Eduardo Padilha in conversation with Melanie Keen
Melanie Keen You work across film-making, drawing, sculpture, installation and textiles. Can you describe how using those different forms helps in the expression of your ideas?
Eduardo Padilha I think it comes from different situations. I've studied in the sculpture department of more than one college and that opened me up to other sorts of media. I've never been actually formally sculpture-trained and that I think is one of the reasons. Another is that the issues that I've been dealing with, like memory, mean that I should embrace different kinds of media and information which I collect using those materials as a medium. That comes across in found films, found materials or general materials which I use in installations.
MK These found objects which belonged to other people, are imbued with their personal histories, and yet you've appropriated them. Why do they appeal to you?
EP What I like is that this material came to me as anonymous material and I use it as a kind of access to my own memory. With that I make my memory public; though it also becomes anonymous, not specifically autobiographical, and that's the attraction for me of the visual materials. I think that with all the media I use, memory becomes more evident.
MK: In your mattress pieces, Staunch (1997), you were saying that they relate specifically to both the public and the private, to the strange and distant as well as the familiar. How does that relate to the found materials that you use in your work?
EP I think in Staunch many things have been made clear to myself. First is the idea of dealing with materials that express the intimacy with a private person and at the same time there is a lot to do with the public. Literally, a mattress can be in our home, can be situated in a domestic situation and, in public, it can be in a hotel. I also think that the idea of ambiguity is very strong in that context. I like to explore materials where there is an ambiguity of being private and public, like mixing my memory with somebody else's memory; layers of different information come across and are added. Another point that's become very important for me in this work is the surface. In the mattresses, everything happens on the surface; all information comes to the surface, from the existing history of the mattress itself to the history that I have added on top - sentences sewn from headlines of newspapers. I think this information crosses the private and the public because the sentence expresses something very public.
MK The sentences were public because you got them from newspapers?
EP And they express some public and general concerns, like 'strangers staying in a strange land'. You don't need to be a foreigner to be a stranger; if you are in a hotel, you are a stranger.
MK Yes, because you're elsewhere, you're out of your own space.
EP And there's a displacement of the domestic situation, of you and the mattress. You are in a room that doesn't belong to you; it's a very ephemeral situation, but reminds you of the domesticity of your private house. Through the materials that I choose, I've become much more aware of these fields of ambiguity lately. In the last three or four years it has been very evident that the found films are also dealing with the surface. In this case, projecting them on to a surface, wherever the exhibition is given, involves both the person who made the film and the person who edits the film; it keeps it anonymous from the public somehow.
MK Who remains anonymous?
EP The original film-maker.
MK Are you creating an illusion to some extent around memory? For example, seeing snippets of those found personal documents, one could assume that they're part of your history. People might not immediately recognise that appropriation of someone else's past.
EP It is never autobiographical, not of the person who has filmed it, nor of the person who has edited it, because the information has been camouflaged, let's say.
MK Because you've intervened and you've changed it.
EP I intervene, I change the visual information that's given and my own information doesn't come across in the visual sense. What comes across is experience, my interference of editing someone's experience. The moment that I edit that experience, I give my opinion and my meaning to it; I think a certain layer of ambiguity remains there. There is no autobiographical presentation there, but there is obviously a distortion. I think that's evident in the sense that when you attempt to reconstruct memory, there is never a way to grasp it fully. The ambiguity I think comes from the fact that your memory has experiences that have been informed by someone else. That's what I am interested in. Your own memory has been shared with someone else and your own memory may pass to someone else.
MK Along with that ambiguity though, there is that sense of strangeness.
EP In the displacement of information.
MK Yes, with the mattresses, there's the strange and the familiar. They're familiar in that they're mattresses which any of us might use, but what's strange is when it's somebody else's mattress; it has somebody else's stains on it, its personal, intimate life is elsewhere. I am interested in this notion of displacement, strangeness and unease, which cuts across your work. For example, the current installation that you're planning - with hares and the Jacquard fabric - brings together two seemingly unrelated things.
EP But individually they are very familiar. In this case, I think it's the first time that I'm dealing with these elements - hares and Jacquard or damask fabric - and the strangeness comes through the slight displacement of familiar things. What's funny about the hares is that once I started to know a little bit about them, I found out that they are not even originally from the UK and they probably originate from the Continent.
MK What period was this?
EP Well, they were introduced into Southern Brazil by the Jesuits, during colonisation, and the ones in the UK during the Middle Ages were introduced from the Continent. I know less about Jacquard, but it has a similar history. It was introduced by the English who economically, not politically, colonised Uruguay and Argentina. And those fabrics, with Victorian patterns, arrived there, but originally they are from the Middle East. Probably the uneasiness, the strangeness you mentioned, occurs because there is a missing link or missing information between two things that you take for granted and look familiar to us. The origins, the function, the displacement of these elements from their normal environment have never been questioned. Firstly, because culturally it is not essential for them to be questioned and, secondly, because people just take for granted the environment they belong to.
MK I like the idea of missing links, missing information. It operates both in your films and in the installation - there's a sense of knowing that these things have a history elsewhere which you can't exactly place.
EP This shifting of ways of perceiving things, of going to the point of abstraction and then returning to a figurative point is the way that I deal with the missing links and the dislocation of information from my environment.
MK When you say your environment, do you mean personal context?
EP My personal, geographical context. In the films, I think it's clear how I deal with this issue, but in the installations it's much more difficult to deal with that because the installations depend very much on the environment that is given to you. In the case of the Jacquard hares, I will have some insights at the moment I finish the installation. One element that I've been working with for some time is the thermos flask which is very familiar to everybody. Even though I've removed the shell that protects the thermos, it will still remind you of the thermos. Hopefully it will give another meaning for people and also have this ambiguity. It's still a domestic material, but it's not strong any more; it's very, very fragile and visually powerful. The thermos takes something domestic to the outside world. It is the relation of public and private again.
MK You spoke once about how, with the thermos flask, if you put something cold in it, it stays cold; if you put something hot in it, it stays hot. Is there some metaphorical relationship about it maintaining a given condition? It doesn't change unless you decide to change the condition within the flask.
EP I don't change anything, I just expose the flask. I want to keep its functionality - I will not disturb the essence of the thing - and I think we should remind people that it's a container. It contains whatever element is put inside, hot or cold, and then keeps it in a permanent condition. Meanwhile, the hare is about to change. The history of the animal is about proliferation, dispersion, about being taken away from its original place. Some of these elements are about permanency, others about change.
MK Has the Jacquard fabric changed at all in its use or pattern?
EP The patterns changed a lot here in the UK, when they were adopted in the Victorian times. I have seen Jacquard and damask used as wallpaper in very sophisticated public buildings, in the UK, in other places in Europe and also in Holland. I have also seen it more commonly used in furniture.
MK In Brazil?
EP No, in Uruguay. In those situations, the patterns are definitely Victorian, like the ones you see here. But certainly they have suffered a lot of transformation since they came from the Middle East. I don't know very much about patterns that have been used over there. Apparently natural motifs have always been used, like leaves, fruit, that kind of thing.
MK The idea of camouflage appears to feature in your work. I'm thinking about how things have been taken out of context and become something else, or have changed to become part of their surroundings. The work you've done with self-portraiture relates to this as well.
EP Yes, I think that when I worked with ID pictures, it was the beginning of my use of the idea of camouflage. What I did was to collect many ID pictures and project them on to my face. Three things come across: identity, memory and camouflage. The attempt of fitting an image of a younger face onto your older face doesn't succeed, but what happens is that you create a ghost of yourself. Conceptually, the idea of camouflage is about how you emerge in a culture that doesn't belong to you, how you adopt other people's culture and elements of their culture in order to take part in the new environment; that is a conceptual part of the work. In the video Self-Portraits (1995), somehow the visual and the conceptual merge.
MK Has the experience of growing up on the border of Uruguay and Brazil, as well as the subsequent travelling that you've done in North America and Europe, influenced this idea of camouflage?
EP Growing up on the border of two cultures which are quite similar means that from an early age you start to deal with subtle ideas of identity and ambiguity. In situations of identity crisis, you play a lot with that. I've become more aware of how growing up on a border is important in my life and being raised in a different country from where you are born. When people start to approach me and ask about my own work, some people ask me about my own culture and other people want to classify me as a Brazilian. I obviously use both cultural situations to escape that. I think also the idea of camouflage becomes more evident because of my geographical background.
MK What were the expectations of you as an individual living on the border - as Latin American, as Brazilian, or as Uruguayan - and does that relate to your experiences in Europe?
EP Those feelings came more strongly once I was here in Europe, but it started when I began to travel in Brazil. I felt that I was from the periphery of Brazilian culture because I'm really from the edge, not just the border, but also from the very south of Brazil. Then there's this sense of belonging to the periphery and not living up to people's expectations of a Brazilian. For Brazilians, I was from Uruguay; in Uruguay, I was Brazilian. Your identity is understood just in the local community; outside the community, it becomes a struggle to identify with things that you can share in common with other people. There are expectations within Brazil and people would frame me as a Brazilian. But in Europe I take advantage of that in the sense that I can revert to feeling Brazilian which makes it difficult for people.
MK Difficult for us as well as for other people?
EP The difficulty comes from both sides when trying to explain who you are. But much more for the European, because the European vision of a Brazilian is the prototype of an ethnic mix. Europeans see Brazilians as a mix of ethnicities.
MK The perception of Brazil is partly manipulated by the media particularly in the recent coverage of the 500 years Brazil celebrations.
EP Along with the installation of the hares, the fabric and the flasks, I have included newspaper clippings on the wall. They become like a temporary diary that I'm doing about Brazil while I'm here in residence; it's based on how the media in England cover Brazilian issues. It was a coincidence that my residency should coincide with the 500 years of Brazil. The issues about Brazil covered by the British press are just restricted to very non-relevant news. I show the news cuttings from the period that I'm here in residency, to introduce an element of the real; it's like a parallel idea of news.
MK Does this concept of camouflage come to the fore now, at this moment when Brazilian culture and identity are in the limelight? Does that have any impact on your thought processes?
EP I'm aware all the time of being Brazilian, but the people from outside don't affect the intensity of my identity. What comes to mind is just how others see me, how I am seen by the other. The idea of the self-portrait is not just me trying to fit in a previous portrait of myself, but it's also about how I am seen by others through ID cards. I think your question will become clearer when the public walk into the exhibition. I want to provoke something. I don't have an answer for you because at the moment I'm the person that is the public for my own installation. It is created only from my own experience, which is much more general; it's like the whole country is represented through them, the whole identity of everybody who is Brazilian is there.
MK There is a huge gap between your experience and the reality described in the snippets of media information. The media diary you have on the wall is one element of what you're developing in this space. How has TheSpace@inIVA become a working space and how is it going to be transformed into an exhibition?
EP It's like a place of ephemeral events; things happen and people come and they walk away. The room doesn't have the characteristics of a specific situation. And then parallel with this feeling is that many of the materials I'm using to build up the installation will not be necessary any more and will not take part in the exhibition, like the sewing machine and the table that represented the meeting room. I don't know if the newspaper clippings on the wall will stay, because there is a beginning and an end to them, but this diary gives this feeling of passage, also of familiarity.
MK Do you want to remove the sewing machine and other apparatus because they're not part of your normal working practice? Or is it because there's a danger that the equipment would be seen as part of the installation?
EP The feeling is that at the moment the Jacquard hares are developing in such a way that they represent the subjectivity that I want to talk about. Any material that surrounds them which was necessary to make them is now redundant and not necessary any more. My feeling is that the hares have taken over.