Artifício is a publication that brings together essays by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, Marta Espiridião and Cru Encarnação, Odete, and Shola von Reinhold, delving into Odete’s homonymous exhibition, curated by Marta Espiridião. The exhibition was on view at Galeria da Boavista from October 10 to December 24, 2024.
“As her biography states, her work is mostly of an ‘erotic-historiographic’ nature, and of a paranoid archaeology (a method developed wither her performances) which once again gains prominence in the installation she presents in the upper floor of Galeria da Boavista, submerged in the shadow.”
Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro
“This glossary brings together several concepts that were presented before and after the making of Artifício. Drawing a constellation of ideas that accompanied us along the process, we hope to provide tools for any reader to (re)construct this exhibition in the ways that are most meaningful to them. All the presented definitions are contextual and critical, and all citations that illustrate them were retrieved from books that were part of Artifício’s Library.”
– Marta Espiridião e Cru Encarnação
“The Grottos are a sideways dimension where fabulous alterities have been preserved, where futures can be dislodged by tracing patterns (optically or otherwise) over and over, and where the tedious glances off—splayed, rayed, faceted, dazzled.”
– Shola Von Reinhold
“Queer people—trans people—cannot take this narrative, this immortality of reproduction for granted, and therefore, they think of more creative forms of intimacy, survival, or even that “immortality”. It is art that is considered a form of the future. Poetry. Music. Fashion. And what Berlant refers to as “the fugitive and parasitic elaboration of gossip, discotheques, phone sex ads”. And flowers—and in a broader sense, beauty—fit into this regime beyond the essentials of life. But as we’ve seen, the concepts of essential are multiple, and the idea of excess and waste is valid only with in a straight temporality that permeates because it is indefinitely USEFUL.”
– Odete