The black work

Work : The black work
Symbolic painting of a city in black.

Photographic series. Epson pigment prints on matt paper covered with black acrylic paint. 35 x 49 cm.

Location : Grândola, Portugal, october 2014.

Reference text :

On February 15, 2013, a thrill of emotion ran through the benches of the Portuguese parliament. A song rose from the platform reserved for the public, Grândola, vila morena. The people stood up and raised their voices from the balcony to express their despair at the ravages of the austerity plans imposed by the troika. Enough was enough. Like forty years earlier, on that night of April 25, 1974, when Renascença radio broadcast this song by José Afonso for posterity, a vibrant signal of the start of the carnation insurrection that would overthrow the fascist regime. Since then, the demonstrations of poverty punctuated by this song have multiplied in all the major cities of the country and I had Grândola, brown city, the Portuguese revolutionary anthem, translated. I had no doubt that he took up the ideal of all democracy, that of a fraternal, egalitarian and sovereign people.
No doubt through professional distortion, it was the brown of the title that caught my attention. What exactly did the poet want to express with this metaphor? What was the influence of a color on a situation, not to mention on the progress of the world? For example, what made extremists of all stripes so avoid bright and joyful colors? I was putting together an interpretation when, at the other end of Europe, I learned that an Istanbul merchant had launched a new fashion: On the fringes of the agitation of Taksim Square, Huseyin Cetinel and his followers were them to repaint the stairs of Turkish cities in the colors of the rainbow to express their desire to emancipate themselves from an oppressive and corrupt power.
It was then that an idea came to me to mix the two stories like you mix cans of paint.
I was going to get off near Lisbon, at Grândola. I was going to launch a major popular protest movement by encouraging the inhabitants of this symbolic city to this time repaint their stairs, their sidewalks, the walls of their houses with the brown of their revolutionary song. It would look really bad if an entire country were repainted black to throw in the faces of the accountants of Brussels the most beautiful cry of despair the world has ever known.
Yes, neo-liberal economism was gradually turning the European ideal into grayness, the dusty color of ruins. Yes, the brown of fascism was returning to Europe. Yes, we only had to mourn social progress. Chick, we were going to do it. The inhabitants were going to rise en masse to signal with brushstrokes that if the government wanted sadness, severity, mortification, it was going to be served. In a delirium, the Huguenot chromoclast regained the upper hand over the perky colorist. It was probably not my colleague from Rodez who was going to reproach me for wanting to relieve myself in this way.
I had thought of everything: As at the dawn of humanity, in the caves of our ancestors, black paint would be made with ash, that of our ending world. I would have mixed it with the blood of the parietal Auroch, with the blood of the Iberian bull, with the blood of the fiery beast which once kidnapped Europa to satisfy its lust and which from two foreign bodies gave birth to a beautiful epic. According to the ancients, when the situation is too serious, it is always necessary to carry out a pagan purification ritual.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tenacity to follow through. Not the type to have a sharp enough knife. And I’m not a leader, far from it. I usually do insignificant, almost nothing.
So I resolved to blacken an imaginary Portugal, a Portugal imagined by me. My action would consist of partially covering with opaque black the photographs that I was going to take of Grândola, of making the city disappear little by little from my views as if the entire civilization were disappearing to leave room for nothing, for the black hole. But to the great music of the big bang, I was going to oppose my little chamber music. Where, in the tiny photonic universe, the metaphorical struggle of light and shadow is replayed, to paraphrase Denis de Rougemont, I was going to try to imprison the soul in the night of matter.
But let’s not be Manichean, black itself, as Michel Pastoureau reminds us, is an ambivalent symbol. Opposite to the black of mourning and finitude, there is the matrix black, the black of renewal. Daughter of Chaos, Nyx, goddess of the night, is promised a formidable descendant. And in my little photographic alchemy, this work in black is, I hope, only a step towards the magnum opus, towards the ultimate accomplishment which motivates all artists.
I express the same wish for our common history.

We are experiencing the end of a world. May the next one make the colors bloom on the path to our destiny.

Links :

 Grândola, vila morena

Révolution des couleurs



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