Filipa Oliveira / Susanne Themlitz

 

 

 

Filipa Oliveira: I would like to talk about your practice in general. What have been the main concerns in your work? 

 

Susanne S. D. Themlitz: Ouch... main concerns... Maybe trying to focus, look and think about what exists in the fragile edges of things, take a deep breath, and focus on these thresholds so that I can understand them and decide my next step. It’s like a slow walk. I take a good look and then choose, step by step, where to put my foot. 

 

F.O. What is it that attracts you to edges or thresholds? 

 

S.S.D.T. The moment. The dot or line after the before and before the after. Things that are what they are, and are with what’s beside them, with what frames them. Context. The adjacent space. The emptiness that breathes or another inspiring moment. 

 

F.O. You mention the importance of looking. What is a watchful gaze? What are you attentive to? Can you train attention? 

 

S.S.D.T. In attention assails me. I get distracted easily. Constantly. Hence this exercise, this practice. Resolve or challenge. Finding a thread with a hair’s diameter, look at it and follow it. 

 

F.O. You refer to your practice as a ‘slow walk.’ There’s a book by Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, that impacted me a lot. Through a historical approach, the author defends that walking is not simply a way to perceive a landscape but also implies a physical and symbolic transformation of the spaces we traverse. In this exhibition, walking also transforms the aesthetic experience, and your works ask for this slow and attentive pace. 

 

S.S.D.T. Every step is time. It’s a pulse. Or a breath. And a change of perspective. It is a digestion process. Rethinking. A pearl in a necklace. 

 

F.O. Given that our society is all about speed, what does being slow, or slowness, mean to you. How is it present in your work? Does your approach to ‘slowness’ fit this new wave of philosophy that considers slowing down a new moral imperative? 

 

S.S.D.T. Are you referring to the slow walk? If we transform the adjective into a noun, we give it new importance and meaning. That’s curious. As an adjective, it’s company. It’s pulsating. Visualization. As a noun, it sounds like value to me. I don’t see myself there, but I like the idea of suspended time, a frozen moment without any imperative. Just being there. Without asking the viewer anything. (...and by the way, I’m always on a roll, with many ants running around inside me...). 

 

F.O. It seems to me that there’s a ‘beyond’ time in your work.
A certain timelessness transpires from the materials you use and the shapes you create with them. Are you looking for that sense of timelessness? 

 

S.S.D.T. Perhaps I find more than what I look for. It could also be an ‘after-beyond-time’ or an ‘inter-time.’ Some ‘inter-state.’ Maybe ‘between-the-lines,’ or even that ‘quasi-imbalances’ we’ve already discussed. 

 

F.O. Casa da Cerca is a contemporary art center dedicated to drawing. Your work is not always associated with drawing, despite it being a fundamental practice in your career. How do you see and think about drawing? 

 

S.S.D.T. The answer is: a lot. I’m constantly thinking about what I see or could see, how I see it, what it is and looks like, and what it isn’t. I often make correlations between elements and absences and drawing’s essential elements. I think of the distance from one thing to the other, from one end to the other, the perspective I have from where I am, or could be, or wanted to be.
I ‘de-perspective’ to dissect, to unfold those many simultaneous moments. I create lines and contours, and I look for voids. I think about what and how a line is, where I can find it, and its density, uniformity, and transparency. I measure or deal with distances; I substitute or compare them with the presence of things that are more or less far away. I find parallels that fascinate me (but that can certainly also seem absurd). I look for or find cracks, stains, words, or phrases, and they are drawing. I transpose moments and try to make them into drawing. Sometimes the sculptures are also drawings. For example, they are surface, line, dot, up, and down. Sculptures relate to space in concrete ways, and installation too. There’s the void, the perspective of the gaze, the far-away gaze, the magnifying glass, the microscopic gaze, fragments or not. The corners of a room, shadows, or a window’s vertical and horizontal lines; whatever is beyond it. There’s no end to it. 

 

F.O. Going back to the idea of an attentive gaze, is your gaze defined by drawing? 

 

S.S.D.T. I prefer to have several gazes. To look at things from different observatories. 

 

F.O. When I invited you to think of an exhibition that would combine drawing with a celebration of the Botanical Garden’s twentieth anniversary, where there any triggers, what inspired you? 

 

S.S.D.T. When I read about the garden’s initial concept: Quinta do Recreio [Play Farm]. An island suspended on a hill. A real metaphor. A place conceived in an urban context but based on an emotional and affective relationship with the landscape. Imported nature and landscape, parallel lines, with shade, light, water, aromas, sounds, and a belvedere. A suspended microcosm where one can roam or sit and enjoy the landscape. A place that is dear to all who live nearby, and more. 

 

F.O. Your relationship with nature is very particular and appears in your work in a peculiar way. How do you think about and question the idea of the ‘natural’? How does this questioning appear in your work? 

 

S.S.D.T. The idea of ‘natural.’ Naturally, I don’t know how to answer. I leave that question for those who look at my works more analytically, or from a bird’s perspective, like you. The natural can be impulse (but also the constructed, the artificial, if you like). The natural is or was. It can be a pretext, note, fragment, or trace. 

 

F.O. You described Casa da Cerca as a suspended microcosm. It seems to me that an exhibition — and this one in particular — is also a suspended microcosm. How did this exhibition come to be like this? We can start with its title, which places us within a space, a mental drawing. 

 

S.S.D.T. I was referring to the garden and Quinta do Recreio as a suspended microcosm. An exhibition can also be seen or felt as an island, a parallel reality. I thought of the title Um berlinde no chão, quase no meio da sala [A marble on the floor, almost in the middle of the room] as a visual moment, at least for me: a marble, a transparent ball, which fits in a trouser pocket, in which the image of what surrounds it can appear upside down, like a camera obscura, on the floor: the top-down perspective, a room, a space with walls and vertical and horizontal lines, light, emptiness,... and somewhere in the middle of a limited, closed space, a ‘marble-point.’ 

 

F.O. We enter the exhibition through a mental drawing, and then we enter the first room in which we confront a sculpture of a diver’s skin (the body is hollow, empty), looking at a diptych you created with the garden in mind. A character, a hide that tries to decipher a landscape. How did you come to draw the garden, and how does that vision relate to the act of seeing? 

 

S.S.D.T. It was through seeing, yes, and thinking about the garden. The sculpture is just there. I don’t know if it’s looking at the diptych. I don’t think a sculpture can look at something. It has no face. It’s our gaze. We are the ones who see the sculpture and the rest. I went back to the garden a few times. What caught my attention was the water. The irrigation tanks. The parallel and perpendicular lines. The layers: the tank’s checkered tiles, the plants on the surface, the roots, ghostly images produced by the wind on the surface of the water, the mirrored trees, clouds, and sky. Now that it’s done, I could propose a vast theory of ‘why I chose the water and the tank,’ but I’d rather let things as they are, even if I recognize we could pick over this bone a little further.  

 

F.O. One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is Laboratório de Desenho [Drawing Laboratory] — a large installation that brings together a myriad of objects: some created by you, others that you have collected and kept over the years. This table is a vertiginous dive into your work, into your attentive and careful way of observing the world. Tell us a little about this work. 

 

S.S.D.T. I thought it would make sense to think of
a piece based on the characteristics of this long room. It would have to follow its long walls and create a path. I installed semi-improvised tables and structures along these almost twenty meters. I gathered moments — elements found or created, drawings, magnifying glasses, and various materials. Objects that become others when I look at them carefully, in which I see drawings, think about drawings, and rethink what I saw. I gathered elements, fragments or not, above, below, leaning against these benches. There, associations happen, they intertwine and awaken. Like a leporello unfolded in three dimensions (like the panorama on the wall). And at the same time, a circular walk. 

 

F.O. We decided to exhibit this table at Casa da Cerca, asserting drawing as a tool to see the world: a coral stops being a coral and becomes an abstract set of lines. This exercise can be transposed to any object on that table. Everything is a line, surface, or dot. By what criteria do you install the table? How do you merge objects? 

 

S.S.D.T. I think of analogies and phenomena. I merge forms. I remember their original geography. I set up viewpoints, compare similarities, look at details, confront fragments, and observe parallels. Similarities and times are knitted — I use magnifying glasses and pour water into glass containers, revealing and inverting the things behind. 

 

F.O. In an interview, you said that “the coexistence of several registers is our day-to-day. It’s all one meaning, layers superimposed in a single moment.” I think this sentence is connected to Laboratório de Desenho [Drawing Laboratory] and the wallpaper installation you created for Casa da Cerca. What were your objectives for this work? 

 

S.S.D.T. Yes, without a doubt, and Sala do Meio too. The wallpapered walls, printed with my drawings and photographs of places, which were digitally transformed as collages and enlarged to DIN A0, everything was thought up from the basis of drawing. Superimposed drawings hang here and there on those walls, entirely covered by a mesh of framed digital prints. There’s also a table with drawings and ceramics in the center of the room. The ceramic glaze drew its path in color and ‘froze’ in the oven’s high temperatures, a moment hidden from me and completely out of my control. After walking through the distance of Laboratório de Desenho, one dives into Sala do Meio before arriving at the exhibition’s last room. In Sala do Meio, we become part of the landscape and its plurality. It’s another moment. 

 

F.O. I’d like to end this conversation by asking you about the importance of words in your work. It draws worlds too. 

 

S.S.D.T. That’s how I feel about words. I think about drawing, moments, observing distances, and shadows, extracting lines, places, spots, and thinking about how to find words, and phrases. It’s a layer that can only exist in this way. It’s shape, image, it says without being there. Just letters and so much more. It’s so much and its written presence is only silence.