’t all that radical in my opinion. It was more like a personal reaction to the conservative wave of policies we are facing now. Sometimes I put issues and themes that could be part of an activist agenda in my work, but I don’t call that a form of ‘direct activism.’ I’m trying to put things in a suspended situation, at a certain distance, and then relate different things, diverse situations with different subjects. I’m trying to establish connections between things that maybe no one or few people saw before, or are not comfortable to highlight. I try to address specific aspects of a political moment, a historical moment, a cultural moment. In this scheme, I hope both the art propositions and the audience may be moved, questioned, confronted, and collided.

LW: To make that a little more concrete, what are you working on now? What is your current project?

BS: I have many things. My projects take a long time to develop sometimes. Some started six years ago. It’s like having ideas that are in small boxes. Sometimes I can open and mix them. One idea brings me to another.

LW: What is one that you’ve been thinking about lately?

BS: Now I’m doing this research that started in Paris. It is an exploration of two Modernist Brazilian artists that lived there. They are more like an entry point, or an excuse, to think about certain issues that are still present in Brazil like national identity, self-exoticization, debates about racial representation, appropriation of the Other, control over the rhetoric around the politics of otherness, and so on.

LW: Who are the artists?

BS: It’s a couple, a woman and a man. The woman is the modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, who had a major show at MoMA last year and now at MASP in São Paulo. Her husband at that time was the poet and writer Oswald de Andrade. I was in Paris visiting archives, museums, locations… going around and trying to figure out a certain type of atmosphere. Tarsila is very important for the construction of a notion of Brazilian cultural identity. I am trying to question this—not her work, I think she was an amazing woman and historical figure, very progressive in her views and actions—but still, her practice helped to create specific rhetorics for Brazilian culture that I want to review. I’m trying to articulate or embody somehow certain ideas and certain concerns that she might have had, that I also have, and that I see in her work.

So, this research is becoming a series of propositions that deal with different aspects of Brazilian questions, which are present in her work and may echo similar questions from other places, in many moments of past and present Brazilian cultural history. I am planning to somehow realize these questions through my work. So the project is not about her, but about the recurrence of issues, questions, and problems that I feel are still present and haunting realities in Brazil, or mine at least.

Shwafaty Foundations of the Design — Installation views of solo show *Foundations of the Design Substance: Cultural Metaphors to Design a New Future*, at OCA Ibirapuera – City Museum of São Paulo, 2014 – in development. Sculptural elements and printed material . Metal structures, c -print on cotton paper, ‘lambri’ wall paneling (wood), MDF sheets with bass relief texts, automotive paint, blasted glass and printed graphic material, video. Variable dimensions. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW: When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

BS: That happened in a very strange way. When I was younger, I was drawing comics, superheroes and that stuff. I had a teacher that was a bit older than me; I think I was 15 or 16 years old, and he was 19 and attending the art course in the university. We became friends. I started to go to the university, to the parties. I started to have older friends from the art school. I knew I would like to do something with drawing, but I was not sure what. Maybe design, maybe architecture, maybe advertisIng. Then I said, “OK, I’m going to do visual arts as a basis. From there, I can decide later.”

I didn’t see myself at that time as an artist. I was just exploring things. I had no experience. The course here was based a lot in techniques—painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture classes—not much about what you wanted to do or why you want to be an artist—the basic questions that later you start to put to yourself. So, I was just doing the activities and exploring things.

BS: I started to understand that maybe art would be what I wanted to do when I began to question the professors about things that they were not comfortable answering, regarding techniques or, if they were talking about artists, I was asking strange questions about their practices. My friends were not doing that. I thought to myself, “OK, I have this inquiring mind about art that others do not have. Maybe I needed to understand this more and better.”

I left school and started to work with other artists. I think my second school was the biennial of São Paulo. I worked in three biennials as an installer, assisting artists and being a producer. I was in direct contact with many great artists, generous people… from whom I learned a lot. It was an amazing experience.Then I think I started to see myself as an artist. It became clearer when I had the opportunity to travel to do the master degree. Then I said, “If I go away to do this, then it’s a life investment.”

LW: Yes, that’s a life choice.

BS: Still, today, in fact, one of my big questions is “what is it to be an artist?” Sometimes, in workshops and similar things, younger people ask me: “What is the formula? What should I do? Teach me how to be an artist” or something like that. I say, “No one can teach you. I can talk to you, discuss with you your ideas, the things you are doing. You can learn techniques. But to be an artist, it’s something very personal. Not just personal. It’s about the risks you want to take, because it’s not an easy job.”

It’s not a profession. I normally say it’s more like a curse.

LW: [laughs] OK.

BS: I say, “If you want to be an artist, try this. Try to stay six months without producing anything. If you manage, then you don’t need to do it. It’s not a necessity. Then find something else. You can still do creative work in other fields.”

It’s a bit romantic, I must say, this vision. But for me, there is a degree of necessity that art must feed itself from. It must be grounded on an urgency. I’m not trying to give a formula or anything, but the type of artwork that I like to see is where I can see the artist dealing with this aspect of the work, of art, that ends up reflecting on other aspects of our existence.

Scwafaty Remediations — Installation view of *Remediations*, installed at Paço das Artes, São Paulo. 2010 –2014. Installation composed by video, TV monitor, dvd player, various furniture, construction materials, vitrine, photographs and graphical interventions on found printed matter. Various materials, dimensions variable. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW: This leads into my next question, which is about who has influenced you…

BS: It’s very difficult to say because I…How can I say? I have no prejudices.

LW: Everything. [laughs]

BS: I can look to a painter and see interesting things there. I can look to an installation artist and see things there.

There are artists that I have been in closer contact with that influenced me, not directly in aesthetic or practical terms, but sometimes in a more human way. I had many, many good teachers that were really important in how they transmitted a certain ethos, a certain way of positioning yourself in relation to the world, to the art system, to your practice.

Of course, there are artists and intellectuals that I really like. I like Simon Starling, with whom I studied in Frankfurt. He was a super generous person, an amazing mind and an amazing artist. He’s really good. At Campinas University, Luise Weiss is an amazing artist working on personal memories employing printmaking, photography, and objects. There, I also met Tuneu, who is an incredible painter and teacher, super generous—coincidentally he was the only student of Tarsila do Amaral. I still remember one class of art history that he gave, still using photographic slides, showing and putting in relation images of cultural artifacts from diverse eras, in a double screen projection… all the students in the dark room seeing that compression of time and space. It was an installation. Also, classes of art and cinema history with Jorge Coli and Nelson Aguilar, at the Human Sciences and History department, were extremely important.

Shwafaty Remediations — Installation view of *Remediations*, installed at Paço das Artes, São Paulo. 2010 –2014. Installation composed by video, TV monitor, dvd player, various furniture, construction materials, vitrine, photographs and graphical interventions on found printed matter. Various materials, dimensions variable. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

BS: Many friends in Italy as well—I was very lucky because Italy became my second home. The course I did there was very political driven, so the director of the course became an important influence, Marco Scottini. Francesco Jodice, a photographer and film maker that I worked with in Brazil, in the 2006 São Paulo Biennial, who also taught in this course and helped me to go to Italy, is a reference. He has a very sharp mind and eye to the social and political sides of our society and culture.

Then, I did workshops and things like that. I met in Luxembourg Marjetica Potrc, Monica Narula from Raqs Meda Collective… there I met too the curator Berit Fischer from Berlin. In Frankfurt I had contact also with Nikolaus Hirsch and Eyal Weissman. Their work were also very inspiring. I mean, there are many, many influences. I try to look at what interest me with an openness that may allow me to learn something from that contact.

LW: Do you have a community of people in São Paulo that you speak with, that you discuss ideas with?

BS: We are a big community. The thing is that I don’t live in São Paulo. I live in Campinas, which is a city 100 kilometers from São Paulo. My family is here. Because of a personal situation, we live here, and then I chose to have the studio in São Paulo because I also work hiring different people to produce specific things and this is much easier to organize in São Paulo. Also, everyone comes and passes through São Paulo. Part of the week I’m here in Campinas, part of the week in São Paulo in the studio or outside, doing something.

LW: How long have you had that kind of situation, where you’re in‑between the two places?

BS: All my life. I was always attached to Campinas. It’s where my university was. I met my wife here. Then I had friends here. My house was here. I had friends and it’s a big countryside town. It’s not big but it’s not rural. It’s in between. You have more nature than in São Paulo, let’s say. Sometimes it’s good to balance. São Paulo is very fast and very dense. Here I have a more quiet and calm reality.

LW: Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city like São Paulo, where there’s an art scene? There’s all these resources and people are coming through, but it also tends to be very expensive and chaotic.

BS: It’s not a formula. I need both, and I’m glad that I can have both. It’s not easy to be here in Campinas, because Campinas has a very small and relatively disconnected art scene. In São Paulo I can meet more people and it’s more productive in this way.

But it depends on how you manage to set up your life. For sure, sometimes an artist must be in the big centers, somehow, to show what he’s doing. I don’t think you need to live there, but you need to be present somehow from time to time.

It’s not an easy question because nowadays a lot of people can’t live anymore in the big cities like New York, Paris, London…

LW: This is why I ask. You move to a big city as a young artist, and you think that because you’re there, it’s all going to happen in your career, but in fact it can be incredibly expensive and difficult.

BS: Maybe it’s not the best situation for an artist, because you need really to be aware of how you invest your time, your money, your resources and everything. I understand that the U.S. has a very powerful and strong center for arts in New York city, but I prefer the set up of Europe, where you have a network of different places, different perspectives, different sizes, and maybe a bit more opportunity.

LW: So when you are in your studio in São Paulo, what is an ideal day like?

BS: For me, it’s very difficult to have a routine, every day the same stuff. It’s impossible. One thing that I know for sure is that I can’t repeat myself. In relation to my artwork, let’s say, if I’m going to do a series of things, I can do three or four, and then I’m starting to say, “OK, what comes next?”

The studio for me is a place where I store things, sometimes I produce and try things out, or assemble the final stages of a work or idea. It is also a place of quiet reflection. In the end, it is storage of things and ideas, where I can have some references for things that I’m working on, or planning to work with. It’s a place where I can take time to research the subject of a book or a paper that I’m interested in. Then I could meet a friend for a coffee or a beer or whatever, to talk. Sometimes, just to walk around.

This more open‑minded environment is very productive for me, when I don’t have to do things. It’s when things happen to me. When I leave space, when I am on the move, then things can slowly start to connect to each other, to emerge and become clear as a proposition or direction to be taken… but it is never an easy process.

LW: Great. Thank you so much.

BS: Thank you for listening.