The line is engaged… features works by Alexandre Camarao, Ana Jotta, Mumtazz, Pedro Barateiro and Tomás Cunha Ferreira. As artists, they explore different practices, such as sound, video, writing, drawing, fibre, sculpture, painting, or even performance.
Textiles can be made from such diverse elements and fibres, develop around diverse structures and compositions, organic and portable, they can adapt to any form or shape, body, function or even medium. Often used as a second skin, they are a challenging, complex, hybrid, contemporary material.
With this exhibition, I do not aim to produce a theoretical body of work on textiles and on its significance in the field of contemporary art. My goal was to engage the line reflecting upon it in its most varied forms and uses, symbolism, and meaning. There are lines of almost everything: flight, reasoning… they can be both organic and geometric. We are constantly creating lines, we are crisscrossed by lines, we walk the line, we cross the line, we draw a line, we fall in line. Even when they are invisible, lines thread and weave our lives.
Ana Jotta thinks the line as if she taking it on a stroll and uses the Arraiolos embroidery stitch to thread it in the landscape, as it is visible in the work Parti chercher du white spirit ( Walter Swennen ). Barateiro transforms threads into words, as we can listen in his sound piece Aprender de Cor, with the voice of Lula Pena, or read in Relaxed Geometry, which presents them so organically, loose and soft, contradicting the usual stiffness of geometry in an obvious critique of the hegemony of straight lines in Western thought. In Alexandre Camarao’s Relance, lines are thread, text, image and sound. In Mumtazz’s work, the line unravels an entire cosmology of interconnected shapes and figures in constant communication. Like Shahrazad, the artist charms us with her stories. Finally, Cunha Ferreira’s Eye Liner pulls the line into the field of sculpture, it autonomizes the line while submitting it to the vibrant tension of the point to shape it into a sequence of variations and specific sonorities that evoke the materiality of a musical score.
In almost all these works, one can find a strong analogy between text ant textile, and a reference to the intimate relationship between language and image. For the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, the same gesture and line are present in the practice of writers, musician, weavers or visual artists. In his book Lines: A Brief History, Ingold observes that the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ have their root in the Latin texere; the author describes the movement, from left to right, from top to bottom, through which the line unfolds and fills a surface — whatever that may be — while leaving behind all kinds of traces, drawings, words, musical notes. One of the most popular Gothic book-hands in 15th century Europe was called textura.
In this show, I sought to bring together artists with a multiform practice, working along the lines of Anni Albers ‘multilinear complex’, exploring and expanding its possibilities. While it links and connects, going from here to there, creating spaces and intervals, bending and folding on itself to create new shapes and contours, the line can also divide, break and cut, it can be used to impose geographical borders and cultural and social boundaries, just like in the famous work by Francis Alys, Green Line.
In our increasingly wireless world, the idiom the line is engaged is seemingly obsolete. We got rid of all the wires (except for the chargers’) and improved our means of communication. We communicate better, more often and more diversely. We use image, text, video and can even engage in several calls at the same time. Ironically, this wireless online world is one that binds and ropes us in. We are forced to communicate. If we resist, we are brought into line.
Benedita Pestana
June 2021
(translation: José Roseira)