"A vida longa das linhas retas", text by Luisa Santos:

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The work of Pedro Pires (1978, Luanda) starts, as a general rule, from an appropriation of objects or ideas. This appropriation, in fact, is not of the objects themselves, but of their contexts. In the project The Green Line, which precedes and forms part of “The long life of straight lines” (A vida longa das linhas retas), and which was presented in 2022 at the gallery THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE, in Lisbon, curated by Lourenço Egreja, appropriates the title of a work by Francis Alÿs, from 2004-05, which, in turn, takes its name from a border. Francis Alÿs walked along the armistice border, known as 'the green line', because it was provisionally drawn in pencil by Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem front in the Arab-Israeli War, on a map at the end of this war in 1948. This line remained a border until the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel occupied Palestinian-inhabited territories east of the line. Francis Alÿs' action, which consisted of dropping green paint behind him as he walked, awakened the memory of this green line at a time when separation took on new meaning - between August and September 2005, Israel implemented a unilateral plan that determined that the entire population of the Gaza Strip was evacuated. Later, Alÿs invited commentators from Israel, Palestine and other countries to reflect on his artistic action. Although it is clear that poetics and politics have a difficult relationship, with this physical action (walking and demarcation in space) and with the invitation to listen to different perspectives that could hardly happen in these terms in a formal space, Alÿs speculates on the transformative potential of poetic acts in political situations of conflict.

The Long Life of Straight Lines once again adopts the title of an existing work, a 1999 essay by the historian specializing in African history Wolfgang Döpcke. The essay presents itself as a study of political borders in Black Africa in its historical and current dimensions, discussing and proposing a critical analysis of stereotypical narratives, which the author calls “five myths about borders in Black Africa”, in popular discourses. and academics about borders in Africa, explaining how they were designed, in all their imperfections and defects, in their narratives of resistance and change. Borders and nationalities that are supposedly divided by borders are constant motifs in the artist's artistic practice and personal life, with dual nationality (Angolan and Portuguese). In contemporary, so-called global societies, this duality has become a growing condition. Bodies that move from one territory to another, between nations, continents, cultures, religions, habits, and legacies, are in constant mutability in a relationship of mutuality with the other bodies and places they encounter. While borders, in the light of geography, are physical or artificial lines that separate geographic areas, political limits that separate countries and describe an area controlled by an administrative or political power, bodies that move between borders demonstrate, on the one hand, that these are living organisms, in a constant process of exchange and transformation. On the other hand, as Jimmie Durham reminds us, in his project to become Eurasian, the movements of bodies are always marginalised: “the fact that Europe is recognised as a continent and Eurasia, the continent, is not known as a continent, it means that we are taught to think politically and never physically” (Durham, 1996).

When trying to understand the conceptual frames that contain the ideas of global, international, and transnational, and that reduce cultures to watertight definitions such as African or Portuguese, Pedro Pires remembers that the border is incorporated in various ways and that the skin is the first border that we have with the world; It is what simultaneously protects us from the outside and allows us to survive and coexist with everything that is external to us. In the first room of the exhibition, we are welcomed by an installation with four vertical drawings-sculptures (Body; Concrete; Pixel and Structural, all from 2023) approximately two meters high, suspended from the ceiling, forming a square that delimits a space within the Gallery space. We can enter from the sides of the square formed by the drawings, which allows us to access the drawings from the inside and outside. The four sculpture-drawings are made with an iron welding machine – the sparks hit the paper and burn it, forming holes that, as a whole, form drawings of bodies, on the front and back of the paper,on a human scale. While the title of the exhibition borrows from Wolfgang Döpcke's essay, the drawings integrate a functional and neutral technique and object. The function of the welding machine is nothing more than to join two parts – it serves to provide the energy necessary to join metal parts. While the borders indicated by the title divide, the weld and the bodies designed by it, they unite, neutralizing and reinforcing the process of imagination in the construction (and destruction) of borders.

The upper room of the Gallery is inhabited by fifteen drawings, including two previously presented in The Green Line - Fractional (2022) and Wall (2022). Unlike the first room, in which the bodies are in a static position that, as a whole, forms a space within a space, inviting movement of our own bodies, in the upper room the bodies are drawn with the same soldering iron technique and are on the move. In the cases of Fraccional and Wall, they are not only in movement but also fragmented, each fragment being framed, that is, delimited by borders that separate each portion, each part of the body. In the same room, there are also four sculptures made with resin and Vlisco fabrics: a body (154 Meters, 2023); two heads (Camouflage for the future and Doppelgänger for the future, both from 2023) and a bust (Transparency for the future, 2023). The sculptures are bodies or parts of bodies with a second skin, or a mask, which are, in themselves, borders. In this case, in opaque fabric, they prevent access to the elements that make bodies recognizable, with a unique identity.

Just like the choice of objects he takes from everyday life for his work, the choice of what we use in our lives is not a mere random selection: "the object is the mediator between man and the world" (Moles, 1981:11 ). Vlisco is one of the few printing companies using the Dutch wax type - a print made on cotton fabric from the mechanization of Javanese batik, which was taken to the African continent in the 19th century and spread across several countries, becoming part of the tradition of local cultural institutions - which has continued to operate since the 19th century. His communication strategies contributed to the visual narrative of Dutch wax as African prints. Since the 19th century, these fabrics have been sold by local agents, mainly women, with hereditary licenses, a system that helped their assimilation into African cultures. Throughout its two centuries of existence, the fabric has undergone several mutations and cultural changes. Systematically associated and communicated as part of African culture, both by Vlisco and by designers and fashion journalists, an association that is then adopted with confidence by the recipients of the message (any of us) who wear the fabrics around the world, never appears linked to specific cultures and ethnic groups, blurring geographic, cultural, and political borders. The imprecision of the time in which the assimilation and appropriation of fabrics took place facilitates the invention of a tradition. After all, the boundaries of time, when blurred, leave spaces among themselves for constructions that, by distorting the past, become alternatives to it. However, as Dandara Maia says, “an invented tradition is not necessarily a false story. These are complex developments, present, mainly in modern societies, which have gone through processes of colonization, forced interactions and homogenization of their cultures” (2019:6). And it is precisely these complex developments, in constant tension, mutation and exchange, that the exhibition The Long Life of Straight Lines takes shape. Ultimately, it operates as a set of living lines that are sometimes fixed and opaque, and sometimes adopt a floating and transparent form.

 

REFERENCES:Durham, J. 1996. Jimmie Durham: Eurasian Project, stage one; la porte de l'Europe (les Bourgeois de Calais); la leçon d'anatomie (a progress report). Le Collège Éditions, Frac Champagne-Ardenne.Maia, D. 2019. “Political dressing: Dutch wax prints as tools for affirming Afro-Brazilian identity”. dObra[s] – magazine of the Brazilian Association of Fashion Research Studies, [S. l.], v. 12, no. 25, p. 144–164. DOI: 10.26563/dobras.v11i25.858. Available at: https://dobras.emnuvens.com.br/dobras/article/view/858. Accessed on: 29 Mar. 2023.Moles, Abraham A. 1981. Object Theory. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Weather.