Installation
On-line
Online is a term that has become very common these days. The emergence of the internet and increasingly sophisticated telephone lines have brought us closer together.
So have air connections, low cost, transnational companies and globalization in general. These are virtual, material or imaginary lines that blur borders and connect us to the most diverse knowledge, in all directions, through incessant exchanges.
Year: 2009
Venue: Macao Museum of Art
Context: Divergence Exhibition – Proposals from Macau for the 53rd Venice Biennale
Technique: Wool yarn, phrases written on the wall
They make us citizens of the world. There are more and more media, ways of expressing ourselves and of moving across borders. Distance has become shorter.
Families disperse in search of their personal dreams. Relationships are no longer confined to our circle of friends, the school circle or the neighborhood where we grew up. Today we are faced with an infinite range of possibilities. Online represents this range which, infinite and variable as it is, is more organic, without the shape of a fan, but expressed in lines and information.
To be on one of these lines is to be on all of them, connected to the world, to the great global network. To be on the line (online) is to be part of the great virtual network that dresses our planet in contradictions, ideals, feelings, relationships, choices, diversity, suffering, creativity, ideas, paths, life. But this mesh is extremely complex and even in a world that still harbors so many inequalities and exclusions, everyone has their lines, their branches of lines, their paths in life.
Year: 2009
Venue: Macao Museum of Art
Context: Divergence Exhibition – Proposals from Macau for the 53rd Venice Biennale
Technique: Wool yarn, phrases written on the wall
Online is a term that has become very common these days. The emergence of the internet and increasingly sophisticated telephone lines have brought us closer together. So have air connections, low cost, transnational companies and globalization in general. These are virtual, material or imaginary lines that blur borders and connect us to the most diverse knowledge, in all directions, through incessant exchanges.
They make us citizens of the world. There are more and more media, ways of expressing ourselves and of moving across borders. Distance has become shorter.
Families disperse in search of their personal dreams. Relationships are no longer confined to our circle of friends, the school circle or the neighborhood where we grew up. Today we are faced with an infinite range of possibilities. Online represents this range which, infinite and variable as it is, is more organic, without the shape of a fan, but expressed in lines and information.
To be on one of these lines is to be on all of them, connected to the world, to the great global network. To be on the line (online) is to be part of the great virtual network that dresses our planet in contradictions, ideals, feelings, relationships, choices, diversity, suffering, creativity, ideas, paths, life. But this mesh is extremely complex and even in a world that still harbors so many inequalities and exclusions, everyone has their lines, their branches of lines, their paths in life.
Divergence is not only limited to the more or less selfish dreams of individuals or families, ambitions or discouragement in the face of the same problems but is aggravated by the legend of the harmonization of thought and life, while the existing web that unites men and nations is more interrupted than continued.
It is therefore necessary to give a new vision of the divergence, and even to counter the ideas that have been made. The view that there is less divergence between people today than in other times only hides the fact that it takes on different contours, based on different messages in which the media tries to instill the idea that anyone who is not the same is against it.
The network of flows that covers the globe is ours, we are all its reproducers. We are all its multipliers. We are all, without exception, responsible for the dynamics of our Earth.
But we, individually, who weave our own lines, or who choose to insert ourselves into certain ones and find ourselves directly at their crossroads. It is we, individually, who feel the effects of this global mesh on the body and understand them in our own way. In this work, I propose a look at this world dressed in my fabric. I will weave the connection between men in their differences, in their respect for each other and not in the gray of a supposed equality. This is according to my vision, my experience as a citizen of this world.
The world won’t wear a shirt, pants or shoes, of course; it has its own shapes, it will have its own clothes. And this world, the one I’ve lived in, has its own forms too. In it, Europe and Asia, more specifically Macau and Portugal, are the backbone, which must be well protected and well dressed. But never isolated in their realities, since their realities can no longer be isolated. They are two global territories, extremely dynamic, economically and even oneirically inserted in the world and in my world.
When you have two nests, on almost opposite sides of the globe, you cross a lot of ground. Working with art, in contact with what happens and made possible by the artistic dynamism of the two lands, I’ve been able to get to know other continents, dream of getting to know places, creating various real, virtual, social and sensitive relationships around the world. It is this relationship, of artistic restlessness under the world of access, of approaching and distancing myself from everything that connects me, that makes me cherish it through the fabric of my life in lines of flowing wool. Online.
