chat archive

If we are ao obsessed with distopias, why are we so afraid of the word love?

These concepts propose that there is not one but many natures, and that the boundaries of nature depend on your position in a given time and place. What constitutes nature varies according to each society’s definitions of nature and culture. For example, we might see androids as being our contemporary version of spirits, as angels were in medieval times, but for Amazonian communities jaguars take on this mantle. I do not wish to surpass the nature/culture divide: I’m looking for variations between cosmologies. If I choose to explore androids or genetically modified ‘monsters’ in my work, it’s because they connect distinct anthropological expectations about technology and futurity. I believe we need an art that kills fascists as much as one capable of inspiring us with images of other possible worlds. 

You need a certain type of person to film. The things that happen before and after tricks are equally as valuable as a trick. Like, my mind isn’t blown from a skateboard trick. I care more about documenting the lifestyle and personality stuff that happens with who I skate with.

I’ve been filming for 20 something years, and I’m trying to entertain myself, too. I can’t just be like, “Let’s go to this spot and try this trick.” And then the next day, “Let’s go to this spot and try this trick.” I want to entertain people who aren’t skaters, too. I want to provide them with so much more than what they’re going to get from a single trick they don’t understand. I want to make them understand it, but to keep them glued to it, I need these other things, and I think I’m real lucky to have the people around that are entertaining. Because I’m a fan, you know what I mean? I’m a fan of all of the kids I skate with.

A lot of companies are like, “We have no money,” and I’m like, “What do you mean you have no money? Your products are sold in 7-11s. You’re owned by this billion-dollar company and you want all these rights forever for free!” Nike is pretty awesome in that regard. It seems like they have integrity in that fashion.

Adidas is interesting to me though. They worked with Gonz for a long time without really saying much about it. I would just see this random Adidas Gonz stuff for years without them putting any effort behind it. I always felt they came from a more authentic place, and maybe because it’s the way they’ve shown up in subculture over the generations without pushing too hard.

I could live in a neighborhood with Adidas as my neighbor and it would be cool, but I feel like Nike would want to buy the whole neighborhood and tell everyone to leave. But there is a reason they’re the biggest shoe brand in the world and this “devour everything” approach underlines it.

(...) The theme of this year’s theme was “A Stranger Comes to Town.” After reading the prompt, I started thinking about what it means to be a stranger versus what it means to belong. The whole idea of conversion therapy is to make a person a stranger in their body. Make them a stranger to who they are. Make them estranged to a fundamental component of their existence. (...)

My real feeling is that a work of art is only a work of art for a very short period. There is a life in a work of art that is very short—even shorter than a man's lifetime. I call it twenty years. After twenty years, an Impressionist painting has ceased to be an Impressionist painting, because the material, the color, the paint has darkened so much that it is no more what the man did when he painted it. That is one way of looking at it. So I applied this rule to all artworks, and after twenty years they are finished. Their life is over. They survive all right, because they are part of art history, but art history is not art. I don't believe in preserving. I think, as I said, that a work of art dies. It's a thing of contemporary life. In your life you might see something because it's contemporary with your life, it's being made at the same time as you are alive, and it has all the requisites of a work of art, and your contemporaries are making works of art. They are works of art at the same time you live, but once you are dead, they die too.

Esses assentos pertencem a um carro que um galerista me deu em tempos - ‘deu’ quer dizer, trocou por obras -, um Rolls Royce. O que fiz ao Rolls Royce foi esventrá-lo por completo e retirar-lhe tudo o que era de riqueza, desvalorizá-lo enquanto automóvel e transformá-lo numa escultura.

An expected amount of misunderstandings have arisen. That’s understandable. I think people who happen upon this page get pissed when they see me assuming some authority. There’s this weird jock side to skateboarding that is on some tough guy-shit like “Dude, let’s see you do it!” I have a problem with that because it comes out of the assumption that people who suck shouldn’t have an opinion.

(...)

I don’t agree about any of the skating being tired and soulless. I think it’s all pretty rad, even if I’m not into some aspect of it. I think the soulless thing is maybe derived from the medium and format in which we see it.

(...)

The way I learned about skating was basically through trying to decipher inside jokes made six months before in magazines. That’s what Big Brother was, right? So in some ways, this is just an inside joke among friends, and I’m happy to share that with and include as many people as possible.

(...) Vejo a arte contemporânea como um espaço iminentemente retórico e discursivo, o que permite articular críticas complexas, por vezes difíceis noutras formas artísticas. Este é um processo que se pode comparar ao das ciências sociais, mas que tem, evidentemente, as suas especificidades: por exemplo, a capacidade associativa das imagens, um certo silêncio, um tempo que tem tudo a ver com o carácter curatorial, mas também espacial, de uma exposição. Esta política sempre foi para mim essencial; de outro modo perderia interesse pela arte e trataria de encontrar outras formas de expressão, outras formas de viver.

So I was like, “Turn around!” We turn around and you know, when we were coming back this way, I pull the camera out right before we turned that corner and I was filming and I noticed that she was still looking that way. So when we went around the corner and slowed down, she noticed me because we were going kinda slow, so she connected with the camera, and I prefer that over anything, really.

There are quite a lot of ways you could word it and, when asked this question we tend to just give this dictionary definition of ‘vase’ that it is ‘a vessel that beautifies its contents’.

In the chapter of Free Ride, where I wrote this, I’m trying to investigate, what it means to me to see photographs of skaters on the works of art. First, there is of course some aspect of vandalism, because skateboards, most of the time, leave marks on sculptures. But having said that, I had the feeling there was something more to it. To try to answer that, I made a little shift : I decided to investigate the meaning of skaters on sculptures as if it was an art practice. Therefore I’m not really saying that skateboarders belong to the tradition of minimalism or that they are influenced by phenomenology, I am saying that if riding on public art was the work of an artist, it would be rooted in that art movement which implies certain ways to consider sculptures. To explain what it means you have to bear in mind that minimalism comes from the geometrical side of abstract art. Normal artists want to create a form, a composition, but instead of having figures, trees or flowers, you have triangles, circles and cubes. The most radical artists from minimalism, those that I refer to as “phenomenological minimalists”, don’t really care about objects. They care about space. They don’t really care about vision, they care about experience. It’s not about putting an object in a space and looking at it, they think, that objects redefine the whole space. So the artwork is the relationship between a simple form and the space around it. For them, a sculpture is not an object, it is a space that you don’t only look at but that you experience through motion, with your whole body and not only your eyes. I think that is very important and suitable to the logic of skateboarding.

While making this film I was obsessed with the idea of how continuous present is forged by economic structures, the way economy mimics nature by trying to find patterns and using the concept of controlled chaos within a certain environment. Economic systems tend to establish themselves as a replica of natural systems in order to survive. Not long ago, when the financial crisis erupted in Portugal, a system was designed to create the illusion of a continuous present, in which the idea of future was erased. Both the Portuguese government and all the news feeds manipulated by market laws, tried—and were successful—to make everyone in the country believe that there would be no future in sight with that amount of debt. The concept of present was stretched in order to become elastic within a specific agenda—to save the European banking system.

(...)

In the film, when I say that economy copies biological structures and tries to organize everything, I’m trying to underline that immaterial forms of abstraction are constantly reshaping the forms of circulation, finding its materiality through representation (images) and objects. Although capital is inherently abstract and manifests itself immaterially, all its consequences are real. I'm interested in the idea of looking, of browsing, as a form of consumption. I’m thinking of Instagram and Tumblr, for instance, and the way they work as a form of projecting our subjectivity while at the same time objectifying ourselves through images, giving shape to desire and immediate need. We’ve always tried to capitalise nature. 

(...)

Modern forms of capitalist consumption are so extremely embedded in human evolutionary processes that I would argue that they effectively manipulate, conscious and unconsciously, our forms of perception. Our relationship with nature is measured within many parameters (also by an aesthetic judgment, as a strategy to give a certain form to thought), but nature has no distinction between good or bad. There’s no moral or ethics in nature. And the modern economic systems are designed to forget about it too.