Interview with Mai Abu ElDahab, 2006

Mai Abu ElDahab: To what extent has your background in philosophy and mathematics affected your interest in the mechanisms of perception? And why did that lead you to art school?

Sancho Silva: I’m not sure if there is a link, so I’ll try to construct one. In the 20th century we witnessed a kind of purification of mathematics. There was an obsession with finding a universal and univocal mathematical language. Mathematicians wanted to clarify the waters, to know what exactly mathematics was, where it started and where it ended. A juridical question almost. This led to a massive search for the foundations of mathematics, for its axiomatization. The idea being that if one found the pure and fundamental elements of mathematics (objects, concepts and operations) one could simply say that mathematics is all that can be built from these elements. It would then be possible to clearly separate the various sub-disciplines within mathematics, and mathematics itself from logic and physics. This had the drastic effect of outlawing from mathematics any element that could not, for one reason or another, be translated into the precisely formulated official lexicon. In geometry, for example, all elements pertaining to visual sensation or intuition were banned. Ironically, however, this search for the universal resulted also in a proliferation of meanings, and ultimately in the relative. It all turned out to be relative to the particular axiomatic basis you chose (hence non-Peano arithmetics and non-Euclidean geometries). Yet this meant that the driving force behind mathematics could no longer be located inside the discipline itself. The question was no longer what mathematics essentially is but how it is externally constituted. How it relates to other disciplines and to society as a whole, and how it is instrumentalized.

Kant believed that classical mathematics described the structures of classical human perception (pure intuitions of space and time), and thus what it meant to be classical. Could we say, today, that modern mathematics describes the structures of modern human perception, and thus what it means to be modern?

As for what led me into art, initially I just wanted to make constructions that played with perception. Later I wanted do something with these constructions, to use them as a basis on which to build something else, conceptual constructions that would have other kinds of implications.

Mai Abu ElDahab: In contemporary Western culture, where seeing is increasingly mandatory (panoptical system), why is it still necessary to frame vision?

Sancho Silva: It is not vision in general that is increasingly mandatory but a particular kind of vision, which is in fact a degraded form of vision. I don’t think this is a specifically western problem. As this degraded vision becomes ever more dominant it tends to be treated as a natural, universal fact. It is being incorporated. Not only is it necessary to frame vision but we shouldn’t forget that vision is an unanswered question, a field of struggles whose outcome has implications in other fields. It is necessary to both unsettle vision and prevent its closure.

Mai Abu ElDahab: But with the predominance of surveillance mechanisms in both the private and public sphere, how can this closure be prevented – given that it serves political and corporate interests?

Sancho Silva: There are still myriads of contradictions, mistakes and imperfections in the system, weak points that can be exploited. The possibilities for action exist. We are not doomed.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Could you define this degraded form of vision in more practical terms?

Sancho Silva: It is a vision that is increasingly standardized and programmed. Just think about all the resources that are funnelled into studies on the psychology of perception as a technology for manipulating public opinion (as in political campaigns, publicity strategies, audience ratings, corporate imaging, etc.). In Lisbon shantytowns and derelict buildings are hidden by huge announcements praising the “happy” life in the city. This is the happiness of shopping malls, where families spend their Sundays window-shopping, looking at objects they desire but which will never satisfy them. Vision is thus indefinitely postponed; it becomes a “di-vision”. We know vision has transformative power. It can establish connections and dismantle rigid categories. It can be a vehicle of pleasure. Instead it is being channelled into a play of mirrors, which reflect nothing else but themselves. This can provoke an ecstatic feeling at first but it ultimately leads to frustration and violence.

Mai Abu ElDahab: It’s a big leap from di-vision to frustration and violence. Would you mind being somewhat more specific, perhaps by relating to your experience of Lisbon?

Sancho Silva: I mean the frustration of being constantly confined to remain passive and powerless, of being a mere spectator of everything that happens to and around you, of being deprived of the tools or resources to appropriate the world and make it partially one’s self. Take the recent upsurge in the Paris suburbs. You burn a car. It makes a big beautiful fire. You can say you did it. It becomes front-page news. It provokes a reaction, an acknowledgement of your existence at last. Is the situation so different in L.A., São Paulo or Johannesburg? Vision is not merely a blank canvas onto which this reality is projected. It has an operative value in its very constitution.

Mai Abu ElDahab: How does your interest in mediated images (TV, cinema…) inform your practice? How do you evaluate their effects on perception? Is your work a reflection on their form, and do you think it is possible or valuable to isolate their content and implications from their form?

Sancho Silva: TV and cinema are simply two of the mechanisms through which the previously mentioned degradation of vision has been implemented. They are, however, simply mechanisms, or tools. Their form does not entirely determine their effect. It all depends on how they are used, and by whom. A hammer, for example, is not necessarily something that will drive a nail into the wall. You may as well use the bottom of its handle to grind garlic. Likewise, TV and cinema can be used in many ways that do not degrade vision; in some instances, they may even achieve the opposite effect.

Yet tools are historical objects. Their form is the result of choices that have accumulated over time. They have been perfected and subjected to a kind of un-natural selection. Remember the different types of optical mechanisms that were developed at the end of the 19^th century, before the advent of actual cinema. Clearly, cinema as we know it today, and later TV, turned out to be in a dominant position. Why is that? In part because their form – including their topological and metric features – contributes in making them particularly effective tools for the reinforcement of unidirectional and hierarchical structures, and for the implementation of a standardized and isolated subject.

I suppose some of my works can be seen as attempts to use the handle of the hammer to grind garlic.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Then how would you relate to the idea that “form should follow function”? Could you give examples where it is relevant to your work?

Sancho Silva: One problem with that dictum is the set of functions it covertly refers to and posits as obvious and unquestionable. I’m more interested in form questioning function, meaning when it refuses to take function for granted and submit to it. This doesn’t necessarily imply that one should design uncomfortable objects. In some works (such as Gazebo, Shortcut and Nihilator) I tamper with architectural form and attempt to partially subvert or divert its functionality.

Mai Abu ElDahab: There is always a latent, almost fleeting criticality in your work. Do you consider critique to be secondary to the immediate physical experience? How do you think the viewer makes this connection? And how do you struggle to articulate it?

Sancho Silva: The immediate physical experience is only one in a series of defining moments in my works. It’s the moment in which the body takes the lead, temporarily becoming the structural or provoking element of thought. Then there are more conceptual moments, in which these relationships are reversed or complicated. I’m interested in moments of tension, in which the different modalities of reception (conceptual, emotional, physical, etc.) enter into some sort of productive contradiction. A physical experience always has conceptual implications because it is never pure. It is always already something other than physical. Hence I don’t think it is valid to separate the immediate physical experience of the works from everything that contextualizes and informs it. The texts written about my works are components of them as well. There is a physical construction, one experiences it, talks, thinks and writes about it. Then there is a conceptual construction, and then another physical construction. And it just goes on like this. My work is this process. It is intertwined with other people’s works and other processes. To receive my work is to track down these processes and possibly even take part in them.

To be more specific, and on a more technical level, some of my works (such as Attractor, Sub-urb and Artifice) provoke momentary spatial disorientation. These are moment of de-familiarization, in which the habitual workings of perception are temporarily suspended. But then, in a kind of dialectical movement, the works also allow for moments of re-orientation, i.e. moments in which one is offered the possibility of resolving the initial perceptual jamming. I don’t expect or want this dialectical process to have a clear univocal impact. But I do integrate it in, and use it as a ground for, a series of reflections on techniques of perceptual manipulation and their implications.

Mai Abu ElDahab: What convinced you to leave the gallery and to start infiltrating public space, as in your works with John Hawke?

Sancho Silva: In my older works the gallery and the museum always appeared as questions. I was (and still am) interested in understanding the way art spaces differentiate themselves from their surroundings, be it in terms of architecture, semiotics or even juridical issues. In this sense these works could be said to function as tools used to analyze and isolate particular spatial vectors or perceptual features characteristic of art spaces. But couldn’t these tools, then, be adapted and applied to other kinds of spaces? Wasn’t it very artificial to remain confined to art spaces? It was at this point that my interests intersected with John’s, who was painting urban landscapes in the street, outside the studio, and who also wanted to try out a different approach.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Your collaborative works often use materials and forms, which seem to have a public purpose. In a sense they are mock public utilities. What response do you get from the general public?

Sancho Silva: Soon after we started working outside, in the middle of the street, the question arose as to who the public is. When you do something in a gallery this question is less pressing, since you have an approximate idea of the types of people coming to the gallery, of what expectations they have and how they will behave. This is not so in the street. There are, of course, different types of streets used by different types of people. But now you have to deal with the figure of the passer-by, who in fact sometimes doesn’t pass at all, or simply stays. The “mis(s)-encounter” and “mis(s)-understanding” are structural modalities of the relationship with the passer-by. The question therefore was how to construct an encounter based on the miss-encounter. Bestowing functionality on the works, i.e. designing them in such a way that they encourage use and appropriation by the public, seemed a good start (functionality as a Trojan horse).

Mai Abu ElDahab: Still, public art is often an aesthetic gesture. Do you think this type of work is still relevant?

Sancho Silva: It depends on where that aesthetic gesture leads to or what it triggers.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Could you name a public art project, which according to you triggered something interesting? If so, could you explain how it worked?

Sancho Silva: There is a project by Lara Almarcegui that I like, called Renovating the Gros Market. Lara had been invited to San Sebastian in 1995 to do an exhibition in a derelict market that was scheduled to be demolished right after. She decided to start renovating the building herself, setting up scaffolding and painting the outer walls. This was a very simple, desperate and slightly comical gesture, with different layers of implications. One layer was the impact on the local people who happened to witness the action. You could ask yourself all kinds of questions: Who is renovating the market in such an unorthodox way? Wasn’t it scheduled for demolition anyhow? Then why is it being renovated? Is this art? If so, what does it mean? This could have drawn your attention to the building, to what it represented and what would be happening to it, to what you could do about it yourself, as an individual. A second layer consists of the impact on the wider public. This layer is more informed and contextualized, it is mediated through different types of documentation, or seen in the perspective of contemporary art practice. It can for instance spark discussions on the speculative potential of art as regards urban planning or on the power structures behind urban planning, whose interests it serves, and so forth. This is, of course, a very crude simplification. What actually happens is much more varied, complex, uncertain and unpredictable. These are very fragile, subtle and intertwined processes, and there is no guarantee that they will happen at all. Nevertheless, they exist as possibilities or paths.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Twentieth-century architecture has been greatly influenced by media images, particularly cinema, whereas architects today often build from a kind of storyboard and hence promote their constructions using the language of lifestyle advertising. Accordingly, the relationship of buildings and urban planning to the construction of social relationships is much more overt, a connection you attempt to demarcate in your work. What impact do you expect it to have on viewers? More generally speaking, is demonstration an appropriate methodology for critique?

Sancho Silva: I think the impact happens gradually, by small increments, through advances and withdrawals. My works are developed within a conceptual cluster and cannot be completely distinguished from it. I like “demarcation” but I think “demonstration” has problematic connotations. Perhaps there are moments of demarcation and even moments of demonstration in my works. But these already presuppose other things such as a more or less structured lexicon, rudiments of meaning and an approximate ontology. Perhaps there are all these moments in the work, and perhaps even moments of critique. It is important to remember, however, that the works cannot be synthesized in a statement or group of statements. I think the word “criticism” has distinct textual connotations; hence it would be awkward to attempt to apply it to a body of artistic work. I would be happy, though, if my works prove to be a convenient environment for the development of critical thinking.

Mai Abu ElDahab: Your work often deals with restrictions, either external or imposed by the work itself. Could you explain your interest in restrictions or the broader context in which you see them at play?

Sancho Silva: Closing and opening, hiding and revealing, prohibiting and allowing. These are fundamental operations for the articulation of space, and hence perception. I use them all the time in my work. Not so much to articulate space but to re-articulate it, for space is always given as already articulated. Restrictions can lead to many places.