Pedro Tudela's work requires an exchange that is not necessarily coherent but retroactive with two other practitioners of the reversible journey between body and machine, between the production of sensitivity through unfathomable technological processes and the “macaque of technicality” that the artistic monomania incessantly problematic in the liminal preciousness of the infantile (of the desire without guilt) and the esoteric (of the apparent seriousness that the incomprehensible lends to aesthetic signs); they are two other authors, who have disappeared, who made their operations and in resulting products (works, projects, actions to socialize difference and strangeness) the possibility of “getting closer to what doesn't agree with each other”, the possibility of “a heteroclite geometry” as Michel Foucault says in another context. They are Francis Picaria (1879–1953) and Elezard Lissitzky (1890–1941). (...)

From the first, I highlight the way in which he transformed the cubist and ontologically Cezannian obsession with the “passage” into an anti-mimetic device where the object dissolves, is disbanded in a continuum that resolves, through tonal redundancy, (and the optical scarcity that is entailed) the problem of representing the “space that exists between things”; the “between two” as Georges Braque said, where the subject is located in relation to the object and these two in relation to the world that contains them. I refer specifically to his painting from the period of the Puteaux group, and the friendship with Duchamp and Apollinaire, (e.g., La Source, 1912); painting where different tonal layers of brown initiate the pictorial space as something more than the figurative incident of plastic form, but I also refer to the paintings he painted in 1913 in New York (e.g. La ville de New York aperçue à travers le corps) and where he establishes a correspondence between the optical and the haptic in the spatial experience while opening the way for a recomposition I am the founder of the finite place, of The place of disappearance but also of the repositioning of experience (of the “present moment of the past” as Elliot would say), which is art. Where does Pedro Tudela's artistic work fit in the apparent anachronism of this genealogy? Wouldn't it make more sense to bring it closer to another nomenclature derived from Bruce Nauman or from angst, from sacrifice and trauma, from European Fluxus? Perhaps, but this is the easiest resolution of the problem and basically what I want to emphasize is that the edge of the labyrinth, where the image initially appears as the codification of otherness, as in the industrial street of the poem Zone by Apollinaire, reaches the other side, and it is no longer the relationship between the support and the surface of the image that matters. The juxtaposition of contrasts is now taking place in space in the same way that the risen Christ, the Christ Icarus from the Poem Zone, confronts the airplane: in the place of exit where Pedro Tudela is found, belief (in what is not We did it believe, in the duty to be of art) and logocentrism (the daily reality of being in repetition as a substitute for the universal, of daring to be) interchange. To the perplexity of this anachronism, I reply that Pedro Tudela's work fits in the methodological neighborhood, in the way in which it replaced the materiality of the pictorial medium, ink, in its oscillation between a solid and liquid character (between a use and a criticism of use), with the inhuman and anti-mimetic condition of sound; and he made this replacement, too, to speak of this “space that exists between things” and the semantic and poetic accumulation that this region of being and consciousness provides; his body of work was thinking and problematizing) through the sound of scale of the body in space. Sound appears as a spatial property, like the corridor of an immaterial transit between the visible and the visual; in many of the experiences, the sound surface functions as the kinetic dimension of the invisible part of space. On other occasions his work tests the penetrability of emptiness through a syntax made of silence and non-silence. Then this neighborhood moves to the unheimlich (the strange familiar) of technology through the mechanomorphs produced by Picabia during the Great War, especially in New York, and of which his Parade Amoureuse of 1917 is a strong image; I can relate them, in appropriation, in anthropogenesis, with Pedro Tudela's collection of metaobjects, forms that create their own content from the point of view of production (and which are the reflection of a creative autonomy that is also linked to that other being that practices, reverts and transforms Mimese daily - what we once were and that we can no longer be. A being whose external reality is the artistic work). And we have another of Pedro Tudela's ancestors: Lissitszky, who in his self-portrait, The Builder (1924), places one of his hands, his “monkey hand” as he will say, on his face and in this superposition he invents a new organ, the hand-eye, the eye motor that can fail because he thinks and thinks in order to understand the poetic contours of imperfection, of the inconclusive. This Lissitzky, of the Prouns, of the supremacy of the ambiguous, of the organic, although dressed in technocratic clothing, can be seen, in the pages of the magazine G, by Hans Richter, his concerns regarding the utilitarian machinism of the 1st Constructivist Group reverberate as a “different gift” in Pedro Tudela's sound machines, in the stereophonic implants. Lissitzky also reappears through the push and pull between the expectant and participant condition he attributes to the spectator in his installations; in a letter to his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Kupers, and regarding a set of photographs she had sent him of Mondrian's project, “Madame B.'s Salon”, (an order from the collector Ida Bienert), Lissitzky commented that he seemed to have erected an abstract still life designed to be observed through the keyhole. In the layout of the domestic space, Mondrian emphasized logos where aesthetic control of the eye predominated. The photographs that Michel Seuphor took of Mondrian's Parisian studio in 1930 reiterate this increase in inhabited (and used) space as pictorial support designed to be totaled, contemplated from a specific place. The author pre-determines what will be seen, when and how this ocularity is performed. On the other hand, Lissitzky's pictorial-architectural interfaces explore the immersion of the spectator; in the Kabinett der Abstrakten (1927–28) that he built at the Hanover Museum, the spectator is inside the work deciding what to look at and confronting the asymmetry and mobility of space (in the composition and scale of the pictorial objects, in the materiality of the removable walls) and the walls have ceased their static condition as resting places of the pictorial, as stated in the magazine G as functioning reverberations. The walls are not comforting but they exist in alterity. The sound and plastic atmospheres with which Pedro Tudela has been developing his relationship with the exhibition space are an extension of that culture of trial and error where the entire exhibition is the studio's main work and is also the construction of situations (ambiguous, without connection, useless, without predictability) provided by the combination of displacement (space) and duration (time) in the depth of sound.

Pedro Pousada
Coimbra, March 2014

Territory and Action

This new cycle is included in the program of strategies aimed at civil society, which involve placing some of the CAPC's activities in places in the city with greater demographic circulation; it is specifically intended to capture the attention of those who do not regularly attend the CAPC or are not even aware of their role in the production and dissemination of contemporary artistic production and thus socialize the artistic and symbolic added value that is realized in the different spaces of the CAPC (Círculo Sereia, Círculo Sede). From an expectant cultural space that awaits its spectators, its visitors, a space representing the contemporary artistic field, the CAPC would assume a social contract with the anonymous citizenship of Coimbra, migrate its contents to the Civita Augescens circle, that is, to the dynamic interior of Coimbra, to its capacity to receive and welcome others, to the culture of multi-ethnicity and supranationality that define the city's efforts to get away from demographic and economic decline.

It is the CAPC that descends to the city, questioning and disconcerting citizens, mobilizing everyday life, promoting critical reception capacity. The general Territory and Action cycle will consist of four cycles: Santa Cruz, Espelho, Linha defensiva do Mondego, and Link.
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Santa Cruz

Instead of the altar, in the “head of Christ”, a series of artistic initiatives will be organized critically and reflectively exploring the protocols of representation in a society that is itself profoundly iconocratic and marked by distracting, escapist and growing semantic ambiguity processes of mediation.

In a place that, in the first phase, had a monosemic and prescriptive position, anchored the liturgy of the divine, the sounds, textures, smells, the visual impact of those moments, and which, due to the obstacles, inhibitions and anxieties of great history, was accommodated to new functions of which the inclusive, plural, tertualian Café de Santa Cruz is the most recent; in a place with this “excess of historical awareness”, CAPC proposes to reheem a dialogue with the city in which it lives and does so through the artistic problem (what is art? when is there art?), a problem that in the last fifty years he has been debating, trying to clarify but also to undetermine; the investigative attention proposed by CAPC in the face of this problem is expressed here, at this initial moment, both in its condition of experience, of something that is extrinsic, that is of the order of the subject who observes, who lives together, and in his condition, a significant form of work.

This CAPC initiative is added to a theme, the protocols of representation, which persists and is refined in the contemporary artistic object with other practical outcomes.

Indeed, the historical permutations established by the modernist symbolic revolution between an aesthetic of comparison (the narrative dramatization of the apparent narrative, the dialectic between verisimilitude and artifice, between secrecy and transparency) and an aesthetic of appearance (of the named and the unrepresentable) are not only audible but also active in today's artistic practice.

By dismissing the Imitatio as the only active principle of the act of representation (of repositioning in the world) the artistic culture of the 20th century, regardless of the proposed paradigm or periodization, opened up to the spectator (even the most inexperienced) new possibilities for negotiation and poetic mobilization in their relationship with the lived world. This Art brought human interest closer to artistic interest, even though it was residual, forcing the subject who observes to convalesce from the deterministic pathos of the picturesque, of the “easy”, of the “expected”, of the “similar”, forcing him to paraphrase Kant, to “audare sapare (dares to know)”. Whether it succeeded will be another discussion.

It is certain, however and contradictorily, that when nothing is recognizable, when not only the spectator's perceptual search is prolonged but also defamiliarized, it becomes strange, difficult to interpret what is seen, Art, (and the works that will be exhibited here will speak of it), develops, (perfecting, criticizing, renewing the mechanisms of representation), a historical effort to root “We” and “Them” on the same conceptual plane, that is, the correlation of forces between the I (I am Imago, so I am an exaggeration) and the difference of the “Other” (the persistence of others anthropologies of identity and of the perception and representation of the world); Art trains us to question the world outside of our ends, of our preconceptions. And it is this effort that is also positive here in the headwaters of Santa Cruz.

Pedro Pousada and Carlos Antunes
January 2012