BIOGRAPHY
Cristina Lucas was born in Jaén, Spain, 1973. Lives between Madri & The Netherlands
2008 Cristina Lucas – Talk, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands;
Cristina Lucas – Cain y las hijas de Eva, Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid;
Eurasia. Geographic cross-overs in art, Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto – MART, Italy;
The Furios Gaze, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
2007 10th Istanbul Biennial
2004 Cristina Lucas, Fundación Ars Teor Etica, San José, Costa Rica
Selected Bibliography MEDINA, Cuauhtémoc,
Zero Killed (cat.), Mexico, Centro Cultural de España, 2004; RUBIRA, Sergio.
TESTIGOS/WITNESSES (cat.), Charta, NMAC Foundation, Vejer de La Frontera, 2006; SÜTÖ, Wilma,
Talk (cat.), Rotterdam, Stedelijk Schiedam, 2008.
INTERVIEW
Cristiana Tejo: Leonilson, a very important Brazilian artist who died in the ’90s, has a work named Leo não consegue mudar o mundo [Leo Cannot Change the World] (1989). Once in an interview you said the same: the artist cannot change the world. However, your work is very committed to serious issues of contemporary politics and economics and seems to softly drive the audience towards an accurate state of consciousness about ethics. In your opinion what is the place of art in contemporary society?
Cristina Lucas: It is a fight against the lack of conscience and common stupidity. Nietzsche maintains the definition of philosophy as a fight against stupidity. Nowadays contemporary art has to work on fields some other disciplines have failed.
Cristiana Tejo: Pantone, the 2-D animation that you will present at the 28th Bienal de São Paulo, carries a recurrent strategy presented in previous works: the use of playfulness for communicating the discourse of power. In a vertiginous informational and visual society is lucidity the most efficient way of unveiling realities?
Cristina Lucas: It is the same strategy that is used at school when the system brings us inside dominant culture. To pervert that language to tell something a bit different is a powerful transgression. In this case the changes are so extended, big and brutal, and we know a bit of some other times; I am thinking of WWII for instance, it is just a 5-second gap, but the media insist on this period with hidden propaganda intentions.
Cristiana Tejo: The work shown in this Bienal depicts maps made only by colors of political changes in the world from 500 BCE until 2007 CE. Can you talk a little bit about Pantone in order to contextualize it for the Brazilian audience?
Cristina Lucas: I do not believe in particular audiences.
Pantone is based on the borders, frontiers and maps of the last 2,500 years. Everyone who is able to recognize a map as a collective agreement is able to understand. What lies behind this, which we must be aware of, once again, is that most of the political changes are made based on violent confrontations and heritage. We must confront and learn from these bloody processes to act differently in future times. I started
Pantone in 2005 with a pattern of that year and I went backwards step by step recovering information until one point in which cultures from each continent were running. So I found out that in 500 BCE the cultures that were running were the Olmeca and the Chavin in America, the Greek and the Etruscan in Europe, the Carthage, the Aksum and the Kush in Africa, and the Persian Empire, the Indian culture and the Chinese dynasties (most importantly the Han Dynasty) in Asia. In order to get the most accurate information I checked out several sources, but I only paid attention to the most official ones. For instance, I reconstructed Africa mostly through the
Brittanica Encyclopaedia, America through the Real Archivo de Indias [Royal Archive of Indias], but I have been using political atlases at Complutense University and Amsterdam University with the advice of several historians. But even when I try to make it as accurate as possible, the main reason for making this animation just with colors and no names on it is to make us think about the video of nation and identity from another aesthetic point of view.
Cristiana Tejo: What are your expectations about the 28th Bienal de São Paulo that aims to rethink the model and role of the biennials nowadays?
Cristina Lucas: The Bienal de São Paulo is one of the oldest biennials in one of the newest and most dynamic countries. Brazil, in the New World, with a society that has a fantastic knowledge of history and tradition, seems to me a perfect place to reflect on many “given” truths.
Cristiana Tejo is an independent curator and director of the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (MAMAM), in Recife, since January 2007.
Projects with updated content
