#contemporaryart – WHY WE NEED ART NOW?

Jovan Mattos im Interview: „Pop-Kultur 2.0“

Während die Museen kurz vor der erneuten Schließung stehen, bleibt die Straße für alle offen. Dies gilt insbesondere für Brasiliens Hauptstädte. Auch die Küstenstadt Salvador de Bahia verfügt über zahlreiche Graffitikünstler. Ihre Zeichen, Codes, Texte und Bilder sprühen die urbanen Aktivisten sowohl auf die teils leerstehenden Holzhäuser der historischen Altstadt als auch auf die moderne Betonarchitektur der autoreichen Neustadt. Jovan Mattos, Jahrgang’ 83, gehört zur Szene. Wem gehört die Stadt?, fragen eindringlich seine Graffitis, die er mit GIFs kombiniert. Die Digitalisierung und Überwachung des urbanen Raumes findet gerade weltweit statt. In Brasilien wird das Thema Sicherheit in den Stadtzentren immer weiter vorangetrieben. Jovan Mattos Graffitis beschäftigen sich mit diesen Schnittstellen, der Mensch im digitalen Zeitalter, zwischen Kontrolle, Überwachung und Vereinsamung sowie der Sehnsucht nach Kommunikation, Austausch und einem direkten Miteinander – Voraussetzung einer jeden städtischen Kultur. Ein Thema, das uns also alle angeht. //

While the museums are about to close again, the street remains open to all. The Brazilian coastal city of Salvador de Bahia has numerous graffiti artists. The are urban activists spray their signs, codes, texts and images on the partly empty wooden houses of the historic old town as well as on the modern concrete architecture that characterises the car-rich new town. Jovan Mattos, born in ’83, belongs to the scene. Who owns the city?, his graffiti ask us, which he combines with gifs. The digitalisation and surveillance of urban space is happening all over the world right now. In Brazil, the issue of security in city centres is being pushed further and further. Jovan Matto’s graffiti deals with the interfaces, the human being in the digital age, between control, surveillance and loneliness as well as the longing for communication, exchange and a direct togetherness – prerequisite of any urban culture. A topic that concerns us all.

Hortense: Jovan, du lebst in Salvador de Bahia, in der drittgrößten Stadt Brasiliens. Eine Stadt, deren koloniales Erbe noch überall spürbar ist. Es ist eine charmante Stadt, reich an Kulturgeschichte, die aber von vielen Spannungen gekennzeichnet ist. Salvador verfügt zugleich über eine rege Szene an jungen Künstlern, Gestaltern, Performern. Ihr sorgt für frischen Wind im Kulturbetrieb und ihr prägt das Stadtbild nachhaltig durch eure Interventionen und Räume mit. Der urbane Raum ist auch Thema deiner Doktorarbeit, was erforscht du? / Urban space is currently the subject of your doctoral thesis, what are you researching?

Jovan: I develop a poetics about the interface for the realisation of urban art. For this, I play visually with familiar symbols of contemporary communication, such as a computer keyboard or a mobile phone. Equipped with a black and white stencil, I walk through the city – always with the intention of creating poetic interference via the interface…

Another interface is created by using the QR code to display GIFs and videos on the street. My aim is to explore what can be human, sublime or subjective in the in-between space to create narratives in what is conceived as this space and time of passages to create an interface between the urban space and the virtual space.

Hortense: Mich würde interessieren, wie Passanten auf den bisweilen gefahrvollen Straßen, auf deine Graffitis und Barcodes reagieren? Gehen sie auf deine Bilder zu?/ How do people deal with the graffiti and barcodes? How do they approach the images?

Jovan: I actually follow the works, especially those on the more common routes that I take. And so I observed once a family taking a photo of themselves next to my picture „conversa01“. They took a photo with their mobile phone but didn’t decipher the code. The staging in the code carries a certain hermetism because of this lack of culture of decoding.

There is another interesting aspect of „conversa01“: I chose a small abandoned playground that was overgrown with tall grass and bushes. After my intervention, the park and the playground was suddenly taken care of. Maybe because I did something obvious, they cared about the place again, maybe also because the work tells a bit about the digital world in which children live and how at the same time parks are abandoned .

What surprised me was to see that my work was not erased during the renovation. It is a completely illegal work and it was obtained.

Hortense: Graffitis haben in Salvador eine große Akzeptanz. So gibt es etwa erfreulich viele Künstlerinnen in der Sprüherszene, du hast davon berichtet und eine habe ich dann getroffen. Hat sich der Umgang im urbanen Raum zuletzt verschärft? Deine Arbeit „dronefobia“ von 2019 verstehe ich als deutliche Kritik an der digitalen Überwachung des Stadtraums. / Has the interaction in urban areas recently become more severe?

Jovan: Salvador has been benefiting from a political fight between right and left wing, based on who builds more improvements to the city. But this changes almost nothing. Slavery and secular system of inequality have produced a structure of urban violence in which the experience of such obscurity creates a desire for some state surveillance.

„For the urban artist, therefore, there are two challenges: the state and the law that prohibits our graphic interventions, on the other hand, a society of necessity that harasses us, sometimes violently. In this sense, the freedom of non-surveillance goes hand in hand with the possibilities of spending a night in no-man’s land. To intervene at night in the city is a political act of civil disobedience, as well as an act of courage. „

Hortense: Eine Nacht im Niemandsland, was genau meinst du damit? / A night in „no man’s land“, what exactly do you mean by that?

Jovan: What I mean is, when I moved around the city at night to intervene with art, I certainly felt a sense of freedom … but in fact the police can show up at any time, just like everywhere else. On the other hand, if we didn’t have the surveillance of the state, which can be a protection, we would be like in a kind of „no man’s land“, I mean, a territory without law.

Hortense: Weshalb existiert bis heute eine Form der Sklaverei in deinem Land? Könntest du uns das genauer erklären. / Why is that form of slavery still exist in your country today? Could you explain that to us in more detail.

Jovan: In Brazil every year 50.000 to 60.000 people are murdered. It is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with people with a lot of money, a white elite. On the other hand, most of the poor are black, the beggars are black, the prisoners are black. Many explain this reality by the fact that Brazil was the last country to end slavery. After slavery no piece of land was given to the former slaves, nor a program or historical reparation. So, what I mean is that slavery, and the way it ended, is also responsible for the existence of this structural violence in the city.

Hortense: Deine Graffitis visualisieren für mich auch unsere Sehnsucht, ob groß oder klein, miteinander in Kontakt zu kommen. Für diese Sehnsucht findest du stimmige Bilder. Wie sich während des Covid-Lockdowns zeigt, führt uns der reine Austausch über digitale Medien aber in eine körperliche Isolation, womöglich in die Vereinsamung. Ist das deine Kritik als Künstler an den neuen Medien? / Is that your criticism as an artist of the new media?

Jovan: A criticism-confession! (laughs) It is true that this cyberspace encourages encounters between people, allows us to meet many people who have already passed through our lives, to maintain contacts with family and even to meet people in a reasonable way. But on the other hand, there is an affection of loneliness in this relationship with a mass of information, images, sounds and videos.

„The citizen’s room can become a solitary cave, a profile on the Internet can be an avatar or a mask to hide the body and the eye to eye. In this sense, the poetry of the interface is be based on the relation of use of the subject, its facts and subjectivities, its possibilities in this interfaced space.„

All this technocracy interests me, all the interface apparatuses, relations and technological creations, but not only through criticism, but also through celebration. This fetishistic effect that makes people hitch themselves to what “tech”, stimulates me, because it is a self-analysis, an attempt to push away the ghost of arranged identities and easy added values. For me, it’s important to balance between a technophile and a technophobe posture.

Hortense: Wie hat die Pandemie, Covid19, deine Arbeit verändert?/ How has the pandemic, Covid19, changed your work?

Jovan: It hasn’t changed much, I was always a little too homemade, I go out a little. In addition, this forced virtualization of everyone and everything, reinforced the idea of exploring a virtual, urban, something in the interface, an urban design or a code.

In Salvador hast du mir damals eine deiner Wandarbeiten vorgestellt. Dafür verarbeitest du die typischen Pflastersteine Salvadors. / In Salvador, you introduced me to one of your wall works where you used the typical cobblestones of Salvador for it.

Yes, I worked for a few years with Portuguese stone, this technique of creating mosaics in black and white stones for pavements, but I applied this reference to sculpture, fusing the stone with urban objects, an organic and human form in a city context. The pavement thing brought me to the urban, so I made gallery and salon art inspired by the street. This art also had a regional and local reference, like an accent. When I turned to urban stencil art, I was looking for a certain lightness of medium and a direct connection to the urban. Combining the virtual global with the physicality of the local is one of the challenges I try to work on. Today, creating is about connecting the stone with the pixel, light and dark, stone and digital, light and heavy, local and global.

Jovan Mattos, Memória, 2016 – Portuguese Stone – b/w stencil graffiti

Hortense: Was könnte sich deiner Meinung nach in den Museen Brasiliens nach deren Wiedereröffnung, nach dem Lockdown, verändern? / What do you think could change in Brazil’s museums after the lockdown?

Jovan: I would like more young people to go to museums, in the same way that dance parties go today. I would like to see the market more connected to the museum or vice versa, I would like the museum to foster more culture, immateriality and performances, but at the same time, I would like the production of culture to be a less mysterious professional path.

Jovan Mattos, „WI-FI, Zona de Guerra“, 2019

Jovan Mattos, *„conversa01“*, Salvador, 2019

„Queerantine“ by Jetmir Idrizi

„The camera serves as a gateway to a parallel dimension, where queer identities, through the language and power of their bodies, put binary and heteronormative systems to question, the systems that have tried to alienate and suppress them for many years.“

Interview with Jetmir Idrizi, Berlin

Lieber Jetmir, selbstbewusste, sexy Persönlichkeiten entdecken wir auf den Bildern deiner viel beachteten Brasilien-Fotoserie . Eine ganz andere Stimmung eröffnet sich uns beim Betrachten von „Museum of Bad Memories“. So unterschiedlich beide Fotoserien sind, gibt es, wie ich finde, auch eine Art roten Faden, der diese und andere Arbeiten verbindet: deine Beschäftigung mit der Bildung nationaler Identität, ebenso die Frage nach Geschlechter-Identitäten und -Rollen. Worum geht es in deinem neuen Berlin-Projekt „Queerantine“; einige Abbildungen hast du mir zur Veröffentlichung zugesandt./ Dear Jetmir, self-confident, sexy personalities we discover in the pictures of your much acclaimed Brazil photo series. A completely different mood opens up to us when we look at „Museum of Bad Memories“. As different as both photo series are, I think there is also a kind of common thread that connects these and other works: your preoccupation with the formation of national identity, as well as the question of gender identities and roles. What is your Berlin project „Queerantine “ about? You have sent me some images for publication. Jetmir: My idea before moving from Buenos Aires to Berlin on February 2020 was that once: I get here, I will have the oppurtunity to show my work to different photography editors, also curators and have studio visits. But world took another turn and –– all these ideas of meeting people physically somehow vanished.

Since everything suddenly shifted to the Internet, you had to adapt to the situation. It was a matter of finding new ways to make new work. In my case, it evolved like this: I have a projector at home because, as a photographer, I’m interested in working with different artists and taking their portraits. So one day while I was talking to my friends and projecting their portraits on the wall in my living room, I got the idea to photograph them and ask them to pose for me in front of their lap-top or smart phone. I shared the photographic material I produced on my social networks.

Du hast gerade gesagt, du arbeitest mit unterschiedlichen Künstlern?/ You just said you work with different artists? Yes, Actors, Dancers, Models and Musicians …

Wie war das im ersten Lockdown mit teils Ausgangssperren, woher kanntest du deine Modelle der Berlin-Serie?/ How was it in the first Lockdown with partial curfews, how did you know your models for the Berlin series? People that I photograph I mainly find through instagram, friends of friends of friends but I do sometimes stop people on the street.

One day, Xheni Karaj, activist for LGBT community rights in Albania and Director of Aleanca in Tirana, told me that she was planning to organize a virtual Pride Parade. She knew my work that I had done during my quarantine in Berlin and now she suggested me to develop a common project that we would call Queerantine. I proposed to photograph young queer people from the Balkans in their homes during quarantine. The exhibition was published on Instagram with my works.

Through my photographic lens i tried to penetrate not only into the physical isolation imposed by the authorities as a result of COVID 19, but also the spiritual, mental and physical isolation that queer people have experienced as their everyday reality throughout human history.

Und jetzt nachdem deine erste virtuelle Ausstellung stattgefunden hat, wie würdest du diese Möglichkeit beurteilen?/ Looking back, what would you say your experience was like with your first virtual exhibition? Regarding the Queerantine exhibition the experience was good, there were more then 200 people that followed us and also we have received thousands of reactions. As it happened quite at the beginning of the Pandemic, just 2 months after the lockdown, I think we did quite good considering that we did not have much experience.

Lately I have seen that people started to develop very good virtual exhibitions even with possibility to tour through it. I think this is a quite good idea to consider even when the Museums will open so that people can virtually visit exhibitions which physically they may not be able too.

Du planst eine weitere Fotoserie in Berlin. Kulturelle Traditionen, nationale Bindungen sind erneut das Thema. Diesmal beschäftigst du dich mit der kosovarischen Kultur, deiner eigenen. Sagst du uns, worum es geht? The political and economic circumstances of the 1990s in Kosovo led to a wave of emigration of many families. One of the main destinations was Germany. Currently I am working on a project which deals with the cultural preservation of Albanian/Kosovar traditions by women in the diaspora. In this process, women have a central role. Therefore, this time I would like to focus on the women from Kosovo who brought to Germany their traditional ethnographic clothing and other belongings such as jewelry and other handmade objects.

The tradition of wearing these clothes still continues and therefore even youngergenerations girls from Kosovo when they get married or in some specific events, they travel to Kosovo to buy these clothes and after the ceremony they bring them with to Germany.

With this project the idea is to contribute to Kosovar current cultural heritage by making a visual documentation of Kosovar women living in Germany, photographing them in these clothes and artifacts at the different locations and German spaces which will enable showing the dialogue between Kosovar cultural heritage and the German landscape.

Letzte Frage an dich Jetmir, wie hat sich die Pandemie auf deine Arbeit als Fotograf ausgewirkt? As for everyone else the pandemic was not easy and especially for me as an artist that I moved to Berlin exactly 1 month before it started. Nevertheless due to current improvement of technology I have to say that it wasnt that bad as one may have imagined. Personally if this had happened 20 years ago the consequences would be worst but since we live in times where internet has facilitated comunications with each other I think it made it easier for all of us to mantain in better condition our mental health. Either by being easier to commute with friends and family or in more difficult cases commutincating with professioanl psycho therapists.

Jetmir, vielen Dank für den Einblick in deine aktuellen Projekte und für deine eingereichten Fotobeiträge aus der Queerantine-Serie, die, wie ich finde, uns sehr ästhetisch und einfühlsam zugleich auf weniger beachtete Bevölkerungsschichten in Zeiten der Pandemie Aufmerksam macht.
Alle auf dieser Seite abgebildeten Fotos können erworben werden. Interessenten dafür schreiben eine E-Mail an jetmiridrizi@gmail.com oder ich leite die Bestellungen gerne an den Künstler weiter./

Jetmir, thank you for the insight into your current projects and also for your submitted photo contributions from the Queerantine series, which I think aesthetically and sensitively at the same time draws attention to less considered populations in times of pandemic.
All of the photographs featured on this page are available for purchase. Those interested in doing so should email jetmiridrizi@gmail.com or I will be happy to forward orders to the artist.

Queerantine, 30 x 40 cm, 8 motifs, Edition: 10, Signed, Inkjet Print. 300,- €

Queerantine is a photographic project about Queer identities in Balkans. As a result of forced isolation due to COVID-19, this photographic project was made possible photographing through video calls using zoom, facetime, facebook. Through my photographic lens i tried to penetrate not only into the physical isolation imposed by the authorities as a result of COVID 19, but also the spiritual, mental and physical isolation that queer people have experienced as their everyday reality throughout human history. The camera serves as a gateway to a parallel dimension, where queer identities, through the language and power of their bodies, put binary and heteronormative systems to question, the systems that have tried to alienate and suppress them for many years. Through this project, queer identities from Albania, Kosovo and the entire Balkans revolt, their bodies are protesting to overcome once and for all the labels, prejudices and collective abuses.