CARLOS NOGUEIRA

We, João Quintela and I, Ricardo Carvalho, are really pleased to welcome you for an interview, in the studio of Universidade Autónoma. I think we must introduce you as the great artist that you are, as well as a lecturer and an educator, since that is also a large part of your life and has much to do with architecture and the work we do here, in the Architecture Department at Autónoma. I would like to welcome you and thank you for accepting our invitation to spend the next hour talking about Art, Architecture and about how you share your vision of the World with others.

First of all, I would like to compliment Ricardo Carvalho and João Quintela for who they are as people, as professionals and as friends. It is my pleasure to be here.

I would like to start by talking about your artistic production. One of your pieces started as performance, in which you included writing a sentence on a wall that said “Todo o mundo é composto de mudança” (all the world is made of change). I like this sentence from the point of view of politics, art, architecture, love and also pedagogy. Do you agree with this view of the world as endless variation of itself? And what about the idea of sharing it with students?

I will start by talking about the performance itself, so that those who are not familiar with the work may have an idea of its range. I showed this at 2.a Bienal de Cerveira, whose theme was “Camões” because we were then celebrating the 400th anniversary of the poet’s death. I was at the start of my career, not in terms of doing things, but in terms of showing things. I designed an installation, which was also a performance, that consisted of a huge white wall. I had requested a wall that had already been used, one with time, history, life and I was given a long wall with a panel. I asked that there would be another panel to provide continuity to the first one. Creating this piece was very challenging. I left Porto and got on a train that stopped at every station. I eventually fell asleep and, when I woke up, I saw the bag where I had all the materials for the piece outside the train. I jumped off the train and then got back inside with the bag while the train was already moving. In a second, all my plans could have been changed.

I started by spray painting on the wall the sentence “Todo o mundo é composto de mudança” (all the world is made of change) a verse from one of Camões well-known sonnets. I had gone to the National Library and had had access to the oldest known original of that sonnet. I designed thousands of pamphlets with that verse in very big letters. At the bottom part of the pamphlet, I wrote my name and the place where the installation would be. At the top, I wrote by hand “A Ti” (to you) using a very old pen belonging to my grandfather. At the same time, I made four hundred little flower bouquets with paper napkins (they were given to me by the owner of the café I went to every day, I asked him to sell the napkins to me but he ended up offering them to me) around which I placed a red cotton ribbon, at the tip of which there was a rectangular paper label. On the label I wrote “A Camões” (to Camões) by hand, and, below that, my name and Bienal de Cerveira, etc.

I find these different readings very interesting, and I believe these ideas extend to your classes on Drawing. I was fortunate to have been your student in high school and then at university and one of the things that I remember is the fact that your classes were very practical, complemented with poetry reading, with classes on music and other thoughts on life or even more philosophical, which evidences an understanding of Drawing that is wider in scope. So, I must ask you: What is Drawing for you?

Drawing is much more than a course; it is a Universe. And the Universe encompasses everything. I must say that I was very lucky to have been lived in Africa, even though there was war, and having taught at a religious school where the children where poor but who knew their land and their environment. When they started to work with their pencils and papers and started drawing, it was fantastic, I have kept many of those drawings.

In class, I show films, I recommend some films, or I take students to the ballet. For any years, I went to Gulbenkian with three groups of students to watch the general rehearsals. I would take them and them discuss what we had seen. Each student and I would take their notes to class and discussed what we had seen and what we had understood of it. Because the universe we were talking about was far wider and richer than the music or the dancing that we had seen

Your body of work evidences your particular approach to your pieces. You mention error often, you say that things are ongoing up to the moment you decide to sign a piece and it is ready to be shown to the world. This means that a piece is made to be public, but, before it is public, it belongs to the artist, it is private, and as a private piece it is in constant change. I would like you to speak about this and your perspective regarding an artistic piece being in constant change.

My work is developed very slowly. When I opened the Santo Tirso Museum, which was designed by Eduardo Souto Moura and Álvaro Siza Vieira, I used a bronze piece that was in my workshop and had been ready for 30 years. I thought that was the right moment to show it because it had aged with time. It has no coating because I don’t like that kind of finishing. Once, Fernando Calhau, who is one of my closest friends, told me: “Carlos, your pieces are all very well made. Why do you need to add that finishing?” I answered that “my pieces are made with the skills that I have”. I need to have a long relationship with my pieces before they can leave my workshop. And I only sign them when they leave it. When my pieces leave my workshop, they have already got some wrinkles. And time was what was lacking to their irreversibility.

I am getting older, but I do not feel old because of my wrinkles or because I cannot do what I want or because I don’t have any projects. I do sometimes feel old because I am no longer strong enough to pick up an iron bar and have to ask my assistant for help. Or because I cannot run up or down a ladder because my knee no longer works. In any case, things are in continuous change.

I would like to ask a question related with the first part of the interview – when you talked about performative action – and with this issue of materials and time I would like to talk about what I consider a very relevant aspect which is the fact that you usually divide your work into two different moments. You call the first moment Wasting and Sharing – which includes performative actions and more ephemeral pieces – and you call the second Restraint and Permanence – which includes the pieces you are best known for because they are more permanent pieces which establish a dialogue with architecture. Can you tell us a bit about this very clear distinction and the relations you find between the two?

I had a wonderful childhood, in a wonderful land, where, on returning home after playing, my mother would only let me in after washing with the garden hose, because I was covered in dirt and sweat. I climbed up trees and fell from trees… I just want you to realize how rich my childhood was. When I was seventeen, I came to Porto to study and during those years and a few years later, life was a wonderful thing.

One of my goals was to reach other people somehow, even if it was to make them stop in order to better understand something. I gave things, lost things, posted things, such as flutes that I made myself using a basic method to learn the flute – all this because I believe that music is one of the ways to save the world. I wanted people to use those flutes and had music closer to them. Mine was an extremely happy world but filled with inconsistency. And then, at a certain point in time, I also gained, for good and for bad, a sense of the finite. And because my work mostly disappeared and I had very little documentation on it (fortunately, I have collected more than I had hoped and I always had a written plan), I started to work with more durable materials. And, if initially I focused on giving, wasting, sharing, though, in some situations, anonymously, in the second moment I pretentiously started to work with the “best materials in the world.”

Exactly. I must say that there is one place in the world that I like and that is home. I really like my house. I have been living there since 1970, it has already undergone some changes, I have designed the interior, the stairs, the raisers, everything. For me, home is life’s jewellery case, life’s box, in the words of Le Corbusier. Since home is so important to me, I see it as a place for life or the place to preserve life.

This piece, which is called beyond the very edge of the earth, in Portuguese até ao fim das terras todas, came about after I was invited to participate in the Triennale Milano. I was not invited because I was an architect, but because, according to the rules of the Triennale then, each group of architects took professionals from other artistic fields – that year Australia took painting and Egypt took poetry. The commissary invited me to take sculpture. The Portuguese group included good architects and, once the Triennale was over, someone had the idea of disseminating that exhibition. It was shown in the USA and in other places… And my sculpture was also shown. When the exhibition was going to be held in London, they invited me to create a piece for that particular place. And that

I believe, then, that your pieces aim to belong to the places they are in – that is a feature of your work. This means that topics, such as tension, rupture, impertinence are not features of your work. Your pieces clearly work through belonging, empathy, continuity. The piece in The Economist is an example of this. But even when you work in a non-urban environment and you have pieces in permanent exhibition here in Portugal, those pieces also want to belong. They often grab a tree, create the place. Do you agree?

I do. And I must say that this occurs because I go to the park, in the case of Santo Tirso, for two or three days and take photos and photos of the place and search and search for the place. Of course, I wanted a place where there would be space, but I wanted to find a place that had something special. And then I found two trees, very close to one another, and I said to myself: “I want these trees to converse beyond the wall that I will place between them” – and the roots and the leaves did, in fact, converse… Curiously, Alberto Campo Baeza, who is someone who follows my work closely, wrote an article for the catalogue of that exhibition in which he used a different story and found a solution for that marriage, which I really appreciated reading and acknowledging, i.e., it means that things have not stayed the same, they can move in a different way, but they never stop moving.

Within this dialog with architecture, the constant attempt to decrease the borders between fields is rather clear. Your texts are poetry, performative actions are dances, drawings are sculpture, sculpture is architecture. And the specific case of architecture seems to me very relevant because, in a sense, it subverts elements that are obviously architectural, allocating them new uses and new features: the doors, a vertical element, which you include in sculptures as horizontal plans. he hydraulic mosaic, which is used to pave floors, which you layer, exposing the tiles’ sides. Even lime, which is usually used on walls, you use to cover the whole floor of a room. Could you tell us a bit about your will to dialog with the different fields and how that is linked to appropriation and redesigning of materials outside their usual context?

What I feel like saying is that I love Architecture. I think I love architecture more than some architects. On the first day I attended primary school, in that afternoon I was at a neighbour’s house whose children were my friends and she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered that I wanted to be an architect. At twelve years old, I had designed houses and museums. It just happened that, to shorten my way to architecture, I studied art. I studied sculpture in Porto and then studied painting in Lisbon. And I must say that I found out that I could not be an architect, because I would not be able to deal with confrontation and it is not always easy to deal with builders or with owners who often choose the less adequate solutions and do not accept the good solutions offered by the architects.

I thought the way you talked about life rather curious. Some people say that your work almost evokes death. I was thinking about your intervention in Rato Chapel, which has a very strong symbolic dimension and almost opposite to what you have just stated. We feel the silence, the twilight, all the dark elements, and we just have the salt with defined light.

That surface with salt can be a tomb or a table for a meal. I am deeply aware of death, and I think about death every day. It is inevitable, it will happen, but, until then, I want to enjoy life to the fullest, right to its core.

I have a great idea, which we can discuss, and it has to do with a very strong piece that you created, in which you offered people pencils to paint gray days. We need those pencils more than ever, because the world seems to be readjusting in a very frightening way… What pencils would those be?

In that performance, I sent those pencils to one hundred people who I randomly found in the phone book. Therefore, one hundred people will have received envelopes with colour pencils, unbranded, as well as a sheet of paper with the sentence “Pencils to paint grey days”. Those pencils were sent on the eve of winter so that people could get ready for the cold typical of the season.

Today’s pencils are much more complicated. They demand time for people to think about themselves, to say the least. I think there is no such time. As a teacher, I think parents need that time to be with their children, not just have the time to be with the children when they go to bed. Parents who had time to deal with the struggles of everyday life because those struggles show children how to deal with them and that will allow them to fly later on. I think people should have more time and, especially, should be able to identify those values that they feel would the best for them, The value of kindness, the value of cooperation, of companionship, the value of a good conversation, even without a fireplace. That is what is most important. People have to be more aware of themselves… I do not know what happiness is, just as I do not know what unhappiness is, I do not use those words. I know a great poet who has a book with a title that has to do with happiness. I would never call something “happiness”. Living your best life has to do with being able to know yourself better, giving yourself some time, yourself and those close to you. This does not mean that each one of us can change the world, I don’t believe that anymore, but if we can change two or three people close to us, that is already worth it.