Títulos, Paço das Artes
(16 November, 2015—10 January, 2016)
Paço das Artes (Arts Palace) – a venue run by the São Paulo State Secretariat for Culture – is set to host the exhibit Títulos (Titles) by Thiago Honório, the artist selected for the 2nd Paço das Artes Artist Residency, starting November 16, 2015. Admission is free.
Created in 2014 by the venue’s art director and curator Priscila Arantes, the program is designed to foster contemporary art creation and research. “The Paço das Artes Residency is intended for established artists and curators. This differentiates it from Temporada de Projetos (Projects Season), created in 1997, which is geared towards early-career artists and curators,” says Priscila Arantes.
Títulos features 190 academic works the artist has been invited to supervise or examine as a member of thesis committees at different educational institutions from 2006 to 2015. Those works include Final Papers, Interdisciplinary Graduate Course Papers, Educational Intervention Papers, Postgraduate Specialization Monographs, Master’s Qualification Reports, Master’s Dissertations, and Doctoral Theses.
In the exhibit, these works will be pasted onto one another, and a circular hole measuring 8 centimeters in diameter will be punched into each. Together, the works will create a large “body” whose design will evoke a skyline as a result of their different sizes, heights, thicknesses, surfaces, bindings, writings, fonts, and spine colors. In doing so, Thiago Honório looks to problematize the notions of knowledge-sharing and interference as it relates to his experience as an artist and an educator.
For the critic Nancy Betts, who witnessed the project’s development at Paço das Artes, the starting point for Títulos is the Duchampian gesture of appropriation. “Building on ‘dead,’ discarded, de-semanticized archives, the artist performs a poetics of resignification – a detour which deprograms the primitive status of inertia, fatigue, routine, or forgetfulness, and proposes, through an organizing force, articulations that pertain to the art sphere,” she notes.
According to Marcos Moraes, the use of the raw material employed in teaching and production subverts certain relationships habitually circumscribed to specific places, spaces, and settings, and to the singularities of the professional relationships and conditions we attribute thereto. “Títulos plays with that, as not only does it simply fray out, but it also perverts the figures and mixes up roles, changes up the outfits of the artist, researcher, professor, advisor, committee member, reader, examiner, archivist, librarian, collector, curator... passionate and obsessive,” he argues.
In turn, Galciani Neves asserts that Títulos is not simply about accountancy-like records of what one has done, but perhaps an invitation to exercise the practice of silence. “Thus, Títulos acclimates us to the challenge of valuing what one loses,” she concludes.
works
Títulos, 2015
Estudos para Títulos, 2015
texts
Da rasura, da “marginália” e do silêncio como genealogia de umvolume incerto, Galciani Neves
Acerca de títulos, ou sobre o volume, a penetração e o vazio, Marcos Moraes
Leveza, Nancy Betts