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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.