O canto dos sapos: Pablo Accinelli

Conversation between Pablo Accinelli and curator Bernardo José de Souza

Bernardo José de Souza: The title O canto dos sapos [The Song of Frogs] evokes both an image and an atmosphere, both a place and a sound landscape. It also suggests a world of living beings, even though the exhibition comprises inanimate, everyday objects, which generate a sort of collapse of the sense(s). 

Pablo Accinelli: O canto dos sapos could form a trilogy with my last two exhibitions: Entes y serpientes and El canto de los pájaros. In the case of this exhibition, the original title O canto dos sapos has this spatial element that you have just mentioned, as the word “canto” in Portuguese can mean both a song and a corner, a nook, a place. So, we could be talking about the way frogs communicate and also about a place they inhabit. Given that the exhibition room is the last one – you can only reach it by crossing the entire gallery – it has the atmosphere of a hiding place. The works could be both inside and outside the gallery program. Also, the word frog can take us to many images, stories with poison and other meanings that clearly evade any reductionist attempts. The frog is an animal into which we are unfortunately transformed or, for instance, in Argentina, people say “to make little frogs” when you throw a stone in the water and it skims the surface several times, like a jumping frog. An inert rock turned into a fast, agile animal. This overflow generated by the word itself is linked to a desire to avoid thematizing the exhibition or the art I make. When you don’t talk about anything in particular, you are talking about everything. It is in this sense that my work expands or invades its context: that of elasticity. 

B: Every time I see one of your works, I feel as if a key has literally turned inside my head – a sort of semantic betrayal generated by the objects around me. The material world gains a phantom dimension, and, from then on, begins to operate within a sui generis logic, as if imbued with its own sensibility and agency. 

P: I like the word “betrayal” as sabotage or vandalism, something that is inherent to a kind of poetry that grows without any notice. I think that this betrayal has to do with the fact that people go to exhibitions to see artworks, but sometimes my works seem to be the ones observing instead. Or, at least, they pose the question: are we the ones observing the works or are the works observing us, measuring us, studying us, like what happens to the ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris? Valentina Liernur wrote about this in relation to some of my exhibitions: “[the works] level out our existence in relation to the rest of the objects in the room, and transform us into something to be observed”. I believe this is where this phantom dimension comes from: the space that the work gives us. The air that separates the works is turned into a trap that makes us feel exposed. I think a good example of this is the work with the broom sticks against the white walls, which mimic the space the air generates. 

B: I see your works as a sort of tele-transport: their inescapable immanence produces a transcendental experience – from here to another space/time, another world. Or would it be from here to this same reality only transfigured?  

P: I think my work is related to waiting and to the state we are in when we are waiting and observing. To wait for a friend, to wait for someone to get off the bus so you can sit down, or when you clean your house. What we see in these moments is full of details, which are so close and so repetitive that they become more real.  Some of our remote thoughts are suspended in favor of our most immediate thoughts, which become the center of the energy. The works are made of objects that are directly linked to this state: a subway seat attached to the wall, everything that we can do with a paperclip to pass time, or trays that are literally waiting to be used. In this sense, the exacerbated details (the cut on the plate, the negative of the paperclip, the newspaper outlines) challenge reality so it becomes larger. Someone once told me that the works seem to play the role of an inverted telescope; they are bigger than what we see; they incorporate a larger landscape. I think it has also to do with that. 

B: I remember a friend who once told me she was astonished not by the technology behind a computer but by the things that are absolutely banal, prosaic, such as the functioning of a lock – for her, an unfathomable mystery! (laughter); and also another friend who wondered about the possibility of taking archeological remains and rather than building a vase, using it to build an anomaly, perverting the idea of use/function attributed to things in their alleged past. I’m telling these stories because they seem to be dealing with issues that your work triggers in me. 

P: I’m also fascinated by the simple or the simplified, by the shortcuts that we humans take to change our predicament, such as opening a door with a credit card or using a door to make a table. It is a material development that is also linked with those things we constantly need in order to be, to build, to live. A few years ago, I thought that my works had to be inhabited mentally, that they had to trigger this type of projection. The cement beds with inflatable pillows emerge from this, and also the white photographic paper surrounded by padlocks. I don’t think my work deals with perverting the idea of use, but perhaps it gives continuity to the possibilities of objects in a spatial sense. A broom stick can be a measuring unit to measure our context or ourselves, with everything else this implies. To hang some dusters can give them an identity that was hidden behind their use, without perverting them, which I would consider slightly violent, but instead attributing them a place that is different from their place a priori. In this sense, I never change the space in which I’m exhibiting; I never add walls; I never change the lighting. A better way of asserting the elasticity of the objects is to use the landscape as it is. The works seem less manipulated, as if they were being observed for the first time. 

B: In some ways, some of your works are the opposite of ready-mades, as they are recreated as the image of an object that already exists. It seems to me that you are exploring the redundancy of existing, recognizable forms. And this makes me think of your desire to not create new objects, but re-propose our relationship with the material world that is already there. 

P: The incorporation of the replicas of objects adds an extra layer to the pieces which, before that, already raised the question of them being something I made or bought. In both cases, they seem to belong to a moment prior to their industrial production. The replicas go back to the models of the object; they bring the objects back to the category of pre-products, as a friend likes to say. At this point, it is fitting to ask a question I have been asking for a while: do I have to produce more or do I have to produce less? This is a question that I feel that our world has been asking us a lot. At the same time, I used to deal a lot with coincidences, something that inevitably brought some kind of resolution to the narrative. Once the coincidences were removed, the spaces recreated by the objects multiplied and the surroundings became enlarged. What space is recreated by a subway seat, by a set of bags of charcoal with keys and by these white structures that go up to our waist? I go back to thinking that the quicker a work takes us to the exterior world the better. 

B: Your work happens in the interstice between narrative and abstraction. There seems to be, at least, these two paths that split and reconnect at some point: they activate narrative repertoires and, at the same time, exhaust the narrative possibility taking it to the edges of language. 

P: There are situations, objects or sentences that belong more to a condition of question, rather than a condition of answer. I want my works to give rise to a condition of question, which is perhaps abstraction. In fact, sometimes, this produces a certain discomfort which is deactivated when someone says something. No one says anything until someone says something. The exhibitions could be a finished crosswords game, and our task is to write the sentences used to find the words in the game. Several things appear summed up like loose words, almost emojis (paperclips, keys, the fire on the bags of coal) or, for example, the trash can that looks like a drawing of itself, its most summarized version. I have a personal interest in questions, in the sense that what appears in the exhibition is as important as what we cannot see. 

B: You have an obsession with keys – keys and padlocks – objects that seem to be always closing down meanings and unblocking/revealing new semantical nexuses, like in the white photographs that you just mentioned. 

P: For a while now, I have been wanting my work to be a sort of machine where anything can go in it. A subterranean off-camera voice that, like in crosswords or the epistolary genre, is able to fit in all genres that escape categorization. The incorporation of keys and padlocks has something to do with this, but also the surfaces that reflect the surroundings (the stainless steel of trash cans and trays, and also – why not? – the metal of padlocks and keys). 

B: Even though, at first sight, your work gives off the impression that it is promoting a strict organization of elements in the space, all in all, I believe it does the opposite: what it does is to precisely disrupt the perception of the world through the creation of several visual tropes. At the same time that your work can be read as highly rational, it also exudes a strong affective and memory charge. The works are like extensions of our bodies, the doubles of ourselves, of our immediate and imagined realities.  

P: Every once in a while, the works are thought of as examples only. The title Duración interna is related to that: what we see is a possibility that is internally generated amongst many others. The same happens with the titles with measurements. They measure the same way they measure other objects (a shoelace, a sequence of shoes). Things are obviously imprinted onto things; they replicate themselves. In this sense, the distance that exists between the works could be related to memory and affection. We see the objects, but we don’t fully recognize their material charge, their past, or the hierarchy between them and others. This distance somewhat disrupts a value system, questioning us about the visibility of the works and of objects in general. There is a touch of camouflage, of being and not being, which is also analogous to the state we experience when we are waiting for something to happen.