Ana Luisa Santos

I am a visual performance artists. I construct works in dialogue with researches that develops on the body as a variable border, a surface of political permeability. As a hybrid artistic expression, the performance includes different languages and the works indicate as an experiment the possibility of being an artist through this manifestation. As action programs, the performance incites an investigation about how the body exists as a metaphor of culture, a place of protest, a space of disputes.

The challenges of the visual artists are the challenges of the performer. The challenges that involve the action of performing as an artistic activity. The challenge of articulating the work with the agents and the spaces that make up the market network and that is related to the strategies of sharing the work with other people. As a visual artist, I try to map, question and invent other and possible articulations that potentiate the work and continue to contribute to the diffusion of the performance language.

As a performer, I develop works in which my presence is involved. Although I can share the work through my photographic and video records, my primary objective is to perform actions, provoke occurrences, in which me and other people are engaged in co-presence, in the process of a common dynamics of time and space.

The first strategy to disseminate the work is through an online platform where records and information on performances are available. Another is to deploy my work as a performer, expanding the occurrence of situations of shared character to other modalities besides actions. I act in expositions, open ateliers, artistic residencies, research and creation centres as a curator, professor and writer, crossing other states of presence as an artist.

The space is a big challenge in my work. My acting implies an activation of spaces (with the installation of fields of energy, relation and images) or the deactivation of spaces, in the sense of a rupture of the routine flows and the production of dislocations. The space is a material of work. The space is thought, argument, invention in the actions that I perform. Therefore, I work in various types of space, both physical and social. This interest makes me act, through interventions, in places differentiated in their purpose, configurations and contexts, like a street, and diverse modalities of urban spaces. And it also leads me to also experiment with the dynamics of the conventional artistic-cultural spaces, like galleries, theatres, museums, auditoriums, rooms, patios and other types of stages in the cultural centres, public or private.

My work as performer and curator involved a direct relationship with the spaces in their uses and force vectors, their affective, architectural and political characteristics, their work teams, when that is the case, workers of the management, security, general services, production, education, technology and reception, and also its goers, its visitors, its diversified publics.

This permits me to provoke and experiment a type of direct mediation of people and space with the artistic work, because as a performer, I am present at the moment of the action. This is a very intense experiment. And it provides the immediate and unfiltered reception of reactions, readings and sensations reverberated by performance. I believe this part of the work is very interesting and challenging in the field of the arts of presence to all involved in an artistic manifestation that functions as a common experience of the event in the sense of the shared involvement for a duration.

Currently, I am very interested in the process of occupation, installation and composition of spaces of dialogues and action of research, experiments, laboratories of self and world invention, of articulation of desires, of testimonies, of poetic exercise, of political intervention and other performance tactics.
I realise that in these shared spaced the potency of co-presence is amplified as a creative process of language. In this moment, I am writing about an experience as curator and resident artist of PERFURA \ ATELIÊ DE PERFORMANCE, exposition that occupied daily for seven weeks the GTO Arte Gallery of the Sesc Palladium in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

In PERFURA as well as in OUTRA PRESENÇA, the first exposition dedicated to performance art in the Art Museum of Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, the space where the action occurs is also of the institutional ordered, that is to say, of a specific configuration of the place and the relations that can take place in it or from there. The institution corresponds to juridical people that legally represent these places, in the public or private spheres, as well as their programs of activities, such as notices and convocations. The physical people that work and live in these places, in their different groups and fictions, as well as their diverse audiences, also constitute the organization of what can be institutionalized, as well as its continuity. To institute is to maintain the perception about something.

The performance challenges the institution as space or mode of relation and can generate a transgression of diverse social signs. It can provide an exercise in questioning established cultural values. Historically we live in a society in which its social bases are established through the exploration of the labour of many for the welfare of the few, where everything is geared towards profits, bodies become reproductive forces of work and diverse relations of segregation and violence are used to legitimate behaviours and standards that culminate in the maintenance of the system, with misogyny, racism and homophobia.

My presence in a performance is a material of transformation in a post-colonial context. The work constitutes as a type of complaint, contestation or provocation by pointing out conflicts of sense and perception of the world through images and attitudes of experimentation of affection. I believe that one of my main goals as a performer is to strip the collective and individual body, exposing their social viscera in a ritual way.

The different reactions experienced by those who observe a performance, that be of energies of perplexity, identification, humour, indifference, apathy or aggressiveness, also begin to compose the performance action and what it moves as an event. A as performer I have to develop a deep and constant exercise of listening, openness and attention. The performance creates a relational policy in which the exposure and vulnerability of my presence and the presence of the other in their singularities can create an ethical claim. The work happens in collaboration. The recognition of the other changes me.
The articulation of my presence as a performer and the presence of the other that witnesses the action constitutes a type of energy which is the initial material of the work. Each action will demand one or more kinds of energies. But, in general, I work in the disposition of more provocative energies, of confrontation, irony, resistance, manifestation or denunciation. I also turn to the vibrations of empathy, where the states seek hospitality, trust, and intimacy.

The energy reverberation of presence is tested in various dispositions, during the action, experimenting different locations at the rhythmic, thematic and dramaturgic levels in order to create various possibilities of reading the work. I elaborate the score of gestures, states and appearances, playing a lot with the costumes for the performance configuration. I perform installation or dynamic situations of actions that are coordinated to function as relationships adulterated with the institutionalized senses.

The arrangements can provide protagonists and collective moments, expanding the perception of the space and the images and texts placed as material in happening. The rhythm and duration of the action can be linear or not, accelerated or distended, which requires me to perform body, voice and state changes in and out of the skin.

I absorb themes from the streets and the living room; the advertising ideology; comments from social networks; the poetic and contemplative verse, the cry, the anguish, the surrealism, the absurd. I rewrite and sketch, from the crossing of my bodily and affective experience, the manifestos of the streets, the post-truths of the news, excerpts of philosophical and sociological reflections, innumerable sources and legends of the contemporary world. This agency map operates by intertextuality, fragmentation, or juxtaposition of differentiated arrays of images, voices, and discourses.

I rewrite and draft, from the crossing of my bodily and affective experience, the street protests, the post-truths of the news, excerpts of philosophical and sociological reflections, innumerable sources and myths of the contemporary world. This agency map operates by intertextuality, fragmentation, or juxtaposition of differentiated arrays of images, voices, and discourses.

I’m also interested in banned materials. In my performances I have to face taboos of various kinds. One of the main is the nudity and all the issues that the presence of the body in the presence of other bodies can manifest. The performance raises questions about what is or what may be art; questions about how to give access to fruition, practice or artistic experience. Questioning internal and external control mechanisms, I want to demonstrate how different devices operate on the body and on space.

From its open and ephemeral characteristics, the performance dissolves narrative or institutional expectations about what can happen, what is happening or who is performing what. It is a dissident challenge that intensifies the research and broadens the possibility of interlocution. I’m looking to find other ways for work to happen; to experiment with other ways that other people can dialogue with work. And at the same time, to look for what has not been incorporated as poetic or political influence: this living and unstable matter demands other visibilities and shares.

Conversation shared during the “Debate Sem Filtro: Conversas sobre os desafios de um artista visual” (Unfiltered Debate: Conversations about the challenges of a visual artist), with Ana Luisa Santos, Nydia Negromonte, Bruno Cançado and mediated by Marina Câmara, held on the 05th of April 2017, as part of the events in the exhibition “Tudo é Tangente” organised by the Casa Camelo, in Memorial Minas Gerais Vale, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.