The Current Situation
2015
In my work process, the research is not very obvious, but rather a set of ideas that arise and for which I try to find meaning. The Current Situation tries to find similarities in two quite distinct events that I witnessed and tried to establish a relationship. One day, I woke up and, literally from my window, I saw two very specific actions happening: right in front of my apartment, they were cutting the last of three palm trees due to a scarab infestation; at the same time that this was happening, I also heard the sounds of demonstrators in front of the Assembly of the Republic, protesting against the austerity measures. The sound of these two events merged and I began to associate them and search for their meaning.
This work is the continuation of a work that I have been developing in which video and sculpture combine and create a particular moment in the relationship with the spectator. My starting point is the need to deconstruct the idea of author, which in fact has been a way to capitalize the name of the artist and his work with the assumption that it is simpler to reach the public with a formally balanced narrative. Although there are formal and conceptual similarities in my work, this is not a concern. There is the presence of writing, used in the videos’ voiceover, which exists in previous works.
I think the work tries to link two very real and specific events to show that everything is connected. And economy, more specifically the doctrines of capitalism or neoliberalism, was designed to copy and imitate patterns that exist in nature, giving it have an incredible, quite destructive force. In this work, I have tried to reflect on the situation that happened all over the world, and in particular in southern Europe, after the financial crisis that began in 2008. What I did was to develop the idea that the southern European countries that were in a more delicate economic situation were the same ones that had infestations in their palm trees. There is the attempt to find a relationship between a natural event and a social and economic event, almost as if they had influenced one another.
Pedro Barateiro in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2017)
The Current Situation, 2015 | Installation
Pedro Barateiro
On the one hand, biology and, on the other, economy. The video begins with a prologue with three recent news pieces. The first is the fact that the word “culture” was considered the word of 2014 by the online edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, since it was one the most searched words in that year. The second is the news of the tragic death of a giraffe illegally transported in South Africa. And the third is that the obituaries editor of The Economist magazine considered 2014 the year of the “Farewell to escapism," considering that, from now on, it is impossible to escape, that is, wherever you go, there will always be an Internet connection to hook you up with the rest of the world. There are many areas of knowledge that interest me, not necessarily related to art, although I believe that art, in some way, reflects in all the areas of life.
Os esforços de Pedro Barateiro para chegar ao presente, by Nuno Crespo (Público, 2015) [port]
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