Literature, language and writing are a fundamental part of Marilá Dardot’s work. The properties that each one offers are the ideal opportunity to move from the written to the visual and make out of both an enunciation about the ways of seeing the world. In this conversation, Marilá shares key aspects of her practice and delves into the ethical, formal, and aesthetic implications of working with the written and visual word.

Regina de Con Cossío: You were born in Brazil, but you have spent some time in Portugal and, now, in Mexico. Do you think that the geographical territory influences your artistic work? If so, how does it work?

Marilá Dardot: The feeling of being a foreigner has been with me since I was a kid. In Brazil, I was born in Belo Horizonte but grew up in Olinda, then I returned to Belo Horizonte, and I have lived in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 2016 I moved to Lisbon and since last year I have lived in Mexico City. Each of these cities is presented as a different universe that I had to explore: experience their paths, understand the layout of the streets, the subtleties of language, build bridges, networks of affection, establish exchanges. I had to start over and over again. So I think that, more than the territory itself, living in a flux of change is what influences my process. Feeling not belonging and fleeting in your own skin raises many existential questions that end up appearing at work.

RCC: Your most recent exhibition at El Eco, titled Primera Plana, is a direct intervention in the public space: the announcement of the exhibition is a piece in itself that dialogues with viewers who might not go to a museum. How do you conceive the spectators in this type of intervention? Is there an investigation behind them, do you distinguish them from those who go and visit museums?

MD: In October 2020, Inhotim invited me to inaugurate the 15 seconds project, which consisted of a daily intervention in advertising spaces in the city of Belo Horizonte for a month. Here in Mexico City, Primera Plana was presented by the Museo Experimental el Eco during May 2021, with interventions to the screens of different metrobus stations. Given that the museums remained closed due to the pandemic, the project was initially based on an institutional need to reach people who were unable to visit their spaces.

When creating a work specifically to occupy a public space, I think of strategies so that it can be perceived as something that provokes strangeness, but at the same time manages to be read by a viewer not trained in the syntax of contemporary art, that makes them reflect without needing to know that it is a work of art. Thus, by being displayed directly on the streets, potentially reaching anyone who passes through the city, the work of art itself expands, each extra layer of reality modifies it.

The insertion of a work in this circuit also criticizes the very means of persuasion in which it infiltrates (here is a reference to the work Insertion in ideological circuits, which Cildo Meireles produced between 1970 and 1975 during the dictatorship in Brazil: a series of works that consisted of the printing of phrases, considered subversive, on bills and Coca-Cola bottles. Cildo took the articles out of circulation, intervened and returned them to the market).

RCC: In the same sense, there is a very strong political influence in this type of work. What function does politics have in your artistic process?

MD: I wouldn’t say that politics has a function, but that it goes through any artistic process. As an artist, I believe that everything I produce is political in some instances, perhaps in my most recent works this appears in a more explicit and intentional way. I’m in the world and I’m affected by what happens, and even if a work doesn’t seem political at first glance, after a while you see the reflection of a larger political context there.

RCC: In your latest artistic explorations there is a very close link with journalism. Journalism is a daily task that, due to social networks and the current flow of information, does not rest. What criteria do you use to select the information that will be useful for your artistic pieces?

MD: Journalistic writing first appeared in my work in 2015, when I went to do a residency at Casa Wabi. I was far from my personal library. A large gray concrete wall separated the house from the outside world. There was an obligation to do a log. The first day I woke up and a message from a group of friends alerted me of something that had happened in Paris, so I went to watch the news. All these elements (the lack of my library, the wall, the blog, the news) led me to create Diário. From then on, my sources, mostly literary, were expanded and many artworks are based on journalistic texts. I could say that the criteria for using them are the use of different printed vehicles and the attempt to contribute to thee critical thinking based on a particular topic, such as investigating which collective subjects that act in a society are legitimized by the press, in the case of Front Page.

RCC: In this same sense, what role do ethics and morals play in your artistic process? We know that journalism does not always act ethically (it distorts information and obeys economic or political powers). How do you deal with that?

MD:

Enquanto os homens exercem
Seus podres poderes
Morrer e matar de fome
De raiva e de sede
São tantas vezes
Gestos naturais
Eu quero aproximar o meu cantar vagabundo
Daqueles que velam pela alegria do mundo
Indo e mais fundo
Tins e bens e tais
Caetano Veloso, Podres poderes

I understand and practice ethics through Spinoza, this means not as obedience to a prevailing morality, based on values far to the subject so that they can achieve them, adapting their reality to those, but starting precisely from human reality in its negative aspects, without refuting it –the negative effects– to transform them into positive effects, through desire, knowledge and freedom. So, I often start with what affects me negatively – the “rotten powers” that Caetano sings about, or their translations in the news – to create something that positively affects the other, to exert their power and joy.

RCC: It came to my attention that a large part of your work is related to books, specifically literature, and now with journalism. What similarities and differences do you find between journalism and literature from the artistic point of view?

MD: Before being an artist, I am a reader. Let’s think of language as a great palette of colors with which I compose my work: literature offers me many colors and infinite combinations among them, it is a freer writing full of subtleties. Journalism is closer to a palette of black, white and gray: there are fewer possibilities, the structures and characters are more limited. But none of them is neutral, in any literary or journalistic text a certain point of view about the world is revealed. My work is an attempt to materialize the possibilities of other points of view from everything I read, without distinction between  fiction and reality.