sancho silva

2008-06-22T16:49:00.006+01:00

Ghetto

2007-12-07T17:01:00.008Z

Mudam, Luxembourg, 2008

An invitation to design the interior architecture for two large rooms in the museum’s basement where 13 Portuguese artists would exhibit their works as part of an exhibition. Most of the works were not commissions so the task consisted in creating the architecture of display for a series of already finished works. But how could architecture separate or otherwise establish connections between an individual artwork and another, the artwork and its public, the artwork and the architecture itself?

Hello again,

Here goes then a second version of the design for the rooms. I've done some modifications according to what you suggested. A new element was introduced: benches also to be made with bricks of Y-tong.

I would just like to clarify that my work for this exhibition consists, firstly, to provide a vocabulary for the articulation of the rooms (brick walls, windows, benches...). Secondly, to propose a point of departure (an initial articulation). Thirdly, in managing and sustaining processes of discussion and negotiation concerning aspects of the design to be altered according to your requests and technical and budgetary demands from the museum. This means that you may, if you wish, suggest modifications to the design (shape, circulation, disposition, placement of the benches, etc.)

Finally an explanation of what I called “disturbing elements.” I understand these as aspects of the design that minimally disturb the classical or habitual viewing conditions of your works.
I do not intend, surely, to prevent moments in which the visitors completely immerse themselves in your works (understood as autonomous pieces) and momentarily and completely abstract themselves from their context of reception.

But I thought it could be interesting to work on the margins of such moments, whether these be moments of distraction (as when one “falls on one's self,” looks around and disconnects from the works) or moments of transition (as when one passes from viewing one work to viewing another work.) It was in these marginal zones that I attempted to introduce disturbing elements. To the extent that these elements interfere in a more or less subtle way with the reception of your works, I see them as questions that confront you and that may trigger processes of reflection and negotiation.

All the best,
sancho

This project was produced for the exhibition "Portugal Agora" curated by Clément Minighetti, Marie-Claude Beaud and Björk Dahlström. In the rooms where shown works by Gil Heitor Cortesão, Alexandre Estrela, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Ricardo Jacinto, Bruno Pacheco, Miguel Palma, João Queiroz, Jorge Queiroz, Rigo 23, Pedro Sousa Vieira, João Tabarra, Rui Toscano and Francisco Tropa.

2007-11-23T18:55:00.000Z

Rear Window
Some notes on Sancho Silva’s work
by Filipa Ramos, 2006

You don’t see Sancho Silva’s works: they are not made to be observed but to make you see other things.

The Portuguese artist Sancho Silva (Lisbon, 1973) has had an odd education for someone in the art world, with qualifications in Pure Mathematics (BA) and Philosophy of Language and of Consciousness (MA). His studies didn’t go to waste, his work redolent of space, time and perception.

Sancho’s creations are delicately balanced between rationality, calculation and abstraction, transposing these elements onto works that challenge our knowledge and perception of the space we move in.

Both Atractor (1999) and Captor (2003) reflect this. In the former, a tunnel connects a door to a window located on the opposite side of the room. There are two seemingly opposite ways to experience Atractor: either by getting inside the new area created by the plywood tunnel, thus being trapped inside a claustrophobic space that leads to a locked source of light, or entering a room from the other side, where it is possible to see the outside of the tunnel without experiencing its contents. Both ways lead to a fragmentary view of the work and reflect such opposing forces as inside/outside, seeing/being seen, looking inside/looking outside, hiding/showing. In mathematics, a binomial is an algebraic expression of the sum or the difference of two terms. Sancho gives form and sense to this concept.

The other work, Captor, is even more cage-like: in the Pinksummer Gallery in Genoa, Silva created a plywood, cone-shaped tunnel ending in a glass capsule. The entrance of the tunnel could only be reached from the gallery’s office, whereas access to the gallery was only possible through a different door. Captor divided the space in two: arriving at the gallery from one door, the viewer saw the tunnel with the capsule facing the room but couldn’t get inside it; arriving from within the office, one could only get inside the cone, look out onto an exhibition space that was not directly accessible.

Presented at Manifesta 4, Gazebo (2002) has simillar logic: Sancho created a closed box, only accessible from the outside of Manifesta 4. Once inside it one could perceive the interior of one of Manifesta’s exhibition spaces through thin slits while in the room, the only thing to be see was the wooden bunker.

Through such division, Sancho re-creates, interprets, questions and offers new ways to perceive three-dimensional space. He also reflects on our ability to see, hear and become aware of our surroundings through our senses and our understanding.

How we perceive our surroundings depends on our knowledge of its mechanisms, understanding its rules and anticipating cause and effect. By changing these rules, challenging common sense and subverting the typical division of space, Sancho confounds our expectations and makes us re-examine our own physical relationship with the world around us. His works are a game of hide and seek where everything is visible and yet out of reach and located oddly.

Cinema and architecture are also major themes in his creations; these pieces in particular are redolent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. All of the key elements are there: the structural weight of established architecture, the thrill of perception, the connections between interior and exterior, private and public, active and passive actions, and the conflict among the viewers between observing and being observed.

His work Cyclopean Eye: Berlin (2006) returns to these same themes. Seated in a dentist’s chair, the viewer looks into a conic structure that ends in a ‘stereoscopic sight machine’, showing a rapid succession of images with fragmentary sequences of movement through urban space in Berlin. The viewer remains static while the images fly before their eyes. Silva’s studies in the Philosophy of Consciousness have clearly not been forgotten and can also be found in his works Film machine (2003) and Ether (2003), the former a recreation of a film projection using a window and the movement of the viewer through space and the later a funnel-shaped structure connecting a sofa with a TV showing static. On the other hand, Nihilator (2003), Vertizon (2004) and Modulators (2004) are three works that develop connections between the interior and exterior of buildings, establishing a similar relationship with the city to the one developed in Cyclopean Eye, even if in this case is a virtual one.

Hut

2007-10-23T02:46:00.000+01:00

Praça Afonso de Albuquerque, Lisbon, October 2007

Developing on previous works such as Infogon (collaboration with John Hawke, 2005) and Studio (collaboration with Tobias Putrih, 2006), Hut is a plywood circular structure, placed in public space, which can be entered only from below (by crawling) and where one can remain hidden and isolated. The roof is a translucent plastic dome and the interior circular platform is carpeted.

photo: Ana Pato

Tourist

2007-09-20T19:10:00.000+01:00

Heidelberg Kunstverein, September 2007

A wooden pavilion composed of two adjacent chambers, each with a separate entrance, divided by a translucent screen allowing visitors in one chamber to have a diffuse view of the interior of the other. On chamber A (the tourist’s) there was a small table, with a bench, facing a window with vertical blinds looking onto the garden. On this table there was an image of Heidelberg from which three of the most famous Heidelberg’s monuments had been cut-out. Chamber B (the surgeon’s) had a table, also with a bench, that faced the translucent screen. On this table the visitors could observe, through a lens, the cut-out monuments from the image of Heidelberg.

60x60x60

2007-03-01T10:30:00.000Z

Biaggio Steps, La Velletta,

Malta

, February 2007

The design of the venue for the final exhibition of a workshop with Maltese artists. During the workshop the artists had been invited to do works answering a series of exercises while respecting two restrictions: they could not manually construct the works themselves and the works had to fit inside a box measuring 60x60x60cm. For the exhibition a tunnel was built that crossed through the space restricting the visitor's movement and only allowing certain fragments of the space itself to be seen. The boxes containing the exercises were attached to the wall of the tunnel. The artists were Francesca Balzan, Austin Camilleri, Celia Borg Cardona, John Grima, Monica Spiteri, Priscilla Griscti, Margaret Farrugia, Patrick Fenech and Irene Zammit.

Stand

2007-02-20T13:32:00.000Z

Design of Lisboa20 gallery stand, ARCO art fair, Madrid, 2007

A stand shaped as a spiral. A labyrinth where visitors loose orientation immersed within the particularity of art works. At the end of the spiral a staircase allows visitors to have a view of the fair from above, and thereby regain orientation.

Cyclopean Eye: Cairo

2007-02-10T12:09:00.000Z

February 2007

A vision machine for three-eyed creatures. A suspended wooden structure where one may insert one's head and look along tunnels at three monitors displaying a very fast succession of photographs. The photographs were taken while walking along three trajectories leading from the center of Cairo to the desert or countryside until the urban fabric dissolves.

Satellite

2007-02-02T17:50:00.000Z

February 2007

A vision machine made of two suspended wooden pyramids joined at the apex. A hole on the junction point of the pyramids allows one to partially observe a satellite image of the city of Cairo back-lit by neon lights. One may then visually scan the image, fragment by fragment, without, however, ever being able to see it simultaneously as a whole.

Involtino

2007-02-02T11:00:00.000Z

Parfiri Building, Bossarino (Savona), February 2007
[permanent installation]

A partially buried wooden observatory allowing one to see, through a system of mirrors, the inverted landscape of the industrial valley of Vado Ligure.

Street Museum

2007-01-20T17:24:00.000Z

Praça dos Leões, Porto, 2007

A wooden shelf-like construction that invited passers-by to open its back-lid and deposit objects inside.

2006-12-27T19:29:00.001Z

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.

Musée Lumière

2006-11-29T23:40:00.010Z

Empty lot by Ottawa Street, Montréal, March 2008

A museum of light. A small wooden construction "floating" on the snow in an empty lot in old Montréal. The glowing white snow provided the theme for the museum. But it also provided a time-frame, for the museum would be dismantled after the melting of the snow would cause it to "land."

The interior of the museum was shaped like a spiral along which were displayed three "artworks," all having light as their medium.

The first of these works was a small circular window, a glass "iris" with a metal "pupil" consisting of a combination lock.

The second work consisted of a fenced-off window-cone protruding outwards from the spiral. Attached to the extremity of the cone was a back-lit photograph depicting an adjacent derelict hallway frequently used as a shelter by local homeless. In front of the photograph, midway down the cone, printed on Plexiglas, hung a small text quoting a website advertising new lofts for sale on a nearby street:

Light is a basic necessity of life. Here on William Street, near the water, the light pours in. The brilliantly designed warehouse-style windows and thoughtful use of materials create the kind of space you dream about.

The third and last work, located in the central chamber of the museum, consisted of a camera obscura in which the adjacent street was projected onto the soles of a pair of old shoes.

Musée Lumière was produced during an artist residency at the Darling Foundry, Quartier Éphémère.

Fragment

2006-11-29T19:30:00.005Z

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, February 2008

Fragment was a small architectural structure originally intended to be placed in urban space in Hiroshima, Japan.

It was designed specifically to resist easy understanding and interpretation as to its intended purpose and mode of use. A strange and foreign space, filled with seemingly random volumes and holes. In it, the distinctions between architecture and furniture, doors and windows, roof, walls and ceiling could not be clearly drawn.

And yet Fragment was a structure that presented itself rather clearly as a space to be entered and used. The gap it attempted to open in the functionality of urban fabric called itself to be filled, in the way of a puzzle. What uses could the structure trigger? How would it be appropriated?

Inside Fragment one finds a clue, or perhaps a decoy. A fragment of a vehicle, the result of a traffic accident, found by a road in Hiroshima, is displayed inside a vitrine as a museum object.

Fragment was produced for the exhibition "Shelter/Survival" curated by Takeshi Matsuoka.

Faro

2006-11-28T01:25:00.016Z

Fábrica da Cerveja, Faro 2008

A plywood structure inserted into the architecture of an old fortress in Faro's city center.

At the end of the tunnel, a small slit allowed one to look onto a dark chamber where a camera obscura projected, with the aid of a mirror and a lens, the cityscape (view A) onto an old plastic gasoline container.

Along a second, perpendicular axis, two corridors disclosed views B and C, to the left and to the right respectively. To the left was what could be called a "negative window" looking onto Faro's delta, i.e. a window in which the habitual opaque/transparent relations are reversed.

view B (long exposure)

view B (short exposure)

To the right was a one-way mirror reflecting both, one's own body and the negative window on the background. Attached to the mirror was a reconstruction of the window's frame and beyond it a strobe light flashing at 6 seconds intervals. When the strobe flashed, for a split second, the dark shape of the window's frame was formed on the mirror.

The result could be described in terms of a "lag" on perception. Between two opposing (and complementary) movements of decomposition and reconstruction, something was lost and something was added.

This project was produced for the exhibition "Articulações" curated by Nuno Faria.

Wall

2006-11-28T00:36:00.007Z

Royal Collage of Art
London, 2002

For the exhibition it was necessary to build a wall dividing the entrance hall. As a strategy of camouflage I offered to design this wall myself, as my contribution to the exhibition.

Walls usually have the function of articulation and division, they are used to split a space in two, or to create two spaces out of one: one before, the other after.

This “before” and “after” point to a dimension of time that is important. For walls always imply the possibility of a passage, the possibility of a door. The spatial dimension of the wall's thickness corresponds to the timely dimension of the passage it proposes. But could this equation be exaggerated to the point of monstrosity?

This project was produced for the exhibition "The Straight or Crooked Way" at the Royal College of Art, curated by final year students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art (Miguel Amado, Max Andrews, Louise Coysh, Tatiana Cuevas, Marcello Grioli, Nav Haq, Rachel Kent, Francesco Manacorda, Erin Manns, Beth McDowell, Eliza Patten, Abigail Scholar).

Cyclopean Eye: Berlin

2006-11-01T16:12:00.001Z

Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2006

A binocular vision machine displaying a very fast (3 images/sec) succession of photographs taken while walking via divergent trajectories to the outer-limits of Berlin, until the urban fabric dissolves. The left eye sees the north-bound trajectory while the right eye sees the south-bound one.

2006-06-28T23:53:00.000+01:00

by Luca Cerizza, 2007

In the guise of machines for seeing, Sancho Silva’s works question the way we look at the world, suggesting how sight and the body are defined and regulated by social laws and devices, by habits and limitations. His installations are presented for the most part as forms that are minimalist in appearance, with somewhat retro, even old-fashioned appeal, but with a completely contemporary agenda. While they descend from an extremely long speculative tradition regarding optics and visual perception, they tell us about the ambiguous and continuously negotiated boundaries – between sight and power, public and private space, inclusion and exclusion, control and exhibitionism – that characterize our daily lives. Silva’s machines entail mostly individual and highly subjective processes; they are often isolated in rooms, and we too are alone as we experience a glance that can be altered, selective, and new. We are invited to observe, spy, re-define a portion of the world in renewed fashion. Silva looks at languages such as painting and cinema when he defines canvases, frames, and sequences of images, or when he frames views to reveal new relationships between man and the surrounding landscape. These spaces bring to mind peep-shows, ancient military apparatuses, or sighting tools; they are positions from which one can exercise one’s curiosity and a voyeuristic pleasure about a situation, a landscape, or other individuals. In Silva’s works, the act of looking is always tied to a position of power, but one that is deconstructed and called into question.

During this time of total exposure, Silva’s works are devices that help us to look at the world more carefully, encouraging a more conscious and active glance.

This text was firts printed in the catalogue of the exhibition Où? Scènes du Sud : Espagne, Italie, Portugal, Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France, 2007.

2006-04-09T17:52:00.000+01:00

Spatial Shifters: Sancho Silva and the Architecture of Perception
by Jennifer King, 2006

A shifter, according to linguistic theory, is a term whose referent changes according to the person using it. Words like “I” and “you” are considered shifters because their meaning is dependent on the situation in which they are articulated. In a conversation between two people, for example, both individuals can use the word “I” to refer to themselves. As a result, the person to whom “I” refers is constantly changing—or, to be more precise, it is constantly shifting.

Just as the linguistic shifter demonstrates the contingency of speech, the work of Sancho Silva demonstrates the contingency of space. For although each of Silva’s works is site-specific, and therefore unique, his projects all share one remarkable trait: the ability to reveal how a single environment can be perceived in multiple ways. By exploring the different (and often contradictory) “articulations” of a single space, Silva’s works function like shifters—they reorient the meanings attached to otherwise static locales.

An early case of such perceptual shifting can be found in Silva’s Attractor of 1999. For Attractor, a work executed at Ar.Co (Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual) in Lisbon,

Portugal

, Silva constructed a plywood tunnel leading from a door of a room to its only window. Visitors entering the room through this door found themselves enclosed within the tunnel—a passageway offering access to the window (and to such features as sunlight, fresh air, and the view outside) but precluding any knowledge of the room in which it was situated. By contrast, visitors who entered the room through a different door encountered the exterior of the tunnel, which appeared as a closed, three-dimensional structure in a space devoid of natural light. From this second vantage point, the interior of the room could be seen, but the tunnel remained inaccessible. Silva’s bifurcation of the space thus created a series of binary oppositions—inside/outside, closed/open, natural/artificial, visible/hidden—in which the assignment of terms remained crucially unfixed. To take the last set of words as an example, what remained “visible” or “hidden” would have changed (or shifted) according to one’s position within the space.[1]

As one of several early projects to probe the nature of perceptual experience, Attractor marked an important turning point in Silva’s artistic production. Prior to Attractor, the artist had already begun to question the stability of perception. In Ladder of 1998, for example, viewers were encouraged to climb an outdoor ladder in order to look through what appeared to be a telescope pointing skywards. Upon peering through the eyehole, however, viewers found themselves presented not with a view of the sky, but with a view of the ground as seen from the top of the ladder. This visual reversal, created by the insertion of a photographic image into the viewing device (which was not, in fact, a telescope, but rather a make-shift slide-viewer), reflected Silva’s interest at the time in playing with viewers’ perceptual expectations. In this and other works involving optical manipulations, Silva strove to create representations which, in his words, “contradicted real perceptual data, thereby turning reality and the habitual workings of perception against themselves.”[2] With Attractor, however, Silva began to move away from an interest in perception per se, to an investigation of how perception is externally constituted. Leaving behind the use of tricks or techniques intended to deceive the eye, Silva subsequently undertook a series of works concerned with the physical and institutional structures of perception.

In order to appreciate the critical gesture performed by Silva’s architectural interventions, it is important to situate his projects along a historical trajectory of works that have sought to expose the ideological underpinnings of the museum’s supposedly neutral gallery space. As Brian O’Doherty described this concern in his now famous “white cube” essays of 1976: “The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion. It stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions.”[3] For O’Doherty and other artists of his generation, the closed hermeticism of the white cube served both to mask and perpetuate the social and economic elitism intrinsic to the modern gallery space. “The spotless gallery wall,” O’Doherty observed, “subsumes commerce and esthetics, artist and audience, ethics and expediency. It is in the image of the society that supports it.”[4]

By the time O’Doherty’s essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, artists like Michael Asher and Daniel Buren had already begun to create works that challenged the presumed autonomy of art and its institutions. In his 1970 installation at the Pomona College Art Gallery, for example, Asher constructed a continuous interior space in the shape of two converging triangles by constructing temporary walls and a false ceiling within the art center’s preexisting exhibition galleries. As part of this construction, Asher removed the gallery’s main doors and concealed the remaining doorjamb and hardware, thereby creating a seamless transition between inside and outside. In the absence of any doors, the space remained open to the public 24 hours a day—a further erosion of the gallery’s previous isolation from external effects. In Asher’s description, “Exterior light, sound, and air became a permanent part of the exhibition.”[5] Or in the words of art historian Thomas Crow, “Asher reproduced the classically pristine, white-walled gallery to the point of fetishism, but the very being of the gallery was cancelled by its space being perpetually exposed to the outside world.”[6]

In Silva’s Shortcut of 2002, one finds a similar rupturing of the boundary between the gallery space and its external site. For Shortcut, a project created at Inkijk, an art space run by SKOR (Foundation for Art in Open Spaces) in Amsterdam, Silva constructed a seemingly simple architectural intervention that produced a sophisticated set of critical and perceptual effects. Using the openings provided by two large windows located at 90 degrees from one another, Silva built a plywood tunnel cutting diagonally across the corner of the building at the intersection of two streets. The space of the tunnel was therefore continuous with the outside—a quality that was reinforced through the use of ramps extending from the tunnel to the streets on either side [figs. 9, 10]. As Silva explains, “This meant that it was possible to walk through the building, passing from one street to the other, without actually entering it.”[7]

What is important to note is that although Shortcut was carefully integrated into the preexisting structure of the building, it nevertheless punctured the integrity of the previously distinct interior space. Through its “cut,” the work excised a volume from the inside of the building and transferred it, temporarily, to the domain of the street. In so doing, Shortcut challenged the function typically assigned to the interior of the gallery. As Silva himself describes this intent:

By creating a zone of ambiguity (the space inside the tunnel belonging simultaneously to the gallery and to the street) Shortcut questioned the spatial and perceptual mechanisms through which the gallery and the street are differentiated. If, on a physical level, this differentiation is implemented first and foremost by the material walls of the gallery, on the level of pragmatics it is implemented through the different roles that are provided and presupposed for these spaces’ users: the street being designed essentially for circulation and the gallery being designed essentially for display. As an art project, the most apparent function of which was the facilitation of circulation, Shortcut reversed and dramatized the ways the perceptual mechanisms of the site attempted to impose determinate roles and behaviors on their users.[8]

Through his architectural intervention in the Inkijk building—what one might consider to be a “rearticulation” of the provided space—Silva shifted the viewer’s frame of reference from the false neutrality of the (previously insulated) gallery interior, to the contingent forces of the urban surroundings.[9] Building on the investigation of space first pursued in Attractor, Shortcut functioned to reorient both the physical and symbolic perception of the gallery and its external site.

In his recent work, Silva has radically expanded the possibilities of what it means to propose a spatial intervention. Working in collaboration with artist John Hawke, Silva has extended the scope of his perceptual investigations to explore the ambiguous definition of “public” space. In a series of projects grouped under the title Orange Works (begun in 2004), Silva and Hawke employ the ad hoc vocabulary of construction sites—plastic netting, rubber cones, security tape, cheap wood—to create subtle spatial demarcations. These quietly subversive works, interwoven into the gritty urban fabric of Brooklyn, New York, range from the unobtrusive arrangement of orange cones under a highway overpass to the (unauthorized) construction of multi-use shelters in low-income neighborhoods. By moving their practice outside the institutionally sanctioned space of the gallery, to what Silva has termed “spaces of ambiguous jurisdiction,” the artists continually test the limits of what it means to create “public” works. Situated in the most nominal of “public” spaces (locations that are often neglected or overlooked), and seen or used (or even destroyed) by an unmonitored—and therefore unknowable—“public” audience, Orange Works provoke a reconsideration of the very meaning of “public” art.

“Spatial practices,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life.”[10] If de Certeau is right, then Silva’s works represent the always present possibility for resisting the externally imposed structures of spatial experience. Like the transient “I” of language, projects like Attractor, Shortcut, and Orange Works stand as evidence that the specific articulation of any space holds the ability to shift its meaning. And just as every speech act provides the opportunity to individualize language, Silva’s work reminds us that every structure holds the potential to reshape our perception.

[1] Silva himself has alluded to the mobility of spatial signification at work in Attractor, observing, “Within the mental maps that we inevitably construct of our spatial surroundings, the area inside the tunnel oscillated between being placed inside the room (to where it normally belonged) and being placed outside (to where it now, temporarily belonged.” Sancho Silva, A Record of Some Works of Sculpture with a Corollary Statement, (M.A. thesis, Pratt Institute, 2005), p. 4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 79. Originally published as a series of essays in Artforum in 1976.

[4] Ibid., p. 80.

[5] Michael Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), p. 34.

[6] Thomas Crow, “Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 138.

[7] Silva, “Selection of Works,” (unpublished writings, n.d.), p. 7.

[8] Silva, A Record of Some Works of Sculpture with a Corollary Statement, pp. 23-24.

[9] This shift was perhaps most apparent in the fact that shortly after its construction, the work was used as a place to sleep by an anonymous squatter.

[10] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1974), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988), p. 96.

Studio

2006-04-09T17:06:00.000+01:00

Collaboration with Tobias Putrih
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, 2006

The furniture and interior design of the Studio, a multi-functional space in the MUDAM in

Luxembourg

. A response to Tobias’s modular pieces that could be assembled and disassembled by the Studio's users to form temporary constructions with variable degrees of functionality. A heavy wooden structure, whose interior was accessible only by crawling or rolling, containing two carpeted platforms where one could remain isolated.

Kunstgriff

2006-04-09T16:53:00.000+01:00

Schwerin Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, 2006

A plywood tunnel extending into one of the galleries of a museum displaying 17^th century paintings. The tunnel had two eyepieces that framed details of the paintings. Going around one could enter the gallery and see the painting to which the details belonged in its totality (Hermann van Aldewereld’s Allegory of the Five Senses) as well as the outside of the tunnel and the eyepieces.

photo: Pedro Tropa

Displacements

2006-03-27T22:10:00.000+01:00

House of the Portuguese ambassador in Berlin, 2006

A one-day exhibition with Portuguese artists in the occasion of a dinner offered by the Portuguese ambassador. The action consisted of displacing a series of objects from different parts of the house, such as: tire, boot, onion, pot, empty ketchup bottle, piece of wood, coat hanger, bottle of Chinese sauce, scrub.

Cochliomyia Hominivorax

2005-04-09T16:12:00.000+01:00

Collaboration with Nuno Delmas
Galeria Ara, Lisboa, 2005

The space was darkened. A transparent Plexiglas cylinder hung from the ceiling containing large live flies (Cochliomyia Hominivorax) and a small electrical bulb at the center. The shadows of the flies were projected onto a spiral-shaped paper screen that split the gallery space.

Vertizon

2004-04-09T15:52:00.000+01:00

Collaboration with Pedro Rogado
ZDB, Lisbon, 2004

A tunnel crossed a room and shot out of the window, hovering above the street. The tunnel became progressively smaller, which meant that in order to reach its end one had to bend down, kneel down and finally crawl. At the end of the tunnel, on the floor, was a slit allowing one to view the street from above.

Ether

2003-04-09T15:48:00.000+01:00

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2003

A long rectangular plywood cone, open on both sides, whose smaller opening matched a television screen. A couch was placed in front of the bigger opening. The television was showing only static.