Biography

Pedro Pousada (1970) is an Assistant Professor at the Architecture Department of FCTUC. He is also a researcher at CES (Centro de Estudos Sociais, Laboratório Associado-UC).His current research interests deal with a set of works from advanced contemporary art, (specifically works developed by Gordon Matta-Clark, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Jeff Wall, Mike Kelley, James Casabere, Angela Ferreira, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Nuno Sousa Vieira, Nuno Cera, Rodrigo Oliveira, that have highlighted the colonization of the symbolic and the aesthetic by dominant economic forms. He is also a visual artist with extensive experience in the field of contemporary drawing and an advisor of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC). His artistic work is regularly shown and he has participated in individual and collective exhibitions. He graduated in 1993 from the Curso Superior de Artes Plásticas/Pintura at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa. Studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, between 1995-1996 with Serbian painter Vladimir Velicovick. From 1999 till 2010 he was an Assistant at the Drawing curricular unit of the Department of Architecture of the FCTUC. He is currently responsible for Desenho III and Arte e Cultura Moderna graduate classes. He is also teaching methodologies of Art research I at the College of Arts Contemporary Art PhD. He is currently vice-director of Colégio das Artes.He concluded his Phd in 2010 with the dissertation "A arquitectura na sua ausência" (Architecture in its absence), where he discussed para-architectonic and spatial practices that became prevalent in Early Modernism (1916-1930) and developed into a focused item of Pos-minimalist contemporary art production.His PhD thesis argued that these art based spatial practices are related to the themes of urban and architectural form in the sense that they deal with the anthropological and cultural aporias of humanized space, as well as with the semantic complexity of organized space. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS In contemporary art theory there is a "steadily growing" body of scholar research both international (Hal Foster, Anthony Vidler, Beatriz Colomina, Jane Rendell, Giuliana Bruno, Jonathan Hill) focusing and debating the mutually inclusive relationships between artistic and architectonic culture. This "Beaux-Arts revisited"research has been done from different but not necessarily antagonistic or exclusive methodological standpoints such as psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, architectural theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, art theory and art history. Paraphrasing Hal Foster one can claim that within the world of cultural productions an "Art-Architecture complex" has, since the late 1960's, consolidated its stance. In my research I propose to address these dynamics from the portuguese visual arts outlook specifically from the practices that can be sited, spatially, in the "expanded field" [Rosalind Krauss], post-studio, post-conceptual contemporary framework of art making [Peter Osborne] and the temporality of the "art after the end of art" conceptual frame work [Arthur Danto]. Architecture appears in the context of these artistic practices as a space of production and socialization of intersubjective relationships [Jane Rendell's "critical spatial practices" has become a methodological instrument in my research]; it's the spatial configuration of anthropocentrism whose kinetics (History) puts itself between the haptic experience of the body (which, as a spatial device, conflates the isotropic and the organic, as one can infer from such pioneering videos as Bruce Nauman's Wall floor positions produced in 1968) and the space that remains undisclosed to the body (the landscape as a visual and a sensory metaphor of posterity and of the unfinished and boundless). It also appears as the ("derisoire" or seductive) realism of the built object where artistic autonomy and Weltbildung (world making) become site specific-with its "given economies, cultures, materialities and promises of security"[Detlef Mertens]. My starting point is that the artists associated with these spatial practices seem to subvert Walter Benjamin's observation that "Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction"; artists stand as a collectivity in a state of optical and tactile enhancement of the built environment. In this context I've been trying to give my contribution to a comprehensive study on the issues of dwelling, architectonic, urban and public space interactions as they are scoped, discussed and creatively transformed by contemporary art practices. This has also been done by narrowing down and filtering this discussion to a more focused area, specifically the Portuguese art context. I want to understand and give a coherent mapping to the multivalent nature of artistic spatial practices developed by Portuguese authors. I have been studying works that range from performative actions, video and film practices, installation art, visual and mimetic apparatus: painting, drawing, printmaking, readymades; my primary question is to understand how authors such as Ângela Ferreira, Rodrigo Oliveira, Nuno Sousa Vieira, Nuno Cera, Manuela Marques, Rui Matos (merging the "post studio turn" with "relational aesthetics", and the occurrence of an intermedia status quo in artmaking), manage to relate and to critically address spatial and architectonic typologies such as: place, public space, landscape, urbanscape, dwellling, domestic space, primitive hut, container, site-specific, situation-specific, anti-monument, counter-monument, ruinment, entropic space, immersive atmosphere, environment.I think that my research can also give a significant contribution both qualitative and critical to a description of the visual poetics that have developed since the cultural epoch of modernism around the spatialization of intimacy, and the reading of the domestic and community realms as social constructs. In line with these interests and folowing the core of my PhD research, I have been also studying and reflecting upon an assorted group of themes and artworks that are positioned within these five parameters: 1) the paramount of constructivist culture: the sotsgorod (socialist city) and its new way of life based on social condensers, the agit-prop of everyday routines, (the new beyt), American efficiency and the power of the Soviets; 2) the non-stop camping of libertarian and ludens engagement designed by Constant Niuwenhuis, a performative example of Henri Lefebvre concept of spaces of representation; 3) Baudelairian poetics, its sense of life as a struggle between survival and unproductiveness, of urban space as simultaneously foreign and familiar; 4) the concept of unheimlich seen by surrealist artists (Paul Aragon, Max Ernst, André Breton, Georges Bataille) as a turning movement of the inner self developed through symbolic stimulus and where urban and architectonic space acquire a magnetism of belonging and disbelief; 5) the Hannoverian Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters (1919-1937) as a primal editing site where one can perceive the Being as an environment, post-war german cultural and social predicaments in action, the modernist novelization of historical, patriarchic and sexual subjects ; 6) the ruinments of the expressionist space subtractor and minimalist improviser called Gordon Matta-Clark;