Your art has many vehicles, we can list drawing, installation, video, performance, and even writing. How did art come into your life, and how did you follow your academic path?
I have a family background that may have had some influence: the fact that my father was a textile designer, what used to be called a debuxador. I grew up with someone who drew, with familiarity towards drawing materials, and I think that determines something in us that brings us closer to the sensitive. There is also something that was absolutely fundamental and that, therefore, I want to emphasise: in our lives – and mine is not a short one – we always have that one special day, one day that is better than all the others. What I consider to be my most special day, because it changed the entire course of my life, was the 25th of April 1974, which caught me in adolescence. The 25th of April opened up horizons I had been completely unaware of and gave me an opportunity to make a decision that, perhaps, lies at the root of my relationship with art. Still a teenager, in 1974, I became a member of the Cineclube do Porto because I had, and still have, a fascination with cinema that I cannot explain. I can say that, possibly, if at that time there had been a film school in Porto, that would have been the path I would have followed. Unfortunately, here in the city, the only thing that existed was the Escola Superior de Belas Artes, which at the time only offered painting and sculpture. Since I never got along with sculpture, I went into painting. And painting wasn’t easy either, perhaps because of the atmosphere in which one lived at the School. From the start, I did not like its closedness, the backwardness the School had in relation to the world. At the time, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation awarded a merit scholarship to the best students, and from my second year at Fine Arts onwards, I received that grant. But since, fortunately, I didn’t need it, I would save the monthly payments so that, in summer, I could go to the Venice Biennale, to Documenta in Kassel… and it was absolutely frustrating to return to the School and be given an assignment to paint a nude in oil, for the entire year after having seen the most stimulating things being done in the world. What I can say that is most interesting about what I experienced in the painting course is that I learned what I did not want to do. I also learned that, in artistic education, there is something far more important than being a good artist: one must also be a good communicator, a good pedagogue, among many other things. As soon as I finished the course, the first decision I made, and it was a radical one, was to ignore everything I had done at the School, because none of it made any sense. To give some context, there had been a shift in the art world during the 1960s, with the introduction of two fundamental elements: first, Minimalism, and then, above all, Conceptual Art. That changed everything. I had spent five years at the School, twenty years after all that had happened, without being made aware of its existence. That is, I saw these things in exhibitions and then came back here and returned to the nineteenth century. So I made a very clear decision in my life: I would learn by myself, buy the books, go to exhibitions, follow a path that was almost self-taught, though with a diploma, continuing along a route, let’s say, alternative to what was being done at the School and that I had already started during the course. In the mid-1990s, a doctoral programme in Visual Arts opened in Galicia, where I was accepted as a student, and there I truly felt that I was learning. The relationship I had with that doctoral programme allowed me to do something I had already been experimenting with before: to take risks and to experiment. That was when something came to the surface that I have been working on more intensely since then: video and moving images. Cinema returned once more. The American author Rosalind E. Krauss, who is of the greatest importance to us in the field of art, wrote a book called "A Voyage on the North Sea", which refers to the title of a work by a conceptual artist. The subtitle of the book is "Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition". This post-medium concept, from my point of view, brings us to a fundamental situation: the separation between the medium and its support – a separation that, in this case, occurs completely. In the works of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (the artist whose work gives Krauss’s book its title), there is no “normal” guiding line; there is no lifelong practice of painting… on canvas, in oil or acrylic. Marcel Broodthaers did not have that linear path, also because he came from poetry. What did Rosalind E. Krauss discover about Marcel Broodthaers? That there is another way of understanding mediality, not through the physical support, but through its conceptual support. For the author, Marcel Broodthaers does not have a continuous physical support, but rather a conceptual one: fiction. And this way of thinking of support, of the medium, not as the act of sculpting a stone or painting a canvas, but as something in our minds that allows us to encompass all the possibilities we wish, is absolutely new. Its what the author called differential specificity.

Research in Art is one of your dimensions as an artist. You are the principal investigator of the R&D project PÁR-A-GEM, which invites us, in a rather provocative way, to rethink time: its dimensions, what it gives us and what it takes from us, and its correlation with artistic contemplation. Where did the idea for this project come from, and what central questions were at its origin?
I make no kind of separation between what I carry out in artistic terms and what I produce in terms of research, for me it is all one and the same. In the early 2000s, a video I was making caught me by surprise. I was filming trees, which I like very much. In the meantime, a storm arose and it began to intensify to such a degree that I had to stay completely still and take shelter. After the wind came torrential rain, then hail... And when I was writing the title for the video, the word paragem “paragem” (meaning stop) came to mind. I wrote “paragem” and realised that I had never looked at the word in that way before, and I noticed that within it there are two opposing verbs: parar (to stop) and agir (to act), which led me to a reflection (that I have continued to this day) on the recovery of a notion that was much attacked throughout the twentieth century: the notion of contemplation. In the twentieth century, art, especially the early avant-gardes, lived in a kind of euphoria with the idea of speed and its gradual increase, the so-called progress, as for example the Futurists, who praised speed and vociferated against the past. In our time, we can almost make a 180-degree arc; we are tired of so much haste, so much speed, so much moving around. The contemplative idea, which was so criticised during this euphoria of speed as being the passivity of the useless, changes in our time and transforms itself, not into passivity, but into resistance. Although I do not entirely agree that contemplation was ever passive, since art is made to think and to reflect. For that reason, I introduced this element of contemplation, added a term to it, and called it “active contemplation” in order to distinguish it from the kind of contemplation known previously, and I began to bring into discussion a series of elements that derive from my doctoral research and that relate to what happened between the end of the twentieth century and what we are living today: the introduction of digital devices and the compression of temporality that these devices brought. From a certain moment onwards, we began to live not according to human time, but according to machine time. And that machine time, in my view, does not adapt to human time. This idea of thinking of art as a possibility of resisting contemporary speed has interested me since my doctorate, and when I brought this question to i2ADS, there were people who joined me in proposing to speak about time and temporalities from a single premise: perhaps the most important political element artists have to speak about in our time, is time itself! And our time is a time without time. But without time, there is no art. And even less is there reflection on the part of the spectator through that art. At the end of the twentieth century there was an “invention” in terminology – the so-called New Media and the New Media Artists. They brought back an idea that was dead and buried: that the medium is bound to its support. They invented a meaningless term, wich is digital art. I would also add the infamous word interactivity, which makes reflection turn into playfulness. This does not interest me; what interests me is, rather, the possibility of making people think, in an age in which thinking is almost dispensable. Today, the most common thing is that people no longer even write, they instead speak to their mobile phones, because writing and thinking have been set aside. This causes me anxiety. There is a general impatience that the PÁR-A-GEM project tries to counter – not only to counter, because that is not enough, but to build an alternative to make people think about the subject, even though stopping, slowing down, is no longer enough. This system – let us call it the capitalism of communication – dominates us. It's chameleonic, it adapts. In PÁR-A-GEM, we dedicate ourselves to investigating what is perhaps the only form that presents itself as the absolute antithesis of this impatience and this compression of time: duration. It is about making the pleasure of time, once again, something that can be enjoyed. PÁR-A-GEM takes us back to the beginning of this conversation, because it is probably the most interdisciplinary research group within i2ADS: it includes people from the visual arts, from music, from theatre, from performance… because all these areas are confronted with the theme. The last intervention we did had a name that played with the word duration and the German word daueraktion – duration as an action, which has to do with the idea that time seems to expand. This interests us greatly. We have a video, about forty minutes long, entitled "Três Respirações Alongadas", which was accompanied live by musicians from ESMAE. And at the end, people applauded. I always hold that optimistic perspective of realising that, in the end, people are still receptive to this. Perhaps they would not go voluntarily, but when they are “caught” in something like this, they even enjoy it. Everything that has this relationship with duration admits only two possibilities in its reception: either we reject it from the start, or we let ourselves go… and letting go is so good, it is a journey made in contemplation.

It’s interesting to see that time is so present in all your art, sometimes in a very evident way, other times more subtly. Why this fascination with time?
The question of time goes beyond everything we’ve been discussing here. Philosophically, there is a relationship that we humans have with time that we cannot ignore – although the system makes us think otherwise every day. We experience time through three layers: past, present, and future, and this is what makes us human: we have memory, and we can only understand our present if we comprehend our past. It is through understanding the past, via the present, that we can structure a utopia of the future. In other words, history. In this sense, as Peter Osborne (an English philosopher closely connected with aesthetics and time) points out, art functions in the same way as history: it encompasses these three layers of time; it is utopian because no one can predict the future. No artist creates a work meant to be seen at that precise moment and then discarded (excluding, of course, performative arts, which are singular in their occurrence). The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted something very curious: when Bach composed his works, there were no processes for producing or recording music; it was played for an elite of 20 or 30 people in a hall or church. Today, three centuries later, Bach is a global reference for music lovers because technology allows us to listen to him in our homes. This shows that often works of art become more interesting with time, sometimes even two centuries later, because the conditions of reception change. At present, I have a Mid-Career Exhibition at the Centro de Arte Oliva, titled “O arquipélago que ressoa” – I wouldn’t call it a retrospective, because it’s a tightly curated selection – but it includes works from 1997 to today, and some pieces, that I chose to present now, make far more sense today than when I created them. At the entrance, there is a video made in 2007 at the Convento de Monchique – a beautiful space – about impatience, not knowing what you want, having so many choices and being unable to select any. Today, this impatience is much stronger than in 2007. I also have a photograph which is the only one I made from 2019 to 2025. This speaks to the importance of selective process: why make dozens of photographs? I could, but I am only interested in that one. In this context, I would say that the “dictatorship” of scrolling has transformed images into what I define as para-images which are images that, when they begin to form, disappear. Kant already noted, regarding the sublime, that nothing printed can convey what we feel when seeing something extraordinary. In our time, all of this is being undermined. It is within this challenging context for artists that I confront myself daily and aim for my work to intervene. I believe all of this is connected to time and to how people live compartmentalized lives in increasingly short-lived ephemerality, following the logic that the past is gone and the future is yet to be seen. Living only in the present. Yet our context often leaves us alienated… I will use a term I coined, which, for me, together with time, is perhaps the most important: desanesthesia. What is desanesthesia? According to the concept, it is art that refuses to be anesthetized by the context of the time we are living in. I found the term in the etymology of the Greek word anaisthēsis, which referred to the negation of beauty. Later, in the 19th century, anaisthēsis came to mean anesthesia, or the negation of pain. What I propose, and have been developing as an artist, is to uncover beauty in order to show pain. This desanesthesia can be carried into artworks, aiming to awaken those who have become anesthetized. Everything that surrounds us culturally and in our leisure time conspires to increase this anesthesia. The more anesthetized we are, the less we think. The word ephemeral also comes from Greek and originally referred to a butterfly that spent months in its cocoon and, upon emerging, lived for only a single day. For the Greeks, the ephemeral was one day; for us, it is a millisecond. This shows how time has been compressed to limits that are no longer natural for us. The American philosopher Fredric Jameson said that Kant theorized the sublime as the incomprehensibly large, while he describes the techno-sublime as the incomprehensibly small. Perhaps it is time to think carefully about where we want to go, and frankly, I am not pleased with the path we are following. A path of absolute pragmatism, haste, and overwhelming speed. A professor of mine once told me that dazzlement causes a kind of blindness. Indeed, our society increasingly needs devices that dazzle and anesthetize us. All of this is complex for those doing artistic work.

As an artist and researcher, how do you balance the practical and material dimension of creation with theoretical and critical reflection, given that both are always latent?
The French author Georges Didi-Huberman, who is of the atmost importance in our time, wrote a book about the Nazi Holocaust, entirely based on four images that were taken clandestinely by prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp and that, for some reason, managed to reach the outside world. The book is called "Images Malgré Tout". If those four images did not exist – that is, if there were no records of sensible thought – he would never have been able to write the book. Images are generators of thought. In that sense, in my case, both text and images are part of a single body of work. I have a concern, and even when I was teaching I tried to convey it to my doctoral students: never to speak about one’s own images, but from the images. Because speaking from the images adds a dimension that they themselves cannot have, precisely because of the polysemic quality inherent to them. In a text, starting from the images, I can go in another direction that interests me. In the Renaissance, three changes were decisive. The first is a political one. In the Italian republics, there was the rise to power of the bourgeoisie, a new class that, in order to ascend, could not use the same weapons as the aristocracy. For the aristocracy, the kings, the only education given to their sons was how to conquer more territory, the power of war. The bourgeoisie, however, invested in culture and art, and that investment made them patrons. The second issue, perhaps related to the first, is a technological innovation that allows painting, above all, to leave the wall, when oil paint is invented and, using a material based on egg yolk, one can make a wooden support and create works that could be movable. It allowed artists, at home or in the studio, to do whatever they wanted. What this innovation brought was the possibility for the artist not to have to respond to commissions which, for the most part, came from the Church; Giotto’s panels are very beautiful to look at but, in essence, they are comic strips for an illiterate population. Giotto was a monk to whom the Church would commission, for example, The Passion of Christ, so that people could understand visually what they could not read. Now, the Renaissance and all this context led artists to break out of that confinement. There is a complete difference from the structuring of what is called the “art world” in the Renaissance, which was later philosophically structured in the eighteenth century, above all by Hegel. Until then, as in Giotto’s example, artists were understood as those who knew how to make. Hence Plato’s distrust of artists. Plato said that the carpenter also knows how to make a chair, and he is not an artist. What did the artists tell people in the Renaissance? We not only know how to make, but we make knowing. This inversion of the two words speaks to what Hegel designates as the master–slave theorem. Perhaps, within the realm of human activities, art is the one in which the split between theory and practice has disappeared, through this making-knowing. It is something absolutely decisive in art, from that time until today, radicalised at the beginning of the twentieth century and accentuated in the 1960s, with the so-called conceptual art. There is that famous statement by Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea as Idea, that is, the materialisation of the work of art was achieved solely as an idea. I was director of the Doctorate in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP) for eight years, and during that time it was always written in the course documentation that sensible thought runs absolutely parallel to the thought of rationality, to logocentric thought. Neither can be superimposed on the other. They are different kinds of thought, but both go beyond the relationship of “knowing how to make,” the manual skill of craftsmen. That is why there are those who consider artists of our time a kind of philosopher – some of them, at least – because they work intensely with the production of thought. And not by chance, since Duchamp (although there were a few earlier exceptions) artists have been writing books. They write because what they do, as artists, is thought, and if it is thought, it can be transferred into words. I wrote a book which is a compilation of thirty years of scattered texts from various places and whoever reads it perceives that there is a line of thought, from the earliest period until today, the same one that can be observed in the visual work. Indeed, I write about my own process: they are, therefore, texts that also contain issues that do not address the problems of art in a generic way, but rather attempt to make me understand the problems that practice poses. They are another form of artistic making. It could not be otherwise. These are not texts from the social sciences. They are texts that speak from within the territory of art outward, whereas an art historian or a philosopher, for instance, speaks from outside the territory inward. And that is a fundamental distinction. They are therefore not to be confused, because I speak from what I do and from what I know how to do. That is, I make knowing.

Your remarkable career includes numerous solo exhibitions (including at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and at Serralves, among many others, both national and international). What is your perspective on the context of exhibition and installations?
I am never concerned with the exhibition itself. I have a habit, which I think is healthy for an artist, of going to the studio every day. I always have things on the worktable, being it video or sound for example, there is always something I must be working on during the day. Just as in writing, the production of thought is a bit like going to the gym. If we stop going to the gym, we lose shape very quickly, and then to regain it takes months. Therefore, the ideal is never to lose that form and to maintain the practice. For that reason, I am always working. When the opportunity arises to do an exhibition (like this one currently on view at the Centro de Arte Oliva), and although it is a very large exhibition, if I wanted, I would have enough work in the studio to set up another one. So, I always approach the invitation to exhibit with great tranquillity, because the only thing I have to do is select what seems to me most interesting for that particular show. There are many artists today who only work when someone invites them, and then they reactivate their system. Nothing against that, of course, everyone has their own way of working. I just don’t think like that. This tranquillity in choosing allows me something I deeply believe in: when there is choice, selection always brings greater quality. When we have ten works and can only exhibit those ten, it is what it is. But if, instead of ten, we have a hundred, we choose the ten best. And that, in my view, changes everything, even in terms of the serenity with which one mounts an exhibition, since it requires a very clear mind. Looking at an empty space and filling it requires many decisions. Precisely because I have so many works and can choose, I can afford the luxury of not overfilling. I prefer to show fewer works and hope that people reflect more on them, as in the case of that one photograph, the only one I made in six years. It gains a dimension – I'll use a word I am not afraid to use – which is auratic, something that it would not have had if I had made 500 photographs. This auratic dimension, however, is not the one Walter Benjamin spoke of in the twentieth century, that almost religious, cult-like dimension. Benjamin said that the aura comes from the unattainable distance. I think the aura I am speaking of is of a different kind; it is an aura that seeks to resist this pandemic of images. The word selection, and again its etymology, derives from two Latin words: se, meaning “set aside,” and electio, meaning “to choose.” Thus, when I select, I can choose that which is set aside, that which is not under the spotlights, that which is not mainstream. My exhibitions are essentially a body of work that usually has a line connecting it, but without fear of taking risks. They are also demanding exhibitions for the public and this is my own decision, a risky one that brings difficulties, but one I insist on. They are demanding because they are not easy to see and they require time – again, the importance of time. In art there is always a kind of novelty when one is a young author; then comes a long crossing of the desert when one has passed 35 and is no longer considered a young author, and then, around one’s late 50s or 60s, the public begins to rediscover those artists who have continued to work and to present things here and there. One then passes into that category that can be described as follows: this person is a resistant, someone who has crossed the desert, who manages to keep working, who still has the ability to experiment, to do what art so loves to do: to surprise. That is what my exhibitions seek to do: to place people before an art that I define, personally, as de-anesthetising. The public who visit the exhibition leave with something to think about, with that resonance that the works provoke, from the titles to the works themselves, through the relationship between the two, the charge of strangeness… I have never given that up. Today we live in a time in which there is a kind of thematic closure that contains much didacticism. I do not believe that didacticism can be part of art, because who am I, as an artist, to teach others which way to go? And in many more recent exhibitions I feel that there is a great deal of this politically correct didacticism. The only thing I can say to people is: think about this and in a way that produces that friction, that resonance. Polysemic. Open.

Contemporary art can be a very active voice in the disruption and breaking away from linear narratives and traditional methods of enjoyment. Is disruption very much the keynote of your work?
Being disruptive, in my understanding, is different from being scandalous. With regard to my work, the characterisation of my artistic practice is always connected to theoretical elements, perhaps because I do not give up that depth in the work; all of it is imbued with it. Without wanting to sound arrogant, of course – I cannot pretend to be someone I am not, that is, to want to be easy and straightforward for people when I am not like that. My work, as an artist, reflects this. And I could say, in my own defence, that there is nothing more disruptive than introducing elements that problematise our relationship with the world in a profound way, in a time of absolute superficiality. It is the antithesis of what we are living through. There is one thing that deeply irritates me in our time: it is that politicians themselves speak on Twitter, meaning that they reduce discourse to a small portion of generic words. But this is the world we live in, and I do not want to enter into that scheme of producing cartoons. I want people to take home material to think about and, perhaps, days later, begin to discover the depth of those things. Being disruptive has several dimensions: there is the surface dimension, which is that of scandal, and then there are other, more subterranean ones that are perhaps not so direct nor so immediate, but they are the ones that endure. Nothing that has remained in history is that which is immediate. Let us return to Walter Benjamin, author of the Theses on the Philosophy of History. There is one in particular in which he says that history must be read in a way different from the official version. According to him, the official version is the one that speaks only of the horse of the victors, a metaphor, of course. I prefer, as he does, the history that refers to the dust raised on the ground after those victorious horses have passed. I believe deeply in that. I believe it is in that dust, lifted by the horses, that lies what does not wish to be told by official history, but which deserves to be known. There are elements that, only after much time, are made aware. And these are not the ones immediately on the surface. Nearby the Rectorate, people go to a bookshop not to look at books, not to take an interest in literature or in the essay, but because of a phenomenon of children’s entertainment. This is a complete distortion of things. We live very much within this logic of hedonism. People say: whoever wants to waste time with that, with history, with memory, let them waste it; I won’t waste mine, unfortunately. This is the situation we are in. And, without wanting to sound like a pessimist, I attribute to digital technology the worsening, by 99%, of this situation, because it has changed the relationship we have with the world and with time and, therefore, returning to Benjamin, with History.

Both in the academic and artistic contexts, what is your perspective on generational confrontation?
There is an infantilization of the University and I believe university students have a relationship with professors almost like the one I had when I was in high school. That is not the porpuse of the University. The University is for much more. But there is something that makes me very satisfied: the students think exactly the opposite of what I think. So, before entering denial, before entering that scheme of “I am right, and you are completely wrong,” I left (FBAUP). Their relationship with the world is almost the opposite of mine. As I said, fortunately. I was raised – and that’s why I started this conversation talking about the 25th of April – to think a lot about the Other, and I believe that this generation thinks more about themselves. They are very individualistic, very narcissistic. I feel that almost as an attack, because it is the antithesis of what I think. In the book "Dialogue on Art and Politics", we see the Irish filmmaker Ken Loach, at the age of 86, dialoguing with the French writer Édouard Louis, who was 26 (or was at the time). It’s curious because they are on the same side of the barricade. And yet, Ken Loach, by choice, always begins by talking about others. Édouard Louis, on the contrary, always begins by talking about himself, before reaching others. And this is very much a portrait of our time. I think that, just as students are a kind of antithesis of myself, in two generations people will reject what they are today: utterly immersed in what their phones give them. In 2011, fourteen years ago, I did an exhibition at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, where I had a piece in which I wrote, by hand, a small sentence on the wall: “half of my life is inside the computer.” There was a kind of telescope through which people could look to be able to read the sentence. If I were to make this work today, I could no longer write “half of my life,” I would have to write “my entire life is inside the phone.” The phone has transformed many of us into a kind of being that I do not quite know how to identify, somewhere between voyeur and narcissist. All of this, to me, is very violent, because it transforms people… It’s dystopian, absolutely dystopian. At the moment, there is a kind of collective alienation around this. I sincerely hope that, in the generational gap that will exist in one or two generations, this will all be absolutely rejected. The logic of the appearance of things, for example on Instagram, is nothing. The Palestinian problem (as of now, it is impossible for anyone to say they are indifferent to what they see and I have worked on this for years, I even exhibited in Palestine) it can be framed this way: a dead child appears in Palestine, and in the middle, a cat or a fashion ad. People read this in an absolutely leveled way. Tomorrow it is no longer news; today it counts, but tomorrow no one talks about it. This is the interest of communication capitalism. Of digital networks. The perpetual present. Art here has a great responsibility, if it is not rhetoric. For example, the latest film by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is called "Memoria", and it is a film in which the main performer is the low-frequency sounds that the actress, Tilda Swinton, hears inside her own head. Now, he could make a lot of rhetoric out of this, but he uses something that seems absolutely correct and effective: low frequencies can only be heard on a sound system that allows their existence; they cannot be heard on a phone. Apichatpong says he made this film for a community that goes to the cinema because this film can only be seen in the cinema. This is art at its best. It is art using its own form of existence to introduce disruptive elements that are not direct, spontaneous, or scandalous, but which make people think about the matter. On the other hand, from a positive perspective, I can see a concern, and it is genuine, I feel it is genuine, albeit manipulated, with something that is absolutely essential in our time: being aware of the catastrophe we are experiencing regarding the planet. Perhaps it is the concern that young people today have most within themselves. It is the catastrophe of climate change, of what we are doing to the planet, and also the relationship with other beings on the planet, animals, plants… I think that is very positive. In these new generations, there is also a kind of understanding that it is impossible for them to have the idea of freedom taken away. I do not know what happens in other faculties, but Fine Arts is a territory of freedom, in terms of thought, gender, tradition, and practice, and I believe they are not willing to give that up. Although, as we know, there is a whole current that is imposing almost a return to the past in these respects. I hope that this generation will not compromise with that. I have even more hope in the generations that will come afterward, because they will see the mistakes this one is making. I always have hope in the young: that they will open their eyes and understand. I have great hope that they will impose restrictions on this absolute lack of control in which we are living, and which most people ignore because of this reigning hedonism, for example, enjoying warmer sea water at the beach without reflecting on the reasons or consequences. To be completely honest, I have more hope in the generations that follow than in the current young adults. In psychoanalysis, there is the notion of the “frontier,” which is designated as an empty signifier. Because the frontier, as such, represents nothing, it exists only because someone is inside and another is outside. And I believe today’s young generation is a kind of empty signifier, trapped in a bubble that they struggle to get out of. They drift inside the bubble. One final example: Gödel’s mathematical theorem is called the incompleteness theorem. Gödel shook mathematics in the 20th century when he said that we cannot exist within a closed circle claiming there are absolute truths. If we cut the circle, we see that other truths exist that call our absolute truths into question. And it seems to me that this generation, under the influence of digital technology, which has completely absorbed them, is still inside that circle. I am very concerned… either they leave, and some already are, or future generations will have to refuse to remain inside that circle of dazzle. The basis of my doctoral thesis title is more or less this: The Utopia of Exile. Its subtitle was "The Utopia of Possibility for Art, Facing the Aporia of (Im)possibility for Digital Developments". Artists have the ambition to have an object in exile because the territory of art is a territory like any other; it has its boundaries, yet it has a particularity: it is elastic (when Duchamp made the first ready-made, it was not accepted as an artistic object; it was in exile, yet shortly afterward, the art world expanded to include it). Utopia is that place without a place, total openness, and that is what must exist in art. Aporia is absolute closure. Digital technology has brought us closure, as we are seeing today, very visibly. In its own peculiar way, art can make its small contribution by making people think – in our time, making people think is no small deed. Regarding the PÁR-A-GEM project, we had a serious problem with FCT because this body is not called ‘FCTA’; it is the Foundation for Science and Technology, and art slips in a bit under the door. FCT doubts the possibility that sensitive thinking can be as legitimate as rational thinking. As a research group, we decided to apply with a project to FCT. In every place in the form where we were required to use the word “scientific,” we put “artistic practice”, because art is not scientific. Art is very intuitive, it is very much about chance. And we wanted to make that clear. The response we received from FCT was that the project was very interesting, very well-prepared, but it looked like a group of artists asking for support to work, and so they placed us fifth from last. This was almost an insult to the way artists think without needing to transfigure themselves into something they are not, that is, into scientists. What the University is doing to Fine Arts, and which frightens me greatly, is that at this moment, professors are required to publish more articles and attend more conferences than to exhibit, because this is what advances careers and rankings. I do not like that. Just as I would not like a Faculty of Medicine without doctors, I do not like a Faculty of Fine Arts without artists. But perhaps it will happen. Let us hope it does not.

A bit of a provocation to send us off: what does it mean, for you, to research art?
I believe that research in art cannot be anything other than that which involves artistic practice itself, because all research is based on some object of study. How can I think or write an article on any subject, if I do not have a tangible object to hold onto? Should I speculate? I could, if I were a philosopher, but I am not. What we are confronted with is a kind of barrier related to distrust of sensitive thinking, which requires artists themselves not to be artists. Congresses on this and that are held, and people are transforming into social scientists, art historians, sociologists, ceasing to be what they are. I go to the studio every day, and it is from what I do there that I produce theory. I have never written an article to fulfill some bureaucratic requirement, and yet that has not stopped me from publishing dozens of texts. I have always spoken from what I consider to be my legitimate place: I am an artist, and it is from this condition that I must speak. And I speak from a condition that is essentially about doing, but as I said before, it cannot survive as such if it is not connected to thinking. Sometimes, one must be more elaborate, more complex, to reach where one wants to go. Moreover, I understand that the idea of research in art does not even need any form of rational legitimation. The sensitive thinking of artistic work can itself be the result of very deep research. Last year, I wrote an unpublished text to be included in a book I published. I wanted it to mark the year the book came out (2025). It addresses a topic that, for me at this moment, is important: the question of Gaza. Some posts began appearing [on Instagram] from a Palestinian girl living in Gaza who said: “It’s Bisan From Gaza, I’m Still Alive.” This reminded me of the following – and the text relates to this – the Japanese artist On Kawara, in the 1960s and 70s, created works with three components: he painted canvases with the date of the day on which they were made. Then he placed these canvases in cardboard boxes, inside which he glued the front page of the local newspaper from that day. He also made works embodied as postcards or telegrams, in which he simply wrote: “I am still alive”. Seeing an On Kawara exhibition is laborious; appreciating these components is to follow a story that is on the surface but, beneath it, has many ways of communicating. Therefore, I wrote a text in which I first explain the entire context of the relationship On Kawara wanted to have with others and history. But also, from the “I am still alive” and the depth that time gave to his ambition, compared to the ephemerality of someone writing on Instagram “I am still alive.” We do not know if, the next second, she is still alive. I am interested in the production of images, in studying other artists, in discussing these things. Perhaps someone outside, or someone from the social sciences, could not write such a text. Yet everything there arises from my taste, as an artist, for the work of another artist. It is possible to research in art from our own status as artists, without dressing up as social scientists or other fields. A problem in much of the research done in art, especially in the digital realm, is that these works often have no artistic creativity. People in research centers, linked to teaching or universities, are almost forbidden to act as artists, because only what the University has always privileged matters: writing, rational-logocentric thinking. I am not optimistic about this. For example, in Spain, artists are already leaving universities because they do not want to be involved in a universe that is not theirs. What does a scientist do in a laboratory from morning to night? They experiment; they occupy their time. What does an artist do in a studio from morning to night? They experiment! I cannot understand why, in one case, it is serious, and in the other, it is a hobby. During all these years at i2ADS, I have tried – never successfully – to create a sort of union among the various Fine Arts faculties in the country to pressure the authorities for a structure, other than FCT, that understands us. To realize that artists are not playing. It is somewhat ridiculous to waste a lifetime doing things that are considered hobbies. This is what society generally thinks; people have some admiration for artists, not for their supposed usefulness, because artists are considered basically useless, but for the exoticism of spending a lifetime being “useless”. But this uselessness is so useful to society that, as long as humans have existed, there has been the need to show others, not through writing, but through images… from handprints in caves to our time. Even without awareness of what they were doing, they were representing something very subjective, just as we do today. Despite being considered useless, it is not as useless as it seems, otherwise it would have ended and disappeared.
That is the great power of sensitive thinking.

You can find more information on the visual artist and researcher here.