aquí se narra
tres dispositivos
an exhibition by Carme Nogueira 18.MAY.2024 — 20.JULY.2024
A colonial exhibition, a documentary film and a vice-royal religious building give rise to the three pieces that Carme Nogueira presents in la oficina's space. These themes to which we could refer to as the basic narrative, are the framework on which the artist piles up stories and versions, descriptions, opinions and multiple points of view. Because achieving a single truth is not the goal, there is no exclusive right to the truth. This statement is heard in one of the conversations of A propósito de Alvão (2016-2017), a project articulated around the graphic reportage that the founder of the photography studio Casa Alvão made during the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of 1934. Held at Porto’s Crystal Palace at a time when the universal and colonial exhibitions of the 19th and early 20th centuries exalted the imperial conscience of the European nation-states, the Portuguese exhibition serves as an example of the so-called human zoos: vile exhibitions of people from other cultures considered as exotic. To this layer of information, with infinite dimensions of historical, cultural, moral, architectural or social analysis, the artist superimposes other perspectives that counteract, tangentially or directly, hegemonic discourses.
Carme Nogueira's work is always based on an open search that is formalised according to the different activations of the process. While researching Alvão’s photography albums from the colonial exhibition’s period, the artist discovered the report the photographer had made a year earlier on the territory and stages of production of port wine. A product that was prominently featured in an ephemeral pavilion specially constructed to promote port wine at the exhibition, the Pavilhão Ferreirinha. The wooden structure that today articulates the piece in the gallery, a continuous bench recreating the perimeter and the entrance door of that same construction, is conceived as a meeting place from which to talk about and rethink the Portuguese colonial exhibition. We interpret the bench as a "device" because of the power it is assumed to have in order to drive processes and collective transformations. For its capacity to shape our opinions. It is an artefact that can help to rewrite those histories by gutting out how things really happened and to collect the memory of what is left out of history, what remains in the background. What Professor Germán Labrador has called the "revelation of colonial ghosts”. During the production process of the piece, this bench, in fact, served to bring together, in the gardens where the colonial exhibition was held a century ago, several people who talked with the artist about the Portuguese colonial empire, about the relationship between the metropolis and the colonies or the use we make of monuments to bring the past to the present in a critical way. That is, as devices of memory or as anti-monuments. One of these people, the artist and curator Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, is the one who reminds us that in order to counteract the dominant discourses we must bear in mind that no discursive point of view is in the exclusive right to the truth.
Carme Nogueira's attention to room devices is one of the defining characteristics of her work. They are museographic artefacts, usually mobile, as to facilitate their activation in the public space and in the context of exhibitions. If the piece A propósito de Alvão is formalised around a bench, in Tenerife (2020) the room device is made up of a series of drawings, a video and a publication that can lead to new narratives and unusual fictions.The project is based on the short film Ténérife, shot by Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar in 1932 to depict, from an ethnographic, pedagogical and political dimension, everyday life on the Canary Island, confronting the poverty of the working classes and the fortune of the bourgeoisie. In Carme Nogueira's new audiovisual version, Allégret and Lotar’s images have now been removed. However, the film’s original audio can still be heard, which the artist translates simultaneously from French over a series of images in which she reveals the process of making the drawings that we see next to the video, as part of the installation, inspired by the Canary Islands’ geography. Both the voice, without deceit, and the transparency with which the elaboration of the drawings is shown indicate the artist's interest in openly showing the mechanisms, the logics of production, the process by which the image emerge as the layers that cover it up, that are left behind, are being removed. As a visual outline of the film, these works on paper accompanying the video and the publication, the three elements that make up the room device, interweave different stories and introduce points of view that show the complexity of any discourse and the importance of knowing who is telling it, how and why.
This process of stripping away ideologies is repeated in Nican Mopohua (Aquí se narra) [which can be translated as "Here it is told”] (2021-2022), the third of the selected pieces, which this time takes the Conquest of America as its historical vector. Based on this narrative, the artist accumulates stories from different times and spaces, questioning the linear course between past and present, the uninterrupted concept of history. In addition to resorting once again to the idea of a device, Nican Mopohua introduces another element integral to Nogueira's work: the existence, as our dear friend Tamara Díaz Bringas explained so well when she wrote about it, of "a present made up of many plots, of discontinuous histories and memories in conflict". Nican Mopohua interweaves the beliefs of the Chichimecas, the original people of the Gran Chichimeca, where the Guanajuato city of León is located today, and the cultural forms in the viceroyalty of New Spain. The dubious cultural hybridisation of the colonial process gave rise to iconographies and devotions such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Based on the legend contained in the historical document Nican Mopohua (from which Nogueira's installation takes its Nahuatl name, meaning “Here it is told”), which narrates how the face of the Virgin appeared on the ayate of the Chichimeca Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. Carme Nogueira's installation reveals how the Conquest implies not only the occupation of territory but also the substitution of some cultures for others, and how forms, including architecture and urban planning, are ideologically determined by the dominant perspectives. Once again, these points of view have a determining impact on subjectivities.
Here too, the formalisation of research responds to the indisciplinary space, between categories, in which Carme Nogueira's work is situated. She now uses the technique of papel picado (pecked paper) on amate paper, a vegetable paper which has been made since pre-Hispanic times from trees and bushes of the Ficus and Morus family, in order to tell us about the architecture of one of the founding buildings of the colonial city, the parish church of El Sagrario. In Carme Nogueira's work, nothing appears by chance, as the use of each technique and each element - screen printing, papel picado or amate leaf - adds a layer of meaning. The artist consciously employs the narrative capacity of the video format and the audiovisual montage technique to interweave, once again, different times and spaces. She films the process of making papel picado and the silkscreen prints, and reproduces in audio the stories heard from architects, archivists and artists in the city of León. Carme Nogueira records herself reading the literal transcription of the oral testimonies collected during the research process. A performative action in which the artist reads without deceit, suppressing any hint of emotion, avoiding the application of mechanisms that provoke empathy and, with it, the loss of perspective. This effective strategy, a nod to Brechtian distancing, allows her to confront different, sometimes contradictory, points of view. It also, after all, decolonises the colonial unconscious.
Text by Agar Ledo Arias