Claire di Felice in Co(ro)n(a)versation with Marco Godinho

Made In Bed had the chance to interview Marco Godinho during the pandemic on the current situation and the impact of it on his work and his future projects. 

Marco Godinho is a Luxembourgish/Portuguese artist living between Luxembourg, Paris and Germany, who represented Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He studied at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Nancy, France, at the ECAL - École Cantonale d'Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland and at the Kunstakademie and Fachhochschule in Düsseldorf, Germany. Since 2006, after completing a post-graduate degree at the ANRT - Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy, France, he has been exhibiting and realising projects and attending artist residencies around the world, in an artistic practice that uses a wide variety of mediums, involving different techniques for each project. May we live in interesting times, the title of the 2019 Art Biennale couldn’t be more accurate to describe the current state of the art world. As most of the countries around the world declared lockdown in mid-March, galleries and museums had to close, art fairs worldwide were cancelled, new opportunities were created and most of the institutions launched online viewing rooms. For artists, the current situation is difficult and unpredictable. What impact does the pandemic have on an artist’s everyday life and how does he handle the current situation? 

CdF: How did your passion for art develop and when did you know you wanted to become an artist?

MG: My passion for art developed at a very early age. As a child, I started establishing a passion for drawing which never left me. I feel that I always had this desire to become an artist - it came out in different ways since I was very young. First of all, I spent most of my time in my mother's sewing workshop, doing crafts, creating clothes and painting with watercolours. At the same time, I have very precise memories of moments of freedom and creation, playing outdoor games combining natural elements with various materials, mostly from my father's construction sites. Without ever having been really in contact with an artistic environment, this passion for art was later reinforced through painting, and even started to become an obsession. 

It is precisely at the age of 16 that I decided to become an artist. While pictorial expression had become essential to me, and due to a lack of choice of an artistic option in the high school of the city where I lived, I decided to change schools and studied at a high school in the capital city of Luxembourg which specialised in arts and crafts (Lycée des Arts et Métiers) where I then discovered philosophy, graphic design, photography, sculpture, cinema, architecture, etc..

CdF: How would you describe your practice? 

MG: I would describe it as nomadic, minimal, conceptual, poetic, and romantic in the sensitive and essential sense of the term, but I would also say that I practice a socially engaged art. My practice often starts with my personal experience to suggest a universal questioning of the state of the world. I have always been attracted by the need to go beyond artistic categories and by the importance of ideas, experience and the creative process of an artistic work that in my case takes the form of videos, sculptures, photographs, installations, drawings, performances, protocols and writings. I am interested in cultural and geographical displacement and the crossing of borders. My aim is to go beyond any form of confinement. The idea is to get away from any sort of belonging to a territory, a language, a nation and an artistic designation. My works are above all traces of actions and performances that explore through physical and mental travel various notions such as time, distance, ‘elsewhere’, and especially what is invisible at first glance. Simple gestures that introduce diverse and moving temporalities, including people, spaces and materials that surround us on a daily basis. The elements as well as nature are also omnipresent and essential in my practice. 

CdF: Could you tell us in a few words about your experience representing Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale? 

It was a very strong and intense experience, especially in the creative process and during the setting up of the pavilion. The project that I developed, entitled Written by Water, involved a lot of traveling, mostly around the Mediterranean basin (Strait of Gibraltar, Tunis, Carthage, the island of Djerba, Trieste, Istria, Lampedusa, Catania, Etna, Marseille, Nice, Ventimiglia, ...) and led me to make numerous collaborations (with blind people, migrants, graphic designers, an illustrator, an actor, an accordionist, a glassblower, a distiller, a sound and light designer, an architect, a blacksmith, etc.). The location of the pavilion is a rather complex space given that there are many constraints but, in the end, this is what stimulated me the most, to push the limits of the space to the extreme. What was also great as an experience and what brought international visibility to the project is that from the first day of opening to the public, the pavilion received a lot of positive feedback. It allowed me to meet people from all over the world and to engage in very encouraging discussions about my work in general. 

CdF: What impact does the Coronavirus crisis have on your daily life? Given that your practice is often based on meeting people and travelling how does it affect your work? 

It's true that my work is very much inspired by encounters, travels and the spaces in which I move around. The displacement is essential, but it is above all the distance, what is between words and things that interests me, it is among other things the temporality of the intermediate space, which gives meaning to my approach. Even though I was constantly on the move before the Coronavirus crisis, there were sometimes quite long moments spent in a single fixed abode. Leaving continuously but always coming back to the same point. This notion of going back and forth always questioned me and I integrated it into my work from the beginning. During those moments, when I'm not travelling, I develop projects that are more connected with my close, local environment. The house has become a very important part of it. After years without a fixed place or a house of my own, I have now been living - when I am not on the road - for about ten years in a house in Germany that I have named The Infinite House / La maison de l'infini. In order not to lose my nomadic spirit when I am in this house, I have placed the number 8 of the house horizontally to transform it into a symbol of infinity. As I consider the world as my workshop, I make gestures of the same type in this house, which make this living space open to the world and vice versa. What affects my work at the moment is that even when I'm not travelling to faraway countries for exhibitions or other research, I move around and change the place where my ideas/objects are being made, between two other places/houses, one in Luxembourg and the other in Paris. This dynamic gives the work a deterritorialisation - as Gilles Deleuze would say - that I find necessary. But I have always been fascinated also by the passage of time and waiting, so this new situation of the Coronavirus only reinforces practices that I had already experimented with before and to which I keep coming back, to stretch them even more in space and time. The whole house becomes an open-air laboratory where I mainly let the elements and time do its work. 

CdF: I saw your journal on Instagram, which seems to have already given a new direction to your artistic work while taking up the same themes that characterise you. (time, language, space...) Does this situation inspire you towards new concepts? 

The interventions that you saw on my Instagram journal are the continuation of concepts that I have already experimented with on the screen, notably in a series of works that I entitled Poems and other thresholds, only here they exist through social networks. Here is what I wrote about these gestures: "By exploring poetry writing and language thresholds in a temporal and evanescent form in the context of personal and collective exhibitions, I developed a series of actions that consist in using the written word as a daily link to the indoor or outdoor exhibition space in which the action is activated. The length of the poem is defined according to the duration of the exhibition. As many lines of text as days of the exhibition are revealed to the world in fragments. Every day, the action is repeated but never the same; it becomes a ritual and invites new ways of celebrating the everyday. This simple gesture, which materialises in different ways depending on the context, is a measure of the passage of time that reveals through the appearance and disappearance of language a breath of poetic revolt against the instability of the present time." What has changed here is therefore the format of the exhibition, which is no longer the duration the exhibition itself, but the duration of the confinement. I would say that in my case it is not the concepts that changed or that are new, but the medium through which they are disseminated.

CdF:  As your work is often installation pieces, in large spaces like the Lyon and Venice Biennials, how do you perceive the idea of virtual exhibitions and even the kind of platform like Instagram to present your work? Does the current situation inspire you to turn more towards the virtual in the future? 

You will note that the poem Isolation that I broadcast daily on Instagram is a photo of a handwritten post-it, it is also this individuality that is lost in the handwriting that I put forward.  I use Instagram as a means, a method of archiving, and not necessarily as a creative gesture in itself. The creative gesture takes place elsewhere. The virtual becomes more than ever, not only an alternative for creation, but a medium in its own right to express itself. However, I am critical and skeptical about what I see at the moment on the networks where most artists and art actors are making the virtual the ultimate solution to get out of the crisis, by substituting their exhibitions entirely with virtual recordings. Nothing can ever substitute an experience lived in an exhibition space or whatever other real context. Artistic creation in any case, as I see it, will not only be virtual in the future. The notion of space, of cognitive perception, will have to continue to exist through the experience of time, of the physical relationship to the other and the space. The question of physicality, of the trace, of palpable matter, of the environment, of the presence of the elements and of the social context in which events take place, seems to me more than ever essential and cannot be replaced only by the virtual. The virtual is for me an additional tool and has become an indispensable medium for expressing oneself and, given the exceptional conditions in which we live at the moment, it is also the means to stay in contact with others. But it remains an abstract contact which requires, and which will not be able to do without, the emotional bond that we can have when we are really in front of someone or something. In my work, the various mediums impose themselves by themselves and if in the near future the virtual would impose itself in relation to an idea that I have and whose tool of creation will have to be that of the virtual, I would not hesitate to use it. But for me it must make sense and the technique used must be in line with the idea I am developing, that it be the main means and not the ersatz. 

CdF: What are your future plans? (exhibitions etc...) Are they affected by the Coronavirus? 

Yes, my future projects are affected by the Coronavirus. Between March and May about ten projects were cancelled or moved to an uncertain date. The situation will certainly continue over the next few months and we will have to find other ways to bounce back. We will not be able to pretend that the Coronavirus did not exist and continue as before. Precisely at this moment, I should have been in Senegal for the development of a project related to the Dakar 2020 Biennale and at the beginning of May, I would have inaugurated a group exhibition in Marseille at the Friche la Belle de Mai, I would have given a lecture at the Sorbonne in the Bachelard amphitheatre in the context of my participation in the Contemporary Art Project/Maritíma 01/Mediterranean, I would have presented a new scenography created for the play Bug, directed by Fábio Godinho at the Centaur Theatre, I would have welcomed the art historian and curator Elisa Ganivet for a presentation of her work and the artist Susanna Fritscher for an artist's intervention at the ESAL Metz - École supérieure d'art de Lorraine, as part of a pedagogical workshop that I am conducting at the school, entitled De geste en geste. 

CdF: In some of your works you talk about your passion for the notion of time, how would you describe this notion in relation to the confinement where every day is the same? 

There is no more Monday or Tuesday, Saturday or Sunday. This notion of the passage of time without hierarchy was already before the Coronavirus completely integrated into my way of life. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to become an artist: it is all about the organisation of personal time. The artist organises his time as he wishes and it cannot be evaluated as a commodity, neither is it quantifiable, nor can it be measured by paid working hours. 

This is one of the most significant tests for an artist: the question of time management in an artistic practice. We don't have anyone telling us what to do and how to do it, it's a 24-hour activity where life and work constantly merge. Of course, it goes without saying that the artist is an integral part of the world and of the objective laws that are practiced in it. However, the artist must reinvent himself, using his own tools to create his own language, and this involves the subjective organisation of his own time. To extend time, to shorten it, to live it in a circular form, like a spiral that goes round and round every day, repeating itself but without ever being the same, in order to get out of the representation of time in a straight line, out of this line that only increases the dimension of the final point, of the end. 

For a long time, I have integrated into my daily life this notion of repetition, of a circular time where every day must be lived as a life in itself, a kind of precariousness, of permanent uncertainty, that is for me the state of mind of the artist. What I noticed with the Coronavirus is that people in general are not used to living this subjective temporality, to have to organise their own time and give it meaning, without being able to calculate a precise output. It is once again what the artist is led to live all his life, to give meaning to his own time and to live life for its intensity without thinking of making it necessarily profitable every second. 

CdF: What advice would you give to a budding young artist today? 

I would tell them that they should never stop believing in themselves, that they should follow their own instincts more than ever and their moment will come. It's in the long run that things are built, that a personal language is formed, and that can only be done through a routine, and through research (without a specific strategy).

Thank you.

Imagery courtesy of Marco Godinho.

Claire di Felice,

Contributor, MADE IN BED