IN VOCA01
OPORTO ART MAGAZINE, PP.48-51. JULY 2008

Voca – Is your work auto-biographical or fictional? Or, in another perspective, perhaps it only looks for the register of an internal imaginary but not necessarily personal…

Rute Rosas – What I do is auto-referential, auto-biographical, but it is also fictional. I create other realities. It is not an album or a diary. It is not intended to have a narrative. It doesn’t concentrate only on me. It comes from me. If it was a diary, I wouldn’t exhibit it, but it also truth that it is my life. What happens is that my life is much alike to the life of any another person, and as I use to say: more important than what keeps us apart is what keeps us together. In this way, apart from the exercise of self-conscience and auto-criticism, I need to be involved with what encircles me, with the Other. Without this Other, nothing makes sense. I do not exist. (…)

V. – We understand it is a reflexive process. Being the starting point this interaction with the Other and knowing that your work is within the scope of self-knowledge, what is the added value of this exterior/interior transition, personal sphere to the public sphere?

R.R. – Reflexive/introspective or vice versa, reflexive in the direction of the reflection of the Other and of the Self, or the others that exist in me and that, sometimes, surprises me. The existential experiences are very rewarding, but more important than the experiences themselves; it is the attention we pay to them and what we pick from them.
There are men and women who cross our lives, just passing by of staying more permanently and that leaves a mark in us, with their own experiences or with their work, their writings, or statements, their talks, their glances, confessions, gestures…
When I exhibit or place a work in contact with the admirers/public, I only propose something which is very simple but simultaneously very complicated to obtain in the XXI century: a little of predisposition, attention.
The word interaction is so much used that it seems to have lost its meaning. A dialogue is a magnificent process of interaction. But it is necessary some commitment so that there is action and reaction.
I believe in the possibility of “touching” the Other. Even if only for a moment, in a reflection, appraising or turning him/her remembered, activating what seemed to be hidden or forgotten.
It happens that only few times I know I’ve achieved it, but I don’t know to give up, I don’t want to, I cannot and I can’t explain the reason.

V. – More than touching a homogeneous public, you prefer to touch the single person “the Other”. This moment of predisposition to talk could then be a moment of mutual identification where the individual recognizes him/herself in your work and the work gains meaning in the reading that the individual makes of it. Are you interested in provoking duality, familiarity/discomfort in the admirer of the work?

R.R. – I prefer the terminology admirer-participant, either physically active or not, depending on what they come across. The reasons are diverse but, in the scope of this talk, I think it makes sense to fit it into the question of plurality and diversity.
This Other is heterogeneous with common characteristics as the fact of being human, but with its singularities that make each of us unique and simultaneously close and similar.
In Art almost everything interests me, except what it is not. And that is much.

V. – And Oporto?

R.R. – Oporto is my hometown. I was born here, I grew, live and work here.
I love my language, some traditions and I am proud of my roots. My identity is this. If it had been born and grown in another place I would be different.
Because of this, I also am critical enough as far as the Portuguese, Oporto, and Portugal are concerned.
Oporto should not be nor intend to become, to my understanding, a metropolis. To be a great cosmopolitan village with always better conditions of life, with everything a city should have, that is okay.
As for Arts or the artistic panorama… I feel it is essential to travel and to know other realities to understand ours.
Oporto is neither better nor worse than other places. It is what it is. It has its own people. It has enormous defects as any another place and also its virtues.
The problems of the artistic panorama are not in the cities, in the places… they are always in the people. We all are responsible for what we have, some more and other less responsible. The political, social questions, economic and human investment in the education, the culture, the education and the information to the population are transversal and parallel to the artistic production and to the artistic panorama.
Let us say that this last part of the reply, though being true, is very convenient.
Anyway, we can try to do something. I do what I can and I think I know how to do it from my experience: I was a pupil, an adolescent; I am teacher, a plastic artist, a woman, a citizen.
I learned with what I received either positive or negative, desirable and undesirable, from what I observed,… what I felt, what made me laugh or cry,…
As teacher I learned to supply the tools that I did not receive and that lacked me as a student, I give continuity to some teachings I haven’t forgotten, which I learned while I was a student from regrettably few professors and artists, and those I keep inside of me.
In the same sense I learned that it is very important to monitor the pupils and to contribute, in case that they are interested in it, to prepare them for the professional life; to be by them helping them to build their foundations, so that they may feel safe. I feel it as a moral and ethical obligation.
I have seen the results of this work and I feel very happy. Some became friends and colleagues, other successful colleagues.
I say this because it is not about getting young people to work for me, becoming my assistants, it is about guiding them in their personal projects and trying to promote them somehow, even if it is their first public exhibition.
I consider that there is no competition in Art. Art is superior to it.
I value the ethical strategies.
Wanting to become a “star”? Wanting to become an “artist”? I do not understand it. I do not lose time trying to answer these questions. The media answer for me.
As far as Time is concerned… who knows…
My work and the exhibitions or projects that I regularly carry through in the most diverse spaces, just happen as long as they please me and as long as I can talk, creating a simple basis of agreement with the people who invite me to do it. I have to feel free to arrive at an agreement. And, thus, dialogues are created, right?



Excerpt of a talk/interview carried through for Voca through email during the month of May of 2008.