en el deseo de tragar,
hasta la sombra
muere
an exhibition by Bárbara Fonte17.MAY.2025 — 19.JUNE.2025
Bárbara Fonte | En el deseo de tragar,
hasta la sombra muere
(Na engolida ânsia se mata até a sombra)
Conversación con Marta Mestre
hasta la sombra muere
(Na engolida ânsia se mata até a sombra)
Conversación con Marta Mestre
Bárbara Fonte's (Braga, Portugal, 1981) work reflects on questions of identity, the body, religion and politics. With exhibitions that have revealed the poetic flow of her work - consisting of performances, photography, video, drawings and collected objects - the artist challenges the boundaries between live action and performance. She uses appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images in visual culture, both popular and academic, including a critique of cultural and gender stereotypes. Erratic and utterly intimate, her work moves between early cinema and Dadaism, Caravaggio and the pin-up genre, the ecstasy of St. Teresa and the circus acts at local fairs. As in a love game, Bárbara Fonte kneels, puts on make-up, undresses, seduces, evades, hides, dances and becomes delirious, in order to capture our face, the face that is the beginning and end of all the images. This game is, in the artist's words, “a labyrinth with no way out” in which her body is the “host”.
Marta Mestre : The title you have chosen has a strong, dense poetic weight. The use of words like ‘swallowed’ and ‘desire’ immediately refer to something visceral, intimate, almost bodily, and at the same time it presents itself as an enigma (without a sphinx?) that reveals itself to be deciphered. The desire (craving) that, when devoured, ends up killing not only the being, but even its remnant (the shadow), is another powerful image…
Barbara Fonte: Desire and affliction are two places from where words sprout unceasingly. I am disturbed, and poetry, excited and impatient, tends to emerge. I then write. That title was taken from one of my poems. To devour the armour that surrounds us is an act of rebellion against the elegance of lies…
MM | I remember I first saw your work back in 2021, in a space in the centre of Lisbon that operated for a few years as a gallery and that today has disappeared amidst the sea of real estate speculation. Wandering around the space during the opening, I entered one of the rooms and saw artist Jorge Molder looking at your work. It had on me a peculiar effect of ‘mise en abyme’ that I since registered in my memory. The idea of playing, as in a game, is very present in Molder's own practice, inhabits your work too without a doubt, as well as the idea of ‘self-representation’ that is very present in both of your works. In a conversation I had with him in 2018, which we published, he mentioned: “Playing is one of the most recognisable aspects of my life, but it has nothing to do with winning or losing (...). It is a dialogue with myself, alone, a conversation without an interlocutor, between chance and necessity". I would like to hear you talk about the idea of play, as in a game.
BB | Yes, actually I would like to understand everything as a game. However, there is an aspect of my own work that, by imploding all rules, it runs away from that very same idea. I believe that, instead of trying to produce a controlled universe, I seek a multiple and fragmented universe, without a cunning concern for intentions. Permanently altering the moulds of the magical practice that grants life to a surface, which can be either a technical image or the surface of my body. On the other hand, the mystical, intimate imagination, “between chance and necessity”, as Molder describes, is a power game in which the image prevails as a body that is both host and possessed, rendering its owner as dead. And it is these small deaths, the result of these “conversations without interlocutor” where the body is completely absent in the complete fulfilment of the loving conquest of the image, that satisfy me and take me back to the “game”.
MM | This ‘power game’ in which the image is a ‘guest leaving its dead owner’, as you point out, refers directly to the play on words A Guest + a Host = a Ghost, which Marcel Duchamp printed on candy papers that he then distributed at an exhibition by Bill Coopley in Paris. The encounter between these opposing words - the host who gives hospitality and the guest who receives it - results in their mutual annihilation. What do you think?
BB | It's an exceptional and quite complex statement... I feel exactly this with my face/body, I see them as distinct. I have always considered my face as something that escapes from my body, separate from my inner self, capable of an isolated and independent life: an other. The face is capable of transience and ephemerality, of temporal fluidity, even figuratively in a suspended and unchanging expression. As is the case of the image. I turn to myself in order to exist, I search for truth, which implies a confrontation with one's own biography, as well as with the world's issues. But the face has an implicit restlessness that breaks with the mirror and reflects the doubt out of which the exposed gaze is born. It is as if the face was a stage where I do not control the actor's interpretation. A face that emancipates itself from a whole, that stands out from the mass that sustains it, by fracturing the compact and enclosed grouping of the rest of the human structure. Moreover, the face endures in time. I feel, unlike the body, which is absent from the soul and the flesh, that the face insinuates itself into permanence. That it seduces time and memory, that it becomes an icon and a landmark. It disturbs me that it escapes the possibility of suicide. It will always be the bearer of the funereal mask that will fasten me to existence.
MM | ...when we speak about the ‘guest’, we are left with the shroud, the wrapping of the ‘host’…
BB | ...Ghosts... What I am trying to do is to produce mementos for a dead future. Perhaps I myself am, in the images I produce, the representation of the immobile and made-up face of the dead and, at the same time, a living mask to study existence and preserve it. A tableaux vivant that narrates and bears witness to the materiality of life and, at the same time, its transience. But nothing else matters: the reality of that life, its identity, its intimacy and coherence... what we see is only a slice, a fragment chosen from a long narrative. These states can coexist: honesty, dissimulation and self-expression. It is good to break the mirror and observe a wandering being.
MM | You started your video work in 2014. I remember one of the first ones, which was filmed outdoors, and in which you/your body appears wandering over a brick cross that looks like a wall. Others seem more staged, theatricalising a series of behaviours, gestures and presences that evoke both the domestic and the sacred, the hero and the saint, stillness and hysteria, tragedy and comedy. Generally, there is a mutism in your videos. But there are also those in which your voice-over recites a poetic text. We could call them ‘video-performances’, although this denomination encloses your work in the historicity of the medium. I like the expression “framing”, which is how it was defined in early cinema. What do you think of this term?
BB | Yes, I make ‘frames’. Places with four walls, frames, closed drawings with defined corners. Each frame contains within itself a vastness of movements, positions and paths. The composition of these frames arises in restless spasms of ideas that move along a dice board, across concepts of time and space, and that come together spontaneously, occasionally attracted to each other by their opposites. The elements I choose ( in order to compose the frames) are sourced from our history, from human behaviour, from certain circumstances. I take everything into account... I think that a frame is, at the same time, a poetic stripping and an immersive eccentricity, like a theatrical stage. And it is formed because I exist within it, but also because it allows me to exist. Each frame contains myself and contains itself and is, therefore, a prison and a jailer at the same time. I am fascinated by the world of simulated beauty that proudly stands on top of the altar of lies.
There are other aspects that are also important to me, for example ‘expression’. Expression intervenes in the construction of the image, but I try for it to deny communication. Communication implies a dispersion, as it assumes an obvious meaning, destroying the potential of an ‘open’ message which I strive for. On the other hand, each layer of editing is analysed in detail so that, in the image, the mere presence remains. I avoid an idea of ‘dialogue’, even though it may occur, and perhaps that is revealed as ‘mutism’, as you mention. It's all rhetoric, evidence, hence silences. Another aspect is the fact that I opt for black and white, and I think this is because as a child I used to go through art history encyclopaedias and look at the black and white reproductions, which always gave me the feeling that they were more real than they actually were. They were almost like documentary photographs, reducing the image to composition and drawing. Eventually, each frame prompts another and they all rest safely on the computer disk until I return to them and edit them into a sequence of shots. Editing them in sequences allows for infinite editing possibilities, constructing narratives, flashbacks or isolated moments of action. Stories within stories.
MM | A friend of ours told me about the relationship that we can establish between your plans and the representation of the Stations of the Cross in the Baroque, the architectural spaces dramatised in a sequential route. You live in a region of Portugal impregnated with religious devotion and close to the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus in Braga…
BF | Besides those images of the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus in Braga, I have always been interested in the images of saints in churches. Particularly those that registered on their bodies the sores, the wounds, the drops of blood, the erotic pleasure, the violence of their lives. (I used to listen carefully to my grandmother who would tell once and again the hagiographies until my curiosity would be satisfied). In such spaces, the images revealed upon myself an expanded world, where the sacred intersected with the human being, and which fragmented and radiated all that I felt. The excess of gestures and the gigantism of emotions seduced me.
MM | Although they are extremely careful to result in a “frame”, the counter-field is also manifested in your video-performances, albeit in a “sabotaging” way. Someone’s hands pulling the strands that make the hair braids rise, for example, are handmade, rudimentary, DIY details that bring a ‘tragicomic’ dimension to what you do. I would like you to talk about truth and lies in your work.
BF: I devote myself to my work as if it were a religious ritual. And in that ritual, tricks or magic are an honest surrender to the devotional or the sacred, which is nothing more than an opaque place of dogmas, not very transparent, where good faith is absurd. In the images I create, there emerges a way of looking at the world that always modifies interpretation, and, in that sense, a sort of chatterborx, a trickster emerges within the necessary slyness which is necessary in order to be free and to be able to do what is considered as creation. As opposed to the religious cult, I intend to emphasise the intrusion of doubt and play. An image is both a lying and a gullible act. I like to welcome what is false as a legitimate child, assuming, in my ‘frames’, all the available deceit in the construction of an image. Threads, stickers, shadows or hands emerge, activating mechanisms that produce movement, circumstantial or clearly manipulated sounds are interspersed. The spotlights, the domestic setting or the curtains that cut the scenes appear, the cuts in the action or the transitions of shots become evident. (It is important to point out that all the phases of the work are carried out by me. The whole process takes place in my studio). All these issues give a familiar and carefree attribute to the work, where humour clearly comes into play.
MM | ...as with Caravaggio's painting, in which Saint Thomas inserts his fingers into Christ's wound…
BF | (You mention an image I have observed countless times). The body squeezed to the marrow is completely incoherent, weak and sentimental, full of damages and grievances. Subject of mockery, losing its glorified quality. I look for images of power and domination where the subject, fragile in its condition, rises as sovereign, empowering its existence within the internal conflict of the other who observes it.
MM | What does nudity mean to you?
BF | Nudity is ripping of the flesh, tearing of the surface. There is no real naked body until the time of death. The body is only naked when it is mere flesh, when the blood no longer circulates and its muscles are stretched. Or when it is an image, a frame.