Paulo Arraiano

Arraiano [adj. One who lives on the frontier or border. One who is the natural from the border] 

Paulo’s research relates to the idea of visual seismography, assessing surges concerning new natural, social and cultural paradigms. This artistic production in- terweaves with his research which involves matter and anti- matter, and engages the body, the landscape and technology to address questions concerning climate changes, biosphere, extinction, transhumanism and the anthropocene.

Paulo Arraiano [b. 1977, Portugal] has a degree in Communication from ISCEM [Lisbon], and Visual Arts at Ar.Co - Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual [Lisbon]. Currently, he works as a visual artist, co-founder of Re_ act Contemporary, art laboratory and residency programme based in the Azores Islands, WATA Publishing, founder of No.Stereo, an independent artist-run platform and Course Director for New Media in Contemporary Arts at Cascais School Of Arts and Design.
Paulo Arraiano is represented by Uma Lulik_ [Lisbon] and Dimora Artica / Candy Shake Gallery [Milan]. He has participated in several exhibitions, both solo and collective including Uma Lulik_ [Lisbon]; Dimora Artica [Milan]; La Casa Encendida [Madrid]; MAAT Museum [Lisbon]; Berardo Museum [Lisbon]; Vellum/LA, [Los Angeles]; Wilhelm Hack Museum [Ludwigshafen]; Candy Shake Gallery, [Milan]; Gr-und [Berlin]; Porta33 [Madeira Island]; Hawaii-Lisbon [Lisbon]; Hangar [Lisbon]; Balcony [Lisbon]; Pivô [S.Paulo]; Museu d’Història de Catalunya [Barcelona]; Art Rotterdam [Rotterdam]; Cidade das Artes Museum [Rio
de Janeiro]; MAH Museum [Azores]; Quartier General, Centre d’art Contemporain [La Chaux-de-Fonds]; Aeroplastics Contemporary [Brussels]; Petra Gut Contemporary [Zurich]; TAL Gallery [Rio de Janeiro]; ArtRio [Rio de Janeiro]; Pena Palace [Sintra]; Galeria Graphos [Rio De Janeiro]; Museu do Côa [V.N. Foz Côa; Hifa, Harare International Festival Of Art [Zimbabwe]; Câmara Municipal do Porto [Porto]; Museé d’Art Moderne [Luxembourg], Miami Basel [Miami]; National Building Museum [Washington DC]; P28 [Lisbon] among others. Paulo Arraiano has also participated in several artist residency programmes and festivals, such as Loop [Barcelona]; Hangar (Lisbon); Fuso Videoarte [Lisbon]; Walk & Talk [Azores]; Transforma [Torres Vedras]; LAC [Lagos] Dutch Design Week Loop [The Netherlands] among others. He is represented in both public and private collections such as CAC Málaga Museum, [Spain]; Luciano Benetton Collection [Italy]; Quartier-General Arts Center [Switzerland]; Museu de Angra do Heroísmo [Azores]; Sztuki Zewnetrznej Foundation [Poland]; Travessa da Ermida [Portugal]; Pestana Group [Portugal]; MARCC [Portugal]; Fundação D. Luís / Museum Quarter [Portugal] and several private collections.

INHALE, EXHALE
(self breathing kit)
Paulo Arraiano (video text)

Here you stand,
on the only planet in the solar system
where atmosphere sustains life.
An imaginary line... Karman,
100 kilometres from outer space, reaches the surface,
a tender and gentle blanket of gas,
penetrates your body, makes you breathe.
Like a shaman, protects you from blasts,
heat, radiation, emanating from the sun.
From extreme cold of poles to tropical heat of the equator,
warms you body and planet by day... cools it at night.
Intense pressure decreases with altitude, tenderly touching the soil, your skin, ocean levels.
The same ocean that gently floats inside you,
protects and sustains life, water, air, your essence.
Yet... You forget to breathe.
Gas increases, while you trap the heat into the atmosphere.
From water, from oxygen, all living forms where able to grow, survive, procreate and colonise this planet, transform it.
Yet... You forget to breathe.
Your human privilege, dancing through biosphere as a divinity
in an ecological orgy that makes you stay alive.
You forget to breathe, to stop, to nurture.
As vapour... your soul dances with technological atoms,
transforming itself into a place of no memory, no past, eternal, becoming immortal data, until... electricity disappears.
Water, oxygen, inside, penetrates you through every breath, open pores, yet... you ignore it, you simply pretend to forget that,(1) Below the asphalt, lies the beach.
_

(2)Inhale, exhale
forward, back
living, dying:
arrows, left flown each to each
meet midway and slice
the void in aimless flight
thus I, return to the source.

(1)“Legacy of the Frankfurt School”, Seyla Benhabib (2) Gesshu Soko [Aiko Poem]

The Zone

Aurélien Le Genissel

What’s the difference between a test tube and a post-apocalyptic landscape? Between an aquarium and the primitive sea on earth? Time and the presence of men. The idea of someone watching. Controlling. In one of the alternatives that presence does not exist. What always exists is the development - natural or not - of an autonomous microcosm, of an ecosystem far from the trace of human danger. Before or after the catastrophe - it may not matter - but close to what we have come to call the natural environment, nature and with which it’s hard to relate without falling into the dichotomy between pure pre-Adamic innocence and capitalistic utilitarianism.

It’s difficult not to think of Stalker (1979), Andréi Tarkovski’s masterpiece, when discovering Biophilia, Paulo Arraiano’s work presented in AL/TARr, an exhibition of InSITU project, which is part of Lisbon Green Capital 2020 cultural programming. Not only because of the wonderful dreamlike and disturbing aesthetics that both works give off - rising the contemporary questions of the anthropocene, climate change or environmental catastrophes - but also because they seem to investigate closely related problems such as the horizon of the future - all the science fiction aesthetics that we see in them -, the interior self and even a certain personal spirituality intimately connected with the environment. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arraiano's work is presented in the Monastery of São Martinho in Tibães, an enclave in which the inner path passes through a relationship with the natural context.

Nor is the title of the work accidental. As the curatorial text explains, “biophilia is an innate and natural affinity of life or living systems. The term was first used by Erich Fromm to describe a psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital”. Aristotle was “one of many to put forward a concept that could be summarized as "love of life". Diving into the term philia, or friendship, Aristotle evokes the idea of reciprocity and how friendships are beneficial to both parties in more than just one way, but especially in the way of happiness” the text clarifies. In this sense, what comes into play in this case is our relationship, as human beings, with nature, the so-called capitalocene and the bond between human and non-human life. 

And, indeed, what interests me in the way in which the work has been installed is that recourse to the aquarium, to the protective bubble inserted in the heart of a “transparent body made of glass skin and metal” placed in the middle of the surrounding landscape. There is something eschatological in this double mise-en-abyme that awakens feelings of nostalgia and fear. Both at the same time. Maybe because mankind seems absent here. We are in front of pure nature. But a double nature in a way. A supposedly pure nature on the outside. And a sort of artificial nature -guarded and perhaps generated - inside. 

What is the true version of it? The one we are destroying outside or the one we are trying to save inside? Is there such thing as a true nature?

Because, in fact, here the visitor finds himself in a kind of intermediate space, in the exact sense in which Emanuele Coccia speaks of it as "the place reality becomes sensitive, becomes a phainomenon", that means visible. The spectator seems to be wrapped in a natural world - and he is - but has never real access to it, he always finds itself with a crystal that mediates that relationship, transforming all possible contact with "the world" into an image. In fact “the extreme aspect of exteriority is only populated with images”, Coccia reminds us when trying to define a new subject-object approach he calls “sensible life”. Plato’s famous fable of the cave is still very present -with an external, unattainable and pure world and an interior, unknown and malleable reality- but we the start to understand a logic beyond classical metaphysics. 

On the one hand, the big window continues to be the impossible attempt of a realistic representation of the world, with all that this refers to romantic painting, the birth of frame or the idea of screen. We can’t escape that tendency to romanticize nature when looking outside; a kind of "theologization" of the natural, a paradisaical idea of a (falsely) welcoming, anthropomorphic in a sense, environment.

On the other hand we find a curious transparent aquarium that seems imagined to re-create or save life. Or at least natural life. The idea of an innocent nature is still present. But the clearly artificial installation immediately defuses that temptation. Here’s a second chamber presented as “a uterus made with hi temperature sand, lava stones, water, aquatic plants and smoke.” by the text. And it does seem like an autonomous biosphere created to house life. But, at the same time, it also looks like a relic: a grave or a cabinet made to preserve something that is disappearing.

Although it clearly functions as a self-sufficient universe, it is impossible in this case to ignore the human dimension -what are these wheels for and where to move it? We are here in an indeterminate zone, outside an aquarium but inside a building, looking but also maybe been observed, in this exact  in-between area of the axolotl in Julio Cortazar’s famous short story. The aesthetic display works with the idea of metalepsis, postmodern irony, the infinite representation that blurs the absolute referent; the cave has become a parody. There is no longer any metaphysical dichotomy. Quite the opposite. We are facing what Coccia calls the "metaphysics of mixing." Not from a fusion with the natural but instead from the appearance of the artificial in the natural, a reflection on transhumanism and a certain technobiology. The glass (bio)forms look like mollusks or aliens and the screens are now born from the earth, as we discover in the second installation presented by Paulo Arraiano, entitled Meanwhile, At Home for the show VER/DE at Estufa Fria de Lisboa (Greenhouse). 

And we are in the middle of it. Between the comforting temptation of landscape, the danger of natural extinction and the emergence of technology. In that ethereal and unstable mist that surrounds the embryo and that the building encloses. Outside and inside. Dominating or letting go. Monitoring  the reality and been absorbed by it.

Because if it is true, as the title implies, that men has to reconnect with their innate biophilia, perhaps the most important question is not what bios we want or what bios awaits us, but what is the correct way of loving – what philia we want. That is to say, how far to stand from what we cherish, how to look at what is loved and how to interact with it. Without objectifying it but without sanctifying it either.

If it is also true that life is "the ability to preserve and produce images", as Coccia says about sensible life, our gaze is then intimately linked to our way of caring. 

And Arraiano’s installation is, as well as an attempt to “love life” again, also an attempt to look at it properly again. 

A way to be a good stalker.

Maybe the same way as the protagonist of Tarkovsky’s movie entering what he calls The Zone.

TOWARDS THE LAST UNICORN
Catarina Vaz (Art Research Map)

If I look around, everyone seems to be in perfect absorption. What is this space around me? Why do their eyes vibrate so stagnant to this portable machine? Do they even need space to circulate? Maybe there could just be individual boxes. I look around and I see trees, earth, water. Is there any water running on their machine? What if they are connected to some kind of count-down and they cannot stop looking at the machine? Can they even hear me? Am I invisible? Is there still earth? Hello?! Anybody out there?

[The Unicorn]

55SP presents ‘Towards the Last Unicorn’, an exhibition co-curated by no.stereo and Art Research Map. A group of artists has been invited to show works that will be both on display at 55SP (physical space) but also online. In these, the immaterial media becomes the message and the messenger for a return to the matter.
New paradigms of lifestyle have been imposed on globalized societies. Avoidance of disconnection and technology equals the risk of entering a system of non-belonging. Hence, how does one not belong, when by belonging we must refer (now) to a state of human absorption through devices and screens? How are we thinking or rethinking the sensori-al approach to the world we live in? Is it becoming merely visual? And therefore, should we name the digital attention span, progress?
There is an urgency to rethink what it means to be human now. And so, the importance of our bodies as the singular potency of creation. Contemporary artists are manifesting the transformation of mind into matter, rethinking our ecosys-tem, both internal and external, as a new way of belonging. The question remains on the viable direction in which to move. As we can only move forward, perhaps this movement means a new ecology and the refusal of a time stealing continuum. It means the creation of awareness. ‘Towards the last Unicorn’ leads us in a direction and that includes the three times - present, past and future. Also, it implies a motion as the present is the possibility to be the catalyst and the kairos. The unicorn is this mythical creature with magical powers, which pervades in our imaginary as something that might or might not exist. It is magical thinking transformed into a symbol, an emoji, a figure with cultural connotations, which still inhabits a thought of possibility linking our present to the past and future. Just as in Blade Runner, the origami unicorn at the end of the movie alludes to the possibility of the creation of empathy in one among all Replicants. The materialized unicorn is the hope of a universal purity of the origin. As a talisman is matter filled with wishful thinking, so is the gesture of the artist that manipulates matter with time, to give it a meaning.
Video as immaterial comes from a very tactile manipulation and, moreover, it implies duration and the time to be seen. ‘Towards the Last Unicorn’, is the last call to the awareness of time and matter, away from a dystopian digital absorpti-on, using this same digital media as a source of communication.

BIOPHILIA
Paulo Arraiano

Biophilia is an innate and natural affinity of life or living systems. The term was first used by Erich Fromm to describe a psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital. Kellert & Wilson describes  biophilia as ”the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life." He proposed the possibility that the deep affiliations humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole are rooted in our biology. Both positive and negative (including phobic) affiliations toward natural objects (species, phenomenon) as compared to artificial objects are evidence for biophilia. Although named by Fromm, the concept of biophilia has been proposed and defined many times over. Aristotle was one of many to put forward a concept that could be summarized as "love of life". Diving into the term philia, or friendship, Aristotle evokes the idea of reciprocity and how friendships are beneficial to both parties in more than just one way, but especially in the way of happiness.Human preferences toward things in nature, while refined through experience and culture, are hypothetically the product of biological evolution. 

Questioning our current paradigm, facing the anthropocene, where our species enchanted by the synthetic, urban development and and the magic of technological prothesis that emulate reality guiding, influencing and controlling our life, relationships and thoughts via artificial satellites and GPS data, associated with extreme global warming and extreme climate change  effects, pandemic virus that threatens our existence and affects our breath, here in this temple at Tibaes Monastery, surrounded by the forest, a glass chamber, an ancient Wolfram House creates a transparent chamber in the hoods. This transparent body made of glass skin and metal bones contemplates the surrounding landscape. Inside is placed a second glass chamber, a uterus made with hi temperature sand, lava stones, water, aquatic plants and smoke. Here grows a new biosphere, a breathing altar, a place to contemplate, nurture and re-connect with our personal biophilia, our innate and natural affinity of life and living systems.

MATTER/NON_MATTER
Catarina Vaz (Art Research Map)

Are we living in a rupture of time? Time ruptures the earth, establishes its tectonic movements, over millions of years slowly transformed its shape; new worlds were discovered, from the guts of the ocean new islands were born. Nature keeps its pace, season by season, it sprouts, it blooms, it dries, it dies, and the cycle is repeated again. Time and nature reckon duration, with their mutual patience; for millions of years they walked side by side. 

The industrial revolution changed the rhythm of production while creating urban dynamics. Ultimately, technology – emails and social media – both as a professional or a leisure tool completely altered the paradigm of time. The time of day – as a solar cycle – became obsolete as information resurfaces at any moment in a global wave, hatching out from our devices without a schedule. 

So how does human curiosity cope with this fast-paced mode of integration? How can the idea of being updated and “not missing a thing” be synchronized with the body’s clock? Perhaps Apple watches and the number of health applications are trying to answer these questions, telling us when to sleep, when to exercise, when to eat, when to work. But are they really a solution or are these just new systems of consumerism control? Perhaps these are the predicted robots of the ‘60s imagery. Instead of walking tin can machines we are letting ourselves become controlled robot devices. 

Re_act Contemporary Art Laboratory was created in an attempt to address ideas of virtuality, materiality, and time. Situated on a volcanic island midway between Europe and the United States – Terceira Island, in the Azores archipelago – the residency and resulting exhibition were commissioned by DRAC and co-curated by no.stereo and TAL Projects at MAH (Museu of Angra do Heroísmo). The immersion of artists in this island – a piece of land 30 km by 19 km long with a population of 56,000 inhabitants – was paramount to the laboratory’s transversal ideas of deceleration and return to a telluric state.

The result of the laboratory was the exhibition “Matter / Non_Matter,” an idea that glues the entire thinking process together – the increasingly noisy materiality of the urbanscapes versus the vaporous minimal island life, the fast-paced contemporaneity versus the looseness of time, the previous virtual contact of the artists and the opportunity of a physical encounter. “Matter / Non_Matter” shows the certainty that the alteration of context, time, and place is key to a change of mindset and artistic process. Each artist was drawn to specific experiences of the island – geography, anthropology, the legend and the sacred, the uncontrollable and the sublime.

The selected group of artists was diverse both geographically and in their artistic approach. This strengthened the possibility of crossing elements of the insular paradigm and the current artist’s practice influenced by an urban environment or by a postdigital perspective.

(...)  ‘Magma Metadata’ by Paulo Arraiano (Portugal) is a hypnotic animated gif displayed on a vertical LCD screen. The artist poetically addresses the idea of the world’s bloodstream as lava – a continuous and rapid scrolling of images of flowing lava from volcanic explosions around the world is disrupted and pixelated – just as our own flow of visual information is disassembled when scrolling through social media.(...)

AS ALWAYS, JUST A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
Daily Collector

In Paulo Arraiano's powerhouse exhibition at Hawaii - Lisbon gallery, he takes on digital life's vast modes of escapism and channels them to depict a synthetic resurgence of natural phenomena, often translated through satellite signals. This repositioning of the environment as forms determined by data and coding illuminates the contemporary sensory experience, one of a digitally mediated existence. Nevertheless, Arraiano is effective in positioning the viewer to instinctively yearn for human interaction with our physical domain.

A flag-like object juts off the wall with a landscape scrolling to the floor in a display of technological devotion. A small cactus perches well above Arraiano's technological representations as a looming reminder of unmediated reality removed from its natural habitat. In tandem, these signifiers suggest a hierarchy of existence that engenders feelings of artificiality in digital sensory experiences. Simultaneously, though, Arraiano presents the breadth of the human will to understand the literal world as it exists around us with the most advanced tools available, particularly GPS imaging.

Equally distinctive is the formally minimal dialect Arraiano develops by thinly dispersing objects throughout the exhibition as a presentation of dematerialization in our daily happenings. The exhibition is efficient in creating signifiers that can be read quickly and are perceivable through the internet, providing recognition to the ever-increasing speed of human information consumption. Here, the functional object is primarily a means for presenting the artist's collections of information depicted behind a screen or controlled by satellites and then regurgitated to online viewers.

The result is an intellectually thrilling exposé on the landscape and its interaction with contemporary filters that limit our access to its physical presence while oversaturating us with artificial and mediated imagery of nature.

AS ALWAYS, JUST A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
Paulo Arraiano

Faced with the unprecedented shift from direct life experience to an artificial way of connecting / disconnecting with the natural world, Interacting through analogic and electronic signals, guided by information that travels throughout satellites, orbit bodies, created by man that, directly via mobile protheses, act as new divinities controlling via GPS data our daily life performance.

A new paradigm alters our perception of time, space and reality, in contrast to the availability of a sensory contemplation. The “digital act” contrasts and coexists with our human nature in an eternal cross communication. A moment in time where matter / non-matter dialogue in a layer of digital blandness, where mood manipulation and the non-spontaneity of trying "too hard" as a mode of indifference is part of our daily swipes, enjoying the illusion and escapism of a post-emotional society, where everything is stored into a cloud or depends on the wifi.

A particular moment where human bodies create a physical distance towards dematerialisation and of the importance of the object, where speed of a post-digital generation dictates time and artificially replaces the natural, contributing for a transformation of human perception. 

These entities - satellites - also trough digital registration, connect us in a pictorial way to the landscape, and in that sense to flora, body and skin. Here technology and the digital will be the element that remembers and re-connects us to the the elements that were here even before our physical presence. Those elements symbiotically contribute to drive the body to its ancient basic elements of human existence although constantly perceived by technology.

FOLD/FAULT
Miguel Moore

A geological Fold occurs when one or a stack of originally flat and planar surfaces, such as sedimentary strata, are bent or curved as a result of permanent deformation.

A geological Fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock mass movement.

In the fast-paced frenzy that drives our contemporary societies, where thoughts and impulses are beamed by way of artificial satellites and express the paramount need to scroll through the snippets of information that make up the latest trends, the current post-digital, new-media generation is faced with the unprecedented shift from direct life experience to an artificial way of connecting/disconnecting with the natural/analogical world. This loss of sensorial reference and contemplation is increasingly contributing to distance human beings from the elements of the natural world. In this dazzling new reality, the pictorial tradition of landscape painting no longer seems apt to capture the intricate web of new significations emerging from cityscapes in the age of the global city.

Delving deep into the contradictions and losses engendered by this new social and technological paradigm, Paulo Arraiano creates still frames similar to satellite images and plane views by way of physical motion and action painting, reconnecting the human body both physically and emotionally to the landscape.

The Fold/Fault Series explores the creation of images perceived with the help of contemporary technology that somehow both connect and disconnect us from the physical and emotional relationship between our body and the landscape. By capturing some of the dramatic, primeval forces that bring the Earth's landscapes into being, this series highlights the intimate link that lies between human emotions and the gamut of energies that emanate from the surrounding environment.

Impelled by the disquietude of living in a place which seems impossible to comprehend in full, giving rise to the condition that propels us to reinvent the way we both read and interpret it, Paulo Arraiano's abstract landscapes seek to express a condition before the appearance of the human element. His poetic visual reflections transport us to a state that precedes us, human beings, as a reference. And yet, it is by way of his humanity and for us, human beings, that these primal landscapes are wrought and consecrated on his canvasses. Countering the high-speed dazzle of the artificial with the slow-paced, yet truly formidable power of the natural.

WHITE AS THE REFERENCE FROM THE ASCAPE OF GREEN
Paulo Arraiano

(…) abstract painting is the successor to landscape, a logical outgrowth of its antimimetic tendencies. Perhaps abstraction, the international and imperial style of the twentieth century is best understood as carrying out the task of landscape by other means (…) (Kenneth Clark)

An incision into the landscape. White as a reference for human action, an unnatural element, the imposition of the urban territory onto the natural landscape. A blow against the living body, the Park (already the fruit of previous cultural actions on the natural framework of reference), seeks to recall the binomials sometimes forgotten within the current context that involves the major urban spaces: body/earth; man/nature.
In situ a white crevice is set out in the earth to depict the human imposition on the natural territory. This living territory, a body. The surroundings here represent a space pre-existing the human being – nature. As a living organism that shall react to each external element. The same extends to a process of transformation and loss of expression and, in the end, disappearing.

POINT OF VIEW
Paulo Arraiano

2016 represents the bicentenary of the birth Ferdinand II. Ferdinand of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha (1816- 1885), following his purchase of the ruins of the Jerónimo de Nossa Senhora da Pena Monastery, and with support from Baron von Eschwege (1777-1855), in 1838 began construction of the National Palace of Pena and a Park spanning 85 hectares. In total and complete symbiosis, for the last two decades they have integrated the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, registered by UNESCO as World Heritage and encapsulating the greatest romantic architectural landmark in Portugal. Ferdinand II – also commonly known as the ‘artist king’ – was one of the most important patrons of the arts in Portugal. Renowned as a collector, not only from the artistic panorama but also of species of flora from the four corners of the world (Nordic forests, Australia, New Zealand, North America, Brazil and...), he transformed Sintra from a rural landscape with only low level tree coverage into the lush scenario that we today encounter and rendering the National Palace of Pena and its Park into an installation established by man in permanent dialogue with the pre-existing nature.

“Point of View” arises out of the expression Point de Vue, applied in landscape architecture and interrelating directly with the concept of perspective. This seeks to set out a contemporary (but also timeless) vision on the Man/Nature binomial and, simultaneously, a cultural dialogue between them. This dialogue was established a priori by Ferdinand II at the time of his design of a project in which Art/Architecture/Nature were mutually interwoven. On the premise of providing continuity to this dialogue, “Point of View” gathers together, in the National Palace of Pena Park, 10 national and international artists - Alberto Carneiro (PT), Alexandre Farto/Vhils (PT), Antonio Bokel (BR), Bosco Sodi (MX), Gabriela Albergaria (PT), João Paulo Serafim (PT), NeSpoon (PL), Nils-Udo (GER), Paulo Arraiano (PT) and Stuart Ian Frost (UK) – for an in situ exhibition commissioned by Parques de Sintra.

Based upon the historical and conceptual assumptions of Ferdinand II, “Point of View” now endows continuity to a culturally pre-established dialogue but with a very contemporary perspective; a reflection in which the cultural and natural landscapes are not opposing but rather complementary languages as happens with the dichotomies light/dark, interior/exterior, and tangible/intangible. Transporting this discourse into the exhibition context essentially engenders an intimate dialogue between Nature and Culture. This intentional displacement seeks to play with the idea of creativity within the conditions of its remote and seminal origins and thus seeking to feed our desire for a universal language, an intelligible structure capable of spreading a collective subconscious in an era saturated with interfaces and satellites – technological, artificial –, thereby returning an emotive and contemplative experience to the universe of visual representation.

This - Man/Nature - dialogue correspondingly questions whether a moment, an epoch, in which, to a greater or lesser extent, there looms the restlessness of those who inhabit a space in which not everything may be grasped, where speed becomes proportional to forgetting in generating a condition that leads us to reinvent the way in which we read and interpret reality and in which there is debate about new forms of dialogue, human relations and processes of contemplation as well as the relationship with those features pre-existing prior to Man. This also questions that deemed contemporaneous society, controlled by artificial satellites, in which the speed of post-digital generation dictates time and artificially replaces the natural/analogic world. The frequent scroll through reality in the search for “new histories”, in which the reference to contemplation becomes lost, increasingly contributes towards the dislocation of human beings from their natural elements.

In this context, the ten artists work as agents for the re-connection and dialogue between the binomial of Man/Earth (concepts that in their essence are the same even while a notion that gains little traction in that deemed contemporary society) through a process of geographic acupuncture that thus fosters different in situ dialogues with a living organism. In this way, “Point of View” strives to celebrate and recall this correlation and the collaboration first launched by Ferdinand II in 1838 following his building of a neuralgic bridge to human cultural heritage.

OLOKUN
Borbála Soós

The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells of the human body, bathed by the primordial wave which continues to flow in the arteries. Our blood in fact has a chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which the first living cells and the first multicellular beings derived the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life. With the evolution of more complex organisms, the problem of maintaining a maximum number of cells in contact with the liquid environment could not be solved simply by the expansion of the exterior surface: those organisms endowed with hollow structures, into which the sea water could flow, found themselves at an advantage. But it was only with the ramification of these cavities into a system of blood circulation that distribution of oxygen was guaranteed to the complex of cells, thus making terrestrial life possible. The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
– Italo Calvino: Blood, Sea

Radical atoms are pixels released into the environment, made 3D and ubiquitous. They congregate to make forms and materials that can transform their shape, colour, properties, through digital or other stimuli, heat, light, sound. It becomes a question of the management of inputs, the flow of currents, the direction of heat, the manipulation of acidity levels to impact on optical properties, size, shape and activity. In this scenario, energy from the temperature of the body, from the light of the environment, could be extracted as a power source for devices, a radicalisation of its current use within the circuitry of the touch screen device. They would charge as we exist, as we emanate from ourselves, holding them, and they exist then without the tangle of wires, transformers, sockets. Ubiquity is not just being integrated into all of our activities. It is co-existing, or synonymous with each cell of our body, each fluctuation of our body temperature, each shadow we cast or remove. This is the bleed. ... The bleeding edge is technology not just on the body, but integrated into every atom of that body, every atom of that world, whose capacities are augmented so that it might account for every state from fixed to flowing, from liquid to crystal.
– Interview with Esther Leslie, In: Flux until Sunrise, a booklet for Geraldine Juarez, 2018

Liquid crystals molecules are organised in ways that possess properties that are both liquid and solid. With Esther Leslie’sexample1, they may have the ability at once to flow, like water, and to refract, like ice. In LCDs (liquid crystal displays)electrical currents cause the molecules to align, hence allowing varying levels of light to pass through to the second substrate and create the colours and images that we see. The properties of this now ubiquitous material are harnessed in variously sized flat-screens, including computers, mobile phones, smartwatches and navigation devices... The screens seduce us not only by representing and luring through apps and advertisement but through a quality of the materiality with a surplus of hues and forever-modulating and hypnotizing forms. Perhaps it is no surprise that liquid crystals also exist inside our bodies. Cell membranes, DNA, many proteins as well as our epithelial tissues, which line the cavities and surfaces of organs throughout the body include liquid crystalline2.

Imaging technologies influence how we see and perceive the world. Do you remember that sunset over the ocean we watched together from the boat? The open horizon with the two islands on either side of us: it looked so CGI, I felt like I was wearing a VR headset! We augment our bodies with headsets and haptic feedback gloves or with goggles and fins, and our perceptions oscillate between experiences of the rendering and real.

Melody Jue’s recent book Wild Blue Media3 starts with the description of learning to dive, and through this process having to learn how to reorient one’s body quite literally. She talks about how becoming a good diver requires extensive rehabituation, rewiring the reflex to stand up and getting used to how the act of breathing affects motion, slightly sinking with each exhalation and rising with each inhalation. In the book, she proposes to destabilise terrestrial-based ways of knowing and to reorient our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment. She develops an almost sci-fi like methodology, a conceptual displacement through submerging to help understand how seawater can transform how information is created, stored, transmitted and perceived.

A feeling of embodied experience emanates from Paulo Arrano’s work. For him too, the ocean offers a change in perception, down to the cellular and even LDC screen molecular level. He considers the ocean as a live material and an imaginative space through questioning how our conceptions might be recalibrated in the context of this body of water.

In his video, Shall We Dance, Arraiano thinks through the body, technology and feelings as “downloading emotions while having a cold drink”. In the video – an extended or perhaps endlessly suspended moment of wanting to be in touch, but not quite knowing how to – the medium of water becomes a dominant measure of time. While the narrator speaks of connecting and disconnecting in different ways, waves wash over the bodies of mythical jellyfish and Portuguese man-of-war floating in open waters.

Mermaids are slippery on purpose. Their roles and intentions vary, but most often they appear as catalysts of a change, transformation and renewal at the points where two worlds meet. Mermaids and mermen (often with ambiguous sexuality) are present in the folklore of many cultures worldwide across great distances and time, and potentially analogous with different animals. Arraiano has a profound interest in the nature of transformation and in creatures of seduction. In Postfossil Images the skeletons of some almost mythical creatures undergo slight alterations and begin to resemble human organs.

The title of Paulo Arriano’s solo show, Olokun, meaning the owner of the ocean, references an orisha spirit who in many ways is an aider of transformation too. Revered as the ruler of all bodies of water, in West African areas directly adjacent to the coast, Olokun takes a male form among his worshipers while in the hinterland, Olokun is a female or androgynous deity. Olokun is also recognized with small alterations all around the Atlantic Ocean including Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, the USA and more due to Yoruba and Edo people being taken as slaves to these territories. Olokun is associated with material wealth and also governs psychic abilities, dreaming, meditation, mental health and water-based healing, and also plays an important role in the transition of human beings and spirits between two existences.

[1] Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form. Reaktion Books, London, 2016
[2] Interview with Esther Leslie, In: Flux until Sunrise, a booklet for Geraldine Juarez, 2018
[3] Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, 2020.

INHALE, EXHALE
(self breathing kit)
Borbála Soós

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.  – Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Sometimes one encounters a boundary along which two elements are coming together or pulling apart, with momentous consequences. When two opposing energies, like liquid and gas or warm and cold meet, they do not mix as one might suppose. Each keeps its own individuality. When one gains supremacy, the other retreats, creating new phenomena in the wake. Paulo Arraiano’s inspiration for many of his works is the sea near the Azores with fault lines where tectonic plates come together/pull apart. The movements of these plates is a force shaping the materials and features of our planet. Below the bursting seams of the open wound lies a sort of smithy forging of materials, which bubbling to the surface carry important elements. Can this place where heat and water meet be the cradle of life? This dragging, pulling, rising, bulging and evermoving action animating our world?

What is life? In an age when biologists push their research by using digital technology and computer simulations to model living things, this question seems to have many possible answers. The definitions of what life is proliferates as much as life itself. I am personally still most comfortable with biologist Lynn Margulis’ approximation that living things are those that grow and multiply. They create copies of themselves and grow their own scaffolding structures. In this sense life is a pulsating (collection of) cells that separate inside from outside through a semi-porous membrane. Life hence describes multiplying entities that breathe, love and consume. 

From water and oxygen, all living beings were able to grow and colonise this planet. To use the words of Stefan Helmreich in Sounding the Limits of Life. Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, “[w]e can think of water and oxygen as once universal and multiple. Water becomes universal through the circulation that spans space and time. It becomes multiple through its presence in different bodies, and through a variety of cultural meanings. Water, like life, an amalgam of the conceptual and actual, is also becoming newly readable as a substance-concept with unsteady identity.” Particles, atoms and cells float in suspended space, dancing around one another, breathing and pulsating, as if stars when you are spinning freely with arms extended under the night sky. This dance reminds me of the rare moonlit nights when corals spawn. The individual eggs find one another to create life. At the same time, this dance is the beginning of something bigger, as the new corals will constitute environments for other beings and contribute to all surrounding ecosystems with complex and far-reaching effects. Or as Arraiano’s new video piece phrases it, they are part of “an ecological orgy that makes you stay alive”.

The space of the video, Inhale, Exhale (Self Breathing Kit) at Travessa da Ermida spills out to the space and envelops you in an embrace. You might find that the whole room is breathing to the same rhythm as you. You are transported to the bottom of the ocean, or transformed into tiny particles running through air vents and bloodstreams… It is as if the sound is coming from inside your body. You feel suspended, floating in the ocean, the waves around you each bringing with them new sensations. They contain both the mundane and the everlasting, love and war, individual and shared experiences within. 

Water and oxygen flow through us as much as we flow through it. They flow through difference. We are implicated in all other living beings through the waves and swells of water that course through and replenish us. As Astrida Neimanis writes in Bodies of Water Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, “[f]or us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are necessarily or only human. The bodies from which we siphon and into which we pour ourselves are certainly other human bodies (a kissable lover, a blood transfused stranger, a nursing infant), but they are just as likely a sea, a cistern, an underground reservoir of once-was-rain. Our watery relations within (or more accurately: as) a more-than-human hydrocommons thus present a challenge to anthropocentrism and the privileging of the human as the sole or primary site of embodiment.”  

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. … The waves broke on the shore.  – Virginia Woolf, The Waves

SENSORIAL DIVINITIES
Catarina Vaz (Art Research Map)

The paradoxical act of creation comes from a place of restlessness. The body, the mind, and the spirit inhabiting the conflict of time and space. Paulo Arraiano’s work embodies some of the most uneasy questions of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

Through an ecological and minimal aesthetic, Arraiano shows a mediation between paradoxes, that at a first glance wouldn’t coexist. The artist’s clean and precise work shows an apparent peace and order, which hides the dichotomy of the savageness and what is highly polished.

The choice of digital found imagery, captured with advanced technological tools (such as satellites and NASA devices), emerges as a base of the free access to information online. However, the lingering content of the images is nature, scaling from micro to macro.

What is intrinsically human and how far can the technological humanity survive? Is there any degree of consciousness in the machine? The natural fluidity of life has been extensively explored by Paulo Arraiano, under the visual austerity of technological media.

At this time the artist observes a shift on the paradigm of the emotional, sexual and spiritual human nature, which is being suppressed by a remote and mobile intellectualization. We are bound by the unknown eyes of God that records our digital life on a cloud. If on the one hand, our bodies are now remote mediators of control (monitored and also monitors), on the other, we are still made of the purest essence of the universe.

On Sensorial Divinities, Arraiano explores exactly that - our existence and our source as water. Could it be that we are reaching a point of non-presence in which our hyperconnected life may soon depend on gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free, animal-free tube saline feeding? When thinking about the Anthropocene effects - extinction, possible humanity relocation to never before habitable areas of the world - one must wonder how does change affect the environment and how does the environment affect human essence.

The artist plays on the field between reality and the digital as a means to archive what once was and may not be, resulting in a dystopian view of post-humanism or trans-humanism. Moreover, Arraiano questions what is sensorial today and how are our senses activated, as we must assume that how we communicate has shifted into a visual paradigm, hence our connection to nature is being mediated by images. In Carbon Footprint Paulo Arraiano, shapes the flowy, almost etheric record of a spiritual machine, bird’s eye view, of bare land, which once was modeled by a life force. Fossilized memories of humanity are engulfed by sensory and watery appealing shapes, which may be containers of the aforementioned serum of life. The liquid is in a state of flow that feeds the shown ecosystem of possibilities.

The work that gives the title to this exhibition Sensorial Divinities, functions as an apparatus for a new spirituality. During five minutes images of nature and technology are merging, while a voice recites what unconsciously resembles a pre-paradigm change mass - “Transforming society and reality as we know it in the present moment, we are spectators of a precise moment where fiction... magic are becoming science facts. The arrival of the internet of things...”

Should we say ‘Amen’? Or perhaps 🙏
Are we creating digital immortality or could we become digitally immortal in a Google cloud of souls?

P.S.: This text was written on Google Docs. May it remain forever accessible for our AI.🙌

SWIPE BABY, SWIPE
Paulo Arraiano

Hi baby!!!! Didn’t notice that you were here…!
Well, still online… downloading emotions while having a cold drink.
Shall I turn on the camera? Shall I? Shall we dance? ;)
To be truly honest, today I feel somehow,… Kinda disconnected from the Cloud… (Did I pay this month? Did I?)
And you baby? How do you feel today? Any news? Any new followers? New stories? How
was it? I feel like a complete mess, really!
A lot of stuff happening at the same time. Trying to get it together but need more time. Have
to finish a few other things today.
My mind… A mess… Totally floating. Just needed to catch up. To be honest just needed some grounding. You do that to me. Really. Still completely stuck in this hermetic idea of going on a VR trip somewhere. I’m a cliché, right? Well… just being me. Why shall I judge myself all the time… Just a bland little drama… Anyway…
Shall I turn on the camera? Shall I?
If I only had enough emojis to express the way I feel about you… I feel…
You know me so well by now, but… Feel so changed… Really. Been swiping relationships, scrolling reality, and then suddenly… U.
Not even upgraded Tinder anymore. Well… don’t judge me… just being myself.
Well, have to refill this cold drink while listening to thisstupid suggested playlist. Why don’t I
upgrade?
But still feel like dancing ;), don’t you? Shall I turn on the camera? Always loose Wi-Fi while
looking at you…
By the way… Have you checked that article I sent you? The one, about the 10 most…incredible lists, right? Top reviews and all… Best literature ever!! Can you imagine… Doing it together… Because sometimes it gets so boring that not even I can tolerate this and have to try to find something more interesting to do… scroll my way out of this, you know?
By the way… Checked your tweets yesterday, truly captures who you really are. You have such a nice way of putting things… so deep… so authentic and spontaneous.
It really made my day.
Oh, Sorry, F**k Baby no battery…, wait…one second… S**t, really can’t find it.Well have to
shut down, see you tomorrow right? Same time,same place? Lov U Baby…

Swipe, Baby Swipe presents visual equations about a moment in time where mater/ non-mater dialogue in a layer of digital blandness, mood manipulation and the nonspontaneity of trying "too hard" as a mode of indifference, is part of our daily scrolls. Where the fantasy of Swipes, Likes and Dislikes are apparently possible ways for happiness and reflection of a moment in time where we become an audience for ourselves, consuming ourselves as a brand or product, enjoying the illusion and escapism of a post-emotional society.

WHILE SATELLITES DANCE
Gabriela Maciel

In a critical reflection of his time, such as satellites moving and drifting in certain orbits, Paulo Arraiano uses his body and movements based on gestural abstraction, thus creating a direct correlation between the body and the natural flow. The result of this process culminates in images similar to what we see in photographic and digital records made by satellites.
 
In a context of transformation of human perception influenced by the digital innovations of our society, a dialogue is created between the post-digital era and the organic essence of our natural being, immersed in an electronic environment. Those elements symbiotically contribute to drive the body to its ancient basic elements of human existence although constantly perceived by technology. The "digital act" contrasts and coexists with our human nature in an eternal cross communication. The continuous influence of our own accelerated pace, propagates in a new paradigm of new media and digital realities that alters our perception of time, space and reality, in contrast to the availability of a sensory contemplation.
 
We interact through analogic and electronic signals of subtleties and speed, guided by information that travels throughout artificial satellites. Orbit bodies, created by man, thousands of them, are constantly flowing through the sky and directly acting in our daily lives. Far from our eyes, they constantly influence us. We receive their information as we also move by various routes and at varying speeds, virtually connecting sky to earth. The coexistence of our organic and digital aspects is reflected in Paulo Arraiano’s newest creations. His painting invites us to contemplate the deepness of the sky, without loosing the certainty of being part of a continuous accelerated generation of "scrolls and swipes."
 
Embodying cultural and physical shifts, currently redefining the city of Rio de Janeiro, is the former Bhering factory. Located at the port region of the city. 20,000 square meters of what used to be an abandoned German iron and steel construction, now daily occupied by a flock of creative minds. Impressive in its industrial innards, the aspects of a once powerful and afterwards ruined factory, now remains, partly renovated by its tenants, providing a unique type of inspiration.

SEDIMENTS
Miguel Moore

Sedimentation is a slow and progressive formative process, whose action lies at the origin of shale. This accumulation of rocky detritus resulting from natural phenomena such as erosion and precipitation is deposited on the earth's surface in layers of particles which, with the passage of time, undergo a process of lithification. A further process of metamorphosing, through the increase of temperature and pressure, gives rise to schist.
In the diptych Sediment I / II which is presented here Paulo Arraiano weaves a reflection based on this process that lies at the origin of one of the most relevant elements in the configuration of the landscape of the region where the Coa Museum is located.
Set within the context of the project which the artist has been developing since 2011 under the title Emotional Landscapes – an encompassing designation that includes several series through which he has been composing a visual indagation into the body/matter dialogue –, this reflection takes shape through a scenographic exploration of contrasting physical elements expressed by way of an equation of fluid landscape planes grounded on a narrow colour scheme.
This interplay of contrasts between a bright surface plane and a dusky one, speaks firstly of the nature of schist – held as “living” while buried and dark, and “rotten” while exposed and faded. By extension, it also speaks of the entire duality contained in the, here inverted, light/dark primordial dimension; of the seemingly opposite but complementary forces: night and day, moon and sun, yin and yang, impurity and purity. In a clear subversion of the cultural subjectivity present in these ancestral symbolic associations, life is represented here by the darker piece, while death is reflected in the action of light and the subsequent fading of the colours.
These compositions thereby establish an emotional affinity between both the author himself, and between the observer, and nature, emphasising the telluric forces that shape the landscape, highlighting the interaction and correspondence that exist between human emotions and the spectrum of energies that emanates from the surrounding environment.
Despite the evident consecration of this dynamics, we find no sign of a cultural, that is to say, human, time in this abstract landscape art of Paulo Arraiano's. His indagations rather transport us to a state that precedes, and anticipates, the human reference. Notwithstanding the emotional affinity that he establishes with the natural forces, we also find no direct, clear references in his landscapes. They contain neither the trace of an objective realism nor the immediate sense of drama or the nostalgic romanticism which we have grown used to seeing in Western landscape art. His painting does not speak of lost paradises but rather expresses an acknowledgement of the energetic and spiritual elements present in the natural world, more common in the Oriental tradition.
However, what we see in his work is not merely a subjective and passive glorification of the natural world but rather an active gaze, one of indagation, of a search that is revealed through a refining of the forms, of the simplification of the whole into the fundamental elements, where the textures softened by the fluid motion of the paint synthesise the components into abstract contrasts.
To this end, his process takes on the form of a performative act rooted in the tradition of action painting that underlines the importance of the physical act itself as an integral part of the work. In spreading the acrylic paint on the canvas – through a constant motion that makes it run like a flowing alluvial torrent which, little by little, settles as sediment –, Paulo Arraiano imparts to the very act of painting something of the energetic dynamics inherent to the landscape elements, in their magmatic condition, which he aims to reference. The process of creation thus complements one part of human action with another of organic action.
His reflection demonstrates that landscape and abstraction are not opposite concepts, that they can be manifested as complementary, just like the dichotomies light/dark, interior/exterior, material reality/immaterial reality, individual/universe. By transporting this discourse to the urban exhibiting context, Paulo Arraiano essentially engenders an intimate, close dialogue between nature and culture. This intentional displacement aims at playing with the notion of creation in the condition of the remote and seminal origin, seeking with this to nourish our desire for a universal language, an intelligible structure capable of reflecting the collective unconscious in an era saturated with interfaces and satellites – technological, artificial –, restoring a pure emotive and contemplative experience to the universe of visual representation.

1/81
Paulo Arraiano

“1/81” is made from the correlation of the existing mass between the Earth and the Moon. Being this last one the Earth’s only natural satellite and the fifth biggest of the Solar System, it’s also the biggest natural satellite of a planet in the solar system. Regarding its primary body size, it has a 27% diameter and 60% of Earth’s density, representing 1/81 of its mass. 

We correlate ourselves in a so called contemporary society, controlled by artificial satellites, where the speed of a post digital and new media generation dictate time, speed and replace by an artificial way the natural/analogical world. The frequent reality scroll, by searching “new stories” where the contemplation reference gets lost, contributes each time more to human being distance from nature element. A reality where the landscape’s pictorial tradition seems no longer to realize the intricate meanings network emerging from big metropolis.

Seven artists, provoked by the disquietude of who lives in a place of which we can’t learn the whole, causing the condition that leads us to reinvent the way we read and interpret it, discuss new ways of dialogue, human relationships and contemplation processes. The act of look again to what was already there before the element “man”

[DE]NATURE
Pauline Foessel

To denature an object, a space, a concept is rarely seen in a positive light, as if changing something's intrinsic nature were essentially frowned upon or poorly received. What about a denaturation of cities? How can we contemplate removing the very essence of the urban space? Would it concern restoring a part of nature to cities, or would it concern returning them to nature?
This is an issue that Arraiano explores in his work. While looking into the contrasts and contradictions of the urban space he gives them new landscapes. He prompts the essence of things, the essence of bodies, by practically taking up a role of landscapist, as if he wished to return to the very beginnings of construction.
The construction of cities, their elements – Matos and Kosta-Théfaine are themselves witnesses and observers of these poetic moments and fragments. By providing or restoring meaning to this space and its components, they are interested in removing them from their context, in denaturing their ephemeral character. Matos explores, studies, creates and examines the textures that surround city dwellers. Similarly, Kosta-Théfaine focuses on the beauty of subject matter that is generally ignored: a detail of a decayed wall, broken glass, an old advertisement poster for an exhibition that has been vandalised. Matos and Kosta-Théfaine denature; they are not interested in the usage itself but rather in revealing the beauty and the poetics of these urban elements.
A poetics that can also be found in Baía's work, introducing into the urban space the notion of human being. With her series of portraits Baía offers us an abstract vision. By denaturing existence itself she removes its physical characteristic, stripping away the very image we have of ourselves. Distorting reality and its nature, removing the aesthetic vision that we have of any given individual, Baía guides us into looking deeper.
Through their exploration of the urban space and those who inhabit it, these four artists are playing with it, denaturing it and rendering it with a poetics and sensibility which it deserves.