La Criée centre d'art contemporain
Place Honoré Commeurec – F-35 000 Rennes – www.criee.org
Charlotte Blin : How did you heard about the project Just A Walk for the first time ?
Carla Cruz : Actually, it was from a phone call by Joao Fernandes. He said there was this artist in Porto, called Jocelyn , who wanted to meet artists from the city and he asked me if I had time to meet him. We met for the fist time in Porto in a coffee place called Guárani .
CC : I think the places for contemporary art are the artist's run spaces, all this little things organized by young artists, such as Salão Olímpico ; Mad women in the attic ; Pessego prá semana … So there is a serie of little groups working in the city. The Serralves Foundation is really important in the artistic scene at Porto, but more in a pedagogical way, I think. They have very big nice shows, so they bring very important artists, but I don't think they are really showing contemporary Portuguese art, as from really young artists.
CB : What are the links between your own work and Jocelyn's Just A Walk project ?
CC : In a way, we are discussing the same questions of territory and identity. But I've noticed from Jocelyn that he always pay attention to little details around him, when he's walking throw the city, it could be in Rennes, in Glasgow, in Porto... He's always noticing the little things happening around him. I remember when we were standing on the top of the Mont Saint-Michel, there were this two Chinese women doing Ti-Chi . I simply notice it as a wired thing in this place, but Jocelyn was immediately interested and already rationalized it like a way to take over the territory. Of course, this two women doing this action of Ti-Chi are already limiting the space and making it something else. This is something very special about Jocelyn and I think he's doing this every day, wherever he goes, so this residencies project and how it will connect several places is important for him.
For me, being lately working on the idea of identity and European community, what European community is building for itself as a common identity, it's always interesting to meet people from the different countries and see how they feel in connection to each other. To be here in France meeting all this people let me keep on making also my own idea in confrontation with their idea about European community.
CC : For this first meeting, it was intense and important to be here together, always in confrontation about each other projects, even if it would be hard to come up with something, after a few days together, but me and Jocelyn managed a kind of dialogue. That started before, with the project I was doing in Porto and by e-mails, so we could come up to a common point and try some little works, like Eurostyle . It's about the idea of a continent and a community. We get all the names of the 46 countries that belongs to Europe as a continent. We wanted to do a performance based on the video clip from Bob Dylan, that Jocelyn was just remembering. But when we started working, it became a little bit more interactive. We were asking people that were knocking on the door of La Criée to see the show : « well, there is nothing to see, but maybe you could come for a few minutes and help us out in this project ». They had to say if the country's names written on sheets of papers were belonging to the European community or not. Of course, there are always different ideas of the European community, with some prejudices on certain countries…
CC : Actually not. Glasgow, Rennes and Porto are very different cities from different countries. Whatever political or economical strategy is made with this Atlantic Arc, I think it's nice anyway to be able to join this different ideas and ways of being in Europe.
CC : I think always about meeting people and see different ways of being in the art world. When you are studying, you are always confronting your works with the others, but then you only have this point of discussions when you have a public presentation, whatever it could be, unless you ask someone to come over. So when you do a residency, this discussion is going on. People would see your work and comment on it and you would know other people's work very directly, which may change your ways of working.
CC : It's hard to say now. We talked a lot about methods : how do we organize our investigation, how do we start working, and how do we come about to present our work and discuss it... From now, this has been very interesting. For the rest, I don't know how it will influence my work, for sure it will, but still I don't know how.
CC : When I think about public space, I don't just think about physical space, but "public arena", so it can be a mental space. For example, a work with newspapers or television can also be a work on public space ; common sense, like proverbs, is a public space… which means that transverse all the common place, not only a square or a urban area, but all the things that belongs to everyone.
CC : I don't know... there are so many ways to make art. At least we are less and less worried about making a kind of universal art, witch is a paradigm of the modern art. now, we are more and more working with a context, for a specific audience, which involve each time a specific way of working : maybe some work will be efficient on a community would mean nothing to one another. The ways of doing art has changed, artworks are blended with life so you cannot really know if it's social work, activism or theatre, or whatever. Maybe it's not even important to call it art, even though if it's made by artists.