Introduction 1

Introduction 1 is a series of seven Introductions, in the form of a conversation, later edited by New York-based Portuguese artists, Pedro Barateiro and Ricardo Valentim, to be published in the book What Is Content? in February 2009. The collaboration between the two artists is centered on the construction and the form that content has in our society. Translation by David Alan Prescott.

Introduction 1 is a series of seven Introductions, in the form of a
conversation, later edited by New York-based Portuguese artists, Pedro
Barateiro and Ricardo Valentim, to be published in the book What Is
Content? in February 2009. The collaboration between the two artists is
centered on the construction and the form that content has in our
society. Translation by David Alan Prescott.

Pedro Barateiro and Ricardo Valentim, Book cover from Democratic Platforms = Mapping the World, 2008. Courtesy of the artists.

Ricardo Valentim: It’s funny that we are from the same country and we didn’t know each other very well and that we started to collaborate when we came to live in New York. We only got to know each other better in New York and found out we shared some interests.
This idea of collaboration between artists or other people has always interested me. I think that the concept of being able to collaborate is a good start for us to talk about our project.

Pedro Barateiro: It’s a conversation. Like this one.

RV: At the time Alejandro Cesarco started working on a series of books in which he invited an artist who in turn invited another one for a dialogue. This organization of conversations and authors is interesting in the sense that it develops a medium and a new understanding of artistic practice.

PB: Yes, because a conversation is a moment in which you say things in a less committed way. It’s a moment when ideas flow. It’s like chatting while we’re walking.

RV: So it works like art.

PB: I don’t think it’s art. I think it is a moment when you are transforming the ideas that are in your head and you have to find the best way to say them.

RV: I think this is where our project is located. The reason for this involves a collaboration that comes from our proposal chosen for Art Basel 39 this June.

PB: And from starting a conversation from a somewhat unusual presupposition, in a space dominated by a capitalist impulse.

RV: At the beginning there was no responsibility to have any collaboration. It simply went from a commercial supposition coming from the gallery and from promoting two artists. When we were chosen we expanded our simple individual participation to a collaboration that will start in June with the production of a book.
We have to thank the art fair committee who chose us and who didn’t even set up a collaboration between the two of us. Had we not been chosen we certainly wouldn’t be here talking.

The capitalist impulse is responsible for the development of discourses. The fact that there are collaborations that are created from this context will empower new discourses, ideas, and proposals. But going back to the “moment vs. art” idea, could you explain your point better to me?

PB: What I meant by “moment” is that perhaps a collaboration is closer to a sort of performance made between two or more people.
When we were meeting in New York in the first days after I arrived, the conversations flowed without us thinking much about the project. In some way the issues that came up at that time served to build the similarities and the differences between our two discourses.

RV: It was that empathy we had that led to our collaboration, and to thinking on what the idea of collaborating could be today, and how one can collaborate, mainly at a time when collaborations are less and less frequent in artistic practice.

PB: What interests me about the idea of collaboration is thinking about the “collective individual” set within a community in which he can pose his questions.

RV: A series of artists are involved in collaborations besides their own careers. It’s like new brands are appearing.

PB: Because perhaps it is the reflection of a more distanced society, one less interested in the idea of the collective.

RV: This is probably the result of today’s reality. Everything is mixed up: culture, economic interests. Everything is becoming more hegemonic. Difference is stopping existing in favor of a more interrelated world.

PB: But at the same time there are more and more sub-cultures. This has something to do with global development as opposed to greater individualization. The fact that more and more artists are working in groups has to do with the fact that there are more mediums of distribution and presentation. It is possible to perhaps think of Roland Barthes when he talks about the death of the author, or even of an earlier text by Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, as two examples in which one can see the transformation of the role of the author/artist into that of a cultural producer.

RV: So the idea of the group is pertinent because we are witnessing the creation of a new space of cultural production. This is the result of the rise of elements coming from peripheral zones that come into a dialogue with elements that form a sort of center, which isn’t static, making this zone of collective contact become a platform cutting through the whole of society. Then we can think about the “why” of sub-cultures set within the intellectual field.

PB: We have chosen a medium for the conceptualizing of our project in the shape of a book, and this reflects our interest in making an intellectual product in the form of a mechanical production. This leads me to one of the greatest differences existing between our personal works. One of the things that interests me in our debate isn’t so much the similarities, but the differences that exist in both of the works.

RV: The rise of sub-cultures is a result of the globalization we are living through. If there were no relationships between the parties it would never be possible to open the doors for communities to participate in a dominant discussion. This is possible today mainly because of an economic level. The rugs we buy in New York City may come from a small town in India, in which the inhabitants have never even heard of New York. The same thing happens in art. As an example there was the Golden Lion awarded at the last Venice Biennial to Malick Sidibé, who is from Bamako, Mali, for work he carried out in the 60s and 70s, taking portrait photos of people in his commercial photography studio, and which it now makes sense to export to the discourse of current art.

PB: But this is the result of a euro-centric and predominantly Western filter that has to do with the question of “the exotic,” which is constantly being imported by the West.

RV: But it will always be like this. But now with a colonial, post-colonial, multicultural, and global clothing. All of them come towards fixing the previous one, but in the end they are the same thing.

PB: For example David Goldblatt works on this question in a very interesting form. He works photography in a way that is totally different to that of Sibidé in the sense that there is a social and political dimension in the work that goes beyond the representation of a culture, but questions its context. In Goldblatt’s case it is Apartheid.

RV: Yes. Of course Malick’s context is only a colonial “exploitation” of his practice as a photographer in his studio in Bamako 40 years ago, nowadays justified by the economic interest it may generate.

PB: The difference between the two is the way in which the content is represented. Both have a social dimension, but while Goldblatt works from a construction of the discourse of contemporary art, Sidibé is imported into that same construction.

RV: One of the major issues that came to us was precisely: “What is content?”
I think that the reason for this collaboration leads us into a space that is of interest to us and that you have mentioned, which is the discourse between parties and the content of that relationship.

PB: This is very self-referential, isn’t it? (laughs)

RV: I would even say that collaboration and content are the form of our project.