Carla Cruz

very soon miss’opo will be opening its doors, and my floor piece will be revealed.

Exhibition: 22- 23 September

RHB:312 (Research Architecture)

Goldsmiths, University of London

I am looking for new understandings of democracy in art practices and new productions of subjectivity for the parties (beings/things) involved: the role of the artist, its function in the respective projects and the different modes of ‘relationality’ with either engaged or removed ‘publics’.

“Many of my projects start by reading, taking notes, looking for specific imagery online and drawing. Most of these first imagery will never leave the studio, and is to be transformed, so it doesn’t really matter so much which materials are being used, normally is just stuff lying around. In the case of the drawings (State Drawings) there was a pad of quite thin paper that I bought on a college sale, so I use that, and yellow pencils. There are always yellow pencils lying around. I got the habit of drawing in yellow from a project I have done in 2004 (Blood 4Oil) where I would first draw in yellow and then fill the figures with India Ink, the underlying drawing became consequently quite invisible. At some point (Again about State Drawings) I attempted to reproduce them in better quality paper, but they just lost the sketchy quality of the first ones. The thinness of the paper was also quite useful in the process, and that could not be repeated in a thicker paper. I made some other models in plasticine, but then again, they don’t add much more for me to the constructions already made in the drawings themselves, (pause) even though two-dimensional they reproduce ideal three-dimensional shapes. (long pause) I don’t know to which extent they (State Drawings) became the thing itself.”

(notes from ‘Claire Smith in conversation with Carla Cruz’)

September 22: 3pm-8pm

September 23: 11am-1pm

Goldsmiths – Lewisham Way – New Cross SE14 6NW

RHB 312 = Richard Hoggart Buidling, 3rd Floor

(documentation from the 20th of July at George Wood Theatre – Goldmsiths)

“The Other” a performance by Sonal, followed by “May Those Who Are Wounded Seek No Refuge But Shed Their Blood in the World” by Carla Cruz

20 July 2011

19:00
George Wood Theatre

Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
(Free event)

From the reading of the seventeenth century epistolary book Cartas Portuguesas by Sister Mariana Alcoforado and the seventies book, also epistolary and based in that older one, Novas Cartas Portuguesas by Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa; performance attempts to create a place for new subjectivations.

The letters by the first author were written between December 1667 and June 1668, while those by the three Marias (as the authors became known as), date from 1971. The seventeen-century ones are most likely a fiction by a French male author, the second ones know it but do not acknowledge it, and are dated but not signed.

This performance is the exercise of vengeance and passion as proposed by these 4 women, exercices were the object is just the excuse. My passion is the world, my exercise art and the object is any.

Mother abbess, where I am sent from the house of my parents

there was no bread for us at men’s table.

Our useless body was pledged to the lord

In the house of the lord we shall eat

In the house of the lord wer shall sleep

And what shall we be with no body nor cavalier?

Our passion is the lord, our exercise paradise, our object the world.

We shall be nuns in a convent.

This performance visits womens passions; from passion for passion itself to the passion for the world. Because the object of passion is just an excuse, pretext in and by itself, to define, and in what sense, our dialogue with the rest. Let’s see: what is left is the world, and the theme is passion. The performance will use spoken and written word, action over the body and visual images in an intimate atmosphere.

We have decided this to be a serious undertaking. What I shall do with you will be serious, even though the very fact will make me feel like laughing. Or, as today, not laughing one bit.