apart. Here we have the presence of the sea, that space that, like a
The Fragmentos de America, in technical terms, are paint fused into
mirage, makes it appearance brandishing life.
the polyester. Their starting point were real fragments, a work that
…
came into being purely by chance, when I observed that the offcuts from larger scale works were the remnants of something, of a work,
X. M. A. C.: […] Having eliminated the possibility of continuing the
which were in turn works themselves. An insight of human stupidity
envisaged process of Projeto Retorno (Project Return) because
in a fraction of a second, which became a project that was hard to
nature in Galicia was unable to provide a sufficient answer to your
finish, because we are talking about 1492 pieces of plastic, in all
demands, as a result of chance and of a fateful need you stumble
manner of shapes, sizes and colours. I worked with hundreds of kilos
across History, concentrated in the specific territory of your atelier in
of resin and hundreds of metres of fibreglass for more than a year,
Gondomar. It is part of the family history that to some extent
hating what they were metaphorising. Everything that our so-called
condenses the collective memory of Galicia and extends threads of
‘civilisation’ had extracted from America since its ‘discovery,’
dialogue, roots that lead to the primitive core of mankind. […] Those
everything they had extracted, both physically, in the form of
‘archaeological remains’ brought with them ‘historical memory,’ a
material riches, and intellectually, with the destruction of highly
basically human one, in the same way as the labyrinths of the Ciclo
refined native cultures and even what was left of them, such as the
do Cupim (Termite Cycle) showed you the ‘natural memory’ of the
Mayan codices, totally altered the profile of a huge continent.
termites who feed on their very world. […] Along what routes did your work as an archaeologist of memory lead you to the massive
…
harvest of the Fragmentos de América (Fragments of America)? X. M. A. C.: Memory, whether collective or individual, is the F. C.: The ‘Archaeological Remains’ and Fragmentos de América
foundation, the cosmic and historical, natural and cultural core to
are two different processes that share the same basic material,
which your questing probe, thirsty for the truth, persistently returns.
polyester. One day I knocked down a wooden wall that concealed
Testimonies of life, written on the polyester pages of the book of the
the real wall of my atelier and found remains of the old paint,
walls of Gondomar, stretch the local dimension out towards the
insects, dirt and so on. I tried to get rid of them but didn’t quite
history of the colonisation of America or the xenophobic and
achieve the result I expected, what stuck to the polyester and came
imperialist past of Spain and Europe. The signs of the memory of
off were bits of the wall itself. From the very first moment I realised
nature, orifices, miniature galleries, spherical figures formed by tiny
that what I was holding was not only a series of new works but
droplets of water, contain within their semantic cores the root of the
also a basic material on which I was able to work in different
meaning of the universe. In the fascinating immediate grammar of
directions, such as the 1492 and Dimensão Possível (Possible
the microcosm there beats the meaning, the memory, of thousands
Dimension) series, the latter of which came about when I was
of millions of years of the macrocosm.
preparing a solo exhibition for the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. It didn’t take me long to perceive that this way of using
…
polyester brought with it the testimonies of the life, of the memory of the people who had lived there, in the house that had been built
F. C.: […] I’m always working with time, and often with the
by my forebears and inhabited by my family ever since.
crystallisation of a given moment, but I also think that certain
I feel that in the case of ‘Archaeological Remains’ two separate
moments are devoid of chronology, and, to go even further, we
entities share the same space. One is physical, material, the remains
can ask: What is chronology? A structure formed in constancy? If
of the layers of paint, of the walls. The other is the repository of the
I now look back I think so, but my own work contradicts this
subconscious, the marks that are not discernible to the naked eye. So
principle, since I almost always work in various directions at the
the result may be upside down, in negative, camouflaged by the ma-
same time: the works that end up being, for want of a better word,
terial, unknown, full of spirits, plasma, emanations, energy, feelings.
formal, because they leave a concrete or lasting result, and others,
In them we can also find, as we finally do in any work, both of the
like my interventions in nature, that leave no visible trace or signs,
traditional readings: what we see initially and what we see as a
and end with themselves. And very often the process has more
result of our relationship with what we have seen. In my mind this
meaning for what it is, as such, than for the outcome itself. In
material is a kind of mirror of what has happened and what is
connection with this idea of time, and here I also include
happening now, it contains ghosts, which are signifiers of life: a dop-
synchronicity, an interesting thing happened to me. I was working
pelgänger. So the whole of my being is in these archaeological re-
on my PhD thesis, that partly had to do with the idea of time and
mains, but without being aware of it, directly linked to the material,
space in a work of art, and to that end I quoted Einstein’s theories,
as if I had to complement the material with voices, smells and the light
amongst others. I also travelled to Rio de Janeiro at the time, and
from a dim bulb in the ceiling until I fall asleep in my father’s lap.
when I got to my hotel, I discovered that Einstein himself, who I