Flash art_Samuele Menin_2015

André Komatsu: Space is a very important fact for my work. However, there are also other questions and fundamental themes for the development of my works, such as the political, social or economic situation. I   personally use space to build and / or deconstruct, to rethink situations and ideas rooted in a territory and in a social context.

SM: How do you decide to interact instead with the location where you have to show your work?

AK: Sometimes I use locations as places to create a situation, a discussion and in other cases, when the space is not a white cube , I prefer to make some investigations on the history of the area in search of some event that could help the emergence of questions. useful for the realization of my work in that   place.

SM: In your works you often use “poor” materials. Why? What meaning do you give it?

AK: I usually use these materials in my work, as a symbol or as a reminder that they carry with them. Sometimes the work begins to speak through the observations of the situations encoded within the objects themselves. Perhaps the preference for using these raw objects is a way of trying to create an essential connection for me between conceptual thoughts and ordinary life.

SM: Architecture and the idea of ​​”home” seem to be one of the main sources of inspiration for your installations. What is a home for you?

AK: This theme has been particularly present, in some works at the beginning of my career. Specifically in Projeto Casa: Entulho of 2002, where for a period of 30 days, I collected objects found on the street and built furniture inside the gallery, a way to rethink the white and official space making it a more reassuring place . However, after building many objects, I realized how difficult it was to transform this so timeless and official space into a “home”. For this reason, on the last day of the exhibition I destroyed everything with a hammer and an ax, then returning the material to the same places where it was collected. Later I made Mim Tarzan, você Jane, a structure of steel pipes and wooden boxes fixed on a tree. The work required people to climb to reach a position where to stop, where to be present at that moment. It wanted to be a way to make the landscape of San Paolo “see” and rethink it thanks to the particular point of this view. “Home” was a conceptual proposal to try to reveal and humanize spaces. It was a way to start rethinking public and private spaces.

SM: What is the meaning of the “fragment” and the “waste” for you?

AK: Perhaps they symbolize the memories and meaning of all things, reminding us of the very value of objects, even if they have been discarded. Thinking, for example, of the recent history of Latin America in the sixties and how, after the dictatorship, the entire public school system was damaged, with the meotodic cancellation of many memories, creating a huge void in knowledge and in understanding the mechanisms of power within Brazilian society. I remember, for example,  Paisagem (2005), a work in which I designed the building that would have been built directly on the fragment of an old house demolished in the same area to allow its construction. After years I went back to this theme in the Três Vidros series(2013), based on the aesthetics of modern architecture, and I made rationalist architecture models pushed to collapse.

SM: Another theme that seems to me very present in your works is that of the “collapse” of matter.

AK: Of course, collapse, rupture, failure, natural / artificial contrast, actions that take place within old structures, rules and systems, are the mechanisms for awakening the world to the present.

SM: When do you understand that your work is in “balance”?

AK: Perhaps it is that moment when I am able to connect my thoughts with the spiritual process of work.

SM: Your works often seem the remains of an action, of a performance. How important is this for you and what do you reconnect it to, since you started out as a performer?

AK: At the beginning of my career I did some performances, most of them on the streets and without an audience, only shot on a video camera. At that time these actions were something important for me, to try to understand the relationship between the body and the environment. For example in Ou até waves or sol pode alcançar , 2006, I walked the streets of San Paolo, from East to West, trying to follow the same path that the sun follows inside the city, with the guide of a compass. I tried to follow a linear path by insisting unnecessarily to destroy physical and social limits. Probably the only performance in the presence of an audience was Mato sem cachorro não tem dono, 2005, in which I reflected on the natural tendency of dogs to urinate to mark the territory following a hierarchical order. On that occasion I built two wooden boxes with sand inside (to make them look like sandboxes for cats, a place that stimulates the animal to make its own needs in that particular space), positioned at the corners of the exhibition space. The action kicked off during the inauguration, with these spaces being the only places to urinate. A few years later I started to be more sculptural, leaving evidence of the anonymous actions that came to life within the space. 

SM: What characteristics of your works do you think your Brazilian being emerges from?

AK: Probably, if the public thinks about the political and social events of the historical moment in which we live, we can guess something …

SM: What will be the title of your next work? What will he talk about?

AK: My next project consists of a presentation inside the Brazil Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where two works will be exhibited. The first is a new installation, Status quo , a steel structure that will form a semi-closed area that separates the exhibition space into two completely opposite spaces, reproducing the paradoxical condition of freedom. Two paths will be created between the grid and the walls of the pavilion forcing the body to lean against the latter. The second work O estado das coisas 2 (três poderes), 2011, which I presented for the first time at the Mercosul Biennale, is an auction hung and fixed to the facade of the building. On this auction there will be a white cotton rope and a pair of used sneakers. The support that should allow the flag to fly, revealing the symbol of the nation, thus becomes more boring and anonymous. An inversion of meaning of this object, usually bearer of a more noble status .

SM: In your opinion, what characteristics must a job have to be “perfect”? 

AK: In order to be “perfect”, the work must try to be anonymous.