Verónica Meloni

Regína de Con Cossío: Public space changed due to the pandemic: people behave differently, the places they visit require them to keep social distance, to wear face masks. How did your perception of public space change after the pandemic?

Verónica Meloni: The pandemic is a transition between planes of perception. This is happening at all levels. The collapse of the referential and perceptual fields is like a slow-motion explosion, with many frames, sequences, and splinters. I have had the opportunity to intervene in public space on several occasions during the pandemic and, a common feature in all of them, is that I perceived myself as a nomad in some kind of border, operating on a threshold between energy densities and dimensions that are definitely different from what I knew. At first it happened to all of us: anguish, uncertainty, withdrawal, absence, loss, mourning. When the sequence stabilizes a little bit, the worst thing we can do is return to pre-collapse mechanical patterns and responses. What I am trying to point out is that this disorientation, this vertigo that for some can be horrible, is really “good” for artistic practices, because artists have always connected with wandering and fluid energies.

My practice in public space -before and during this pandemic- was and is a tool to enhance the encounter with the poetics that serve as a channel to lead to other levels of attention, which enables a reorientation and recalibration, even if they are precarious, in the perceptual process.

In that sense, I would tell you that -in the middle of all this change- my perception regarding how I operate in my practice has not changed. For me, today, the only thing that makes sense is to follow impulses for which I have no reference, since any attempt at stability is provisional.

RCC: In this sense, is there a change of the concept of “public space” for your artistic activities?

VM: In the same sense as above, no. But I’m not suggesting an introduction to a single sense either: I’m just speaking from my experience. The complexity and diversity of artistic practices can give rise to other meanings and operations, generating transformations at a conceptual level. Even so, I think that all practices in the public space have the common feeling of vertigo.

RCC: How does your profession as a teacher affect your artistic processes?

VM: How wonderful, no one ever asks me this. I am a lousy teacher from an academic point of view. I do not experience teaching as something separate from my artistic practice. In the areas of training where I work, I enable exchanges of creation processes regardless of the level, career, subject or study plans. The space-time that I share with my students is an opportunity for rest, freedom and access to another landscape within the art schools where I “work”. It’s another performance.

RCC: In a recent video on YouTube you mentioned something about memory that really caught my attention. In your own words: “A performance has all that past perceptual memory that I use as knowledge.” I want to ask you: when you carry out a performance, there is a solidity of the present time where the past and the future are displaced because you’re there while the artistic event takes place. However, how do you perceive the past and the future when you perform?

VM: In performance practice, the time of perception coincides with the time of language, that is, it creates language from the perception of the present time, but the perception is mediated by memory. The data or information of past perceptions or “now invoiced” are the material of the performance, but memory is a double-edged sword. The problem arises when these data are not updated and do not create new referential nuclei, or when we generate “parasitic gestures” or mechanical and automated responses to new stimuli. This is what I was telling you about the power of vertigo in this context of a pandemic, because it pushes you to create reference from perceptual/referential chaos. For example, in my last performances of the series of broom sweeps -collective or solo- I realized that not many more things could happen in that action, my response was automaton, and to free myself from that debt with my process “I grabbed” another object: the boleadoras of the native people of what we know today as Patagonia. This is the process that I will present at ACME in February.

I don’t think that performance is capable of solidifying the space-time dimension, what it can do is generate peaks of attention.

The future of this practice is not (yet) “material”, the unpredictable is. Nor could I deny that there is a certain cryptic aspect to performance, which is involved with subtle and delicate questions of the order of the prophetic, the secret, the sacred… the magical in a word.

RCC: During some of your performances you make these hand-sanded plaster objects that, as you said, are not sculptures but somehow have a life of their own. When you build, so to speak, these pieces, their form is motivated by the presence of the public. How do you conceive this relationship between the public, the plaster objects and your own body during the artistic process?

VM: In that piece it was very difficult to generate a peak of attention in the public, hence my insistence on the sustained action of sanding, which allowed me to reveal the elusive and mutable essence of the object with which I decided to interact.

Simultaneously with the action, my attention is focused on how the public is interacting with my live process, and I perceived, during that performance, a generalized bewilderment that I translated into gestures and bullfight passes “with an invisible beast” that crossed the space. As I continued sanding, I noticed the power of embodying bewilderment and in this way, I continued with the performance in my studio for two years. This is how the series of hand-sanded plaster objects was born.

Confusion is a good state from which to observe oneself. I stripped various layers and surfaces of representation in that performance, both of the object and of my physical body.

RCC: Many artists give more importance to the artistic process than to the artistic result. I don’t want to be prejudiced but I get the impression that this is your case. How does an artist like you conceive the concept of artistic result? Is there a result, what is it for?

VM: I think that no artistic practice or creation process yields a result. What does exist are points of suspension, inflection, knots, bifurcations and “accidents” in the process; that may or may not cause effects and/or drop objects.

I am a “believer” that art is an energy that cannot be possessed or accumulated, energy that does not increase or decrease but that settles temporarily in matter (years or millennia, it does not matter).

Art is an energy that flows, that proceeds by deactivating what there is of evidence, of finishing and normalization in its languages and practices. Energy-art has no commitment to the logic of conservation, that is what institutions, museums, restorers, historians, critics, curators are for: they are allowed to take care of enunciating the conditions of production and expression of the materiality that art-energy adopts in the flight of time.