Conversation with artist Corinne Silva and curator Cécile Bourne-Farrell
Cécile Bourne-Farrell: Corinne is currently in Athens and I'm in Camden Square in London. We wanted to have this discussion because Corinne’s recently installed piece, Once There Was and Once There Was Not, is important for the aspirations of A Dobradiça biennale.
One of the reasons I thought of you for the biennale is because of your practice related to environment. Maybe you can share how the theme of the festival and the geographical context of Mação influenced your artistic approach?
Corinne Silva: I had an initial site visit with you and festival director Jabulani Maseko in January 2023. We explored the rural landscape beyond the town, including the factory-like plots of eucalyptus trees that are the regions’ dominant industry.
CBF: Yes, it was interesting to observe how these landscapes have been so affected by the monoculture of eucalyptus. Beyond these plantations, the land is very much left unconsidered. It feels to be a rather remote place. We also went to a former mine where we could see the different rock strata, and this was a starting point for a conversation around your interest in earth and rocks.
CS: This discussion was important for the piece I went on to produce. Jabulani introduced us to what may be the last factory in Portugal still producing handmade clay bricks and tiles which are fired in a wood-fuelled kiln. The business has been in the family of Marco Cadete for several generations but his son doesn’t want to take over, so the line will be broken. I’ve wanted to learn how to produce clay bricks for a while, and I’m curious about ways to make chains of knowledge that don’t rely on either commercial or biological familial relationships.
I've been working with the production of landscape for a long time, in different ways. Recently, I’ve been considering marginalised knowledges in relation to those who work with the land. Thinking about the fragility of certain forms of knowledges – who keeps or records them, how they are recognised or valued. This was central to my video work Flames Among Stones (2019/22) which you also included in the biennale programme. In this piece, intergenerational and matrilineal knowledge transmission are explored through two intertwined narratives. The first focusses on two elders, Güler and Türkan, sisters who tend their walled garden in central Turkey. Weaving through the footage of the women planting and harvesting throughout the seasons with their daughters and granddaughters is the Kurdish folktale of Şahmaran, a snake-woman who lives in a beautiful secret garden. She holds the knowledge of this and the other worlds, of plants and trees and rocks. She passes this wisdom down to her daughters who in turn pass it on to theirs, in a never-ending cycle. Until one day she is betrayed and her knowledge gets into the wrong hands. Making the film was a way for me to think about what we value and what risks being lost, in this case female ancestral knowledges in relation to the land.
Earth has been present in my work for several years. My series of photographs Rocks & Fortresses, which I began in 2018, incorporate pigment from the earth I was standing on to make the photograph. It was a way of embodying something of the location itself in the image, while giving the place some agency in its depiction. The factory in Mação, and the possibility of working with terracotta, and with knowledge exchange, immediately resonated.
CBF: I loved the brick and tile factory.
CS: Me too. The word ‘factory’ conjures up an image of an enclosed building. But this is an open structure, an expanse of tin roof under which a few workers use moulds to produce the pieces from clay sourced from a nearby hill, which they then fire in a huge wood-fired kiln, also on-site. This ritual of stacking the tiles, feeding the fire, is so compelling to observe.
CBF: The title of your piece, Once there was and once there was not, is a traditional way to start a folk story and the first words spoken in your video Flames Among Stones, which we screened at Ciné-Teatro of Mação along with the research elements and sketches for the final piece you made.
There is such an ecological coherence to your piece here, between the source of the raw material on site, ready to be collected and re-formed, and the location of your site-specific work which is on the footprint of a former church hospital.
CS: I wanted to make the site, local natural materials, and the region’s cultural history central to the installation. The emptied site of the old hospital is located in the centre of the town. It’s a curious space, the façade of the building is all that remains, with metal grills where the entrance doors and windows would have been. It’s a place of absence that people pass by every day and which this installation draws attention to.
CBF: There is a an almost theatrical, voyeuristic aspect you seem to create. Because one cannot get in, people must peep into that empty space which has a history of pain and care as a former hospital.
I really like this seemingly naturalistic form you created with the tiles. Like in a Chinese garden, it feeds infinite paths for the imagination. You choose to keep it quite enigmatic; we do not know how far it continues after that wall. The artwork disappears out of sight, which is intriguing.
CS: There’s also another perspective from which to view the piece. It was documented with drone photography and video, which gives a birds-eye view and brings the installation into relationship with the terracotta rooftops surrounding it. A passing bird would see the overlapping tiles on the roofs and the installation in relation to one another, in a way not visible to the human eye. The birds have a more satisfying viewing experience.
CBF: It also brought to mind Stanley Brouwn’s iconic piece, This Way Brouwn (1960-64) in which he asked people to draw on a piece of paper how to get from one point to another across the city. And as we know there are multiple ways of going from A to B! The abstract form of your work can allow the viewer to read this map or pathway from their own perspective.
CS: I’m glad it feels that way, that there is space for a viewer to go somewhere with it. And I realise now that mapping has been present in many other works of mine: video Night Circuits (2018) for which I tracked the routes of urban foxes, Garden State (2015) which is a kind of mapping of one layer of a territory through a photographic installation, or collective walks around the Elephant & Castle, initiated by me and Eva Sajovic and led by local people who map on foot a cityscape undergoing rapid change.
CBF: The choice of material and the shape say a lot about the final piece. Once there was and once there was not is consistent with your artistic practice focused on transmitting ancient craft knowledge. With this public installation you brought ceramics into another level. This path of ceramics is made out of ancient organic shapes. One can find this geometric shape everywhere in the world, from Arabic tradition to the first Christians until today’s, one can recognize this significant shape. This piece speaks about the path of life, that each of us invent and live through. It is not a geometric path, but a more sinuous shape, isn’t it?
CS: Yes, that’s right. And to say more about the tiles: I often encounter these scale shapes in the human-built environment in the form of tiles or cladding on buildings on my journeys through many parts of Europe. It’s a shape from animal architecture that has entered the human vernacular – scales that cover bodies to thermoregulate and protect, just as tiles do for buildings. I began by thinking of the snake-woman Şahmaran’s scales, and then researched this pattern in Ottoman textiles, ancient Greek pottery, North American quilts. It’s present in folk art and architecture from numerous eras and geographies.
CBF: The collaborative aspect is often very important to your work, in which there is an exchange of knowledge in the relationships.
Enabling this collective contribution to the piece was something that developed through discussion with you and Jabulani, and it became central to the energy of the work. I initiated a public workshop at Marco’s factory during the opening week of the biennale and we made the tiles collectively with local people of all ages.
CBF: Is this your first public intervention?
For Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain, I made Imported Landscapes (2010) in response to the movement of plants, animals, humans and earth between Europe and Africa. This was a series of photographic works of built landscapes on the northern coast of Morocco, printed as billboard posters and pasted onto huge advertising billboards on stilts, sited in the rural and post-industrial landscapes of Murcia.
This intervention temporarily re-shaped the landscape, bringing Africa into Europe. And it spoke to time as well as place. The dimensions of the billboards suggested 16:9 screens, offering an expectation of something about to move in or out of the frame, the possibility of transformation.
CBF: The result of your Mação installation is very convincing. What did you take away from this work with A Dobradiça Biennale?
I’m thinking about the work in its relation to pattern languages. Firstly, in the repetition and placement of the tiles. When making the piece, I was thinking of it as an energetic body, a flowing entity in motion. I saw the repetition of the tiles as a way to create transition – proposing ways of remaking, reforming, and as you suggested, path-making. The second pattern language relates to the patterns between people, the exchanges of knowledge during the production process and the connections we made with each other. These are all materially present in the piece. Face-to-face exchange of knowledge is so important to me, it creates a kinship, and is a way of safeguarding learning and sharing and storing data – in our bodies, not in the cloud.
October 2024
Once There Was and Once There Was Not, installation view, A Dobradiça biennale, Mação, Portugal, 2024
