PRIVATE PROPERTY
Spirit Shop in Belo Campo
Galeria Francisco Fino
Bruno Bogarim
Beatriz Neves Fernandes
Fox Maxy
Sofia Montanha
Mariana Tilly
13.12.2023—27.01.2024
Spirit Shop was invited by Adrien Missika, who runs the program at belo campo, to think of a project for the gallery’s basement. The gallery is located in the fast-growing neighborhood of Marvila, following an overall interest of real estate and venture capital in this part of Lisbon. The changing scenarios of this neighborhood and the city are the background for speculations of all types. New developments and constructions take shape at a fast pace, coffee shops and craft beer define our current mood, while the living costs rise quickly fast, making it more and more difficult for lisboners with normal salaries to live in the city. The economic is growing, so they say, and these are its growing pains.
The exhibition titled Private Property departs from the film Maat by Fox Maxy, a Payómkawish and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians filmmaker based in San Diego, California. Maat means land. This compelling, playful collage film constantly ignores and challenges the rules of what film should be. The film revisits sites that belonged to Indians in South California before the settlers arrived to colonize the land. Time and again, activism squeezes itself forward through the background, which gives the entire film an inescapable political layer. Fox Maxy uses self-archive of films, phone videos, found footage, and computer game screen recordings, giving invigorating expression to contemporary Indigenous culture and identity, the film shifts between temporalities while mixing instances of sociality, play, dance, and activism.
Private Property is an exhibition about the obsessions with ownership and the constrains of development. In the frame of post capitalist neoliberalism, property is a guaranty of privilege and class. Property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operations for profit. Ideas about and discussion of private property date back to the Persian Empire, and emerge in the Western tradition at least as far back as Plato. Prior to the 18th century, English speakers generally used the word "property" in reference to land ownership. In England and Europe, "property" came to have a legal definition in the 17th century.
In the 19th century, the economist and philosopher Karl Marx provided an influential analysis of the development and history of property formations and their relationship to the technical productive forces of a given period.
It is argued by critical race theorist Cheryl Harris that race and property rights have been conflated over time, with only those qualities unique to white settlement recognized legally. Indigenous use of land, focusing on common ownership, is distinguished from private property ownership and Western understandings of land law.
The works presented in this exhibition claim their own position within certain forms of presence and escapism. Mariana Tilly presents a group of two drawings, Suíça (2021), a depiction of a coffee cup from the now extinct Pastelaria Suíça in Praça do Rossio closed due to real estate pressure, and the drawing Mercator Contents World Cup (2021) shows a cup where the map of the world is printed in the way we’ve been accustomed to within Western imperial narratives that define the global north and global south. Beatriz Neves Fernandes sculptures reflect the presence of a body and the instruments of transformation of that body in the space. Sofia Montanha presents the work Bella Rosa (2023), appropriating a readymade object of a blue rose incapsulated in a glass dome, protecting it from aging. The tent-like structure that overtakes the former object, stretched by a blue silk ribbon reflects on the delicate yet precarious forms we create to protect any living body. Bruno Bogarim’s cutout sculptures are inscriptions in the cave-like space of belo campo, creating a contrast between the golden shinny surface of the works and the exposed cement walls of the space.
A gallery deals with property in a particular manner. Artworks perform an idea of value that is similar to the action of selling/ buying any object, a car, an apartment, a piece of furniture, a piece of land, yet completely different from other objects. Artworks have, ideally, an intrinsic value besides the material value, an intellectual component that establishes or not its relevance and necessity. Legally, when an artwork is sold, the artist is in a way “letting go” of the intellectual value, that stays fixed in the object. The property of one, the artist, becomes the property of another, the collector, in a transfer that enhances the particularities of this object.
The production of capital is about an obsession with form, or rather, the processes to engender form, to objectify. It’s the obsession to contain, to tame, to own, to find significance in something, and to create a representation of it. And art isn’t something you name, and it’s not even the opposite, the unnamable. It just doesn’t work like that, I think. There’s an object and everyone calls it art. You can buy it and then you think you own it, but you don’t, really. You can possess certain aspects of its appearance and physical characteristics, but you don’t really own it, it owns you. Artworks have the capacity to belong to everybody. It’s the immaterial aspects, the things you can’t actually grab with your hands that make an artwork.
Spirit Shop in Belo Campo
Galeria Francisco Fino
Bruno Bogarim
Beatriz Neves Fernandes
Fox Maxy
Sofia Montanha
Mariana Tilly
13.12.2023—27.01.2024
Spirit Shop was invited by Adrien Missika, who runs the program at belo campo, to think of a project for the gallery’s basement. The gallery is located in the fast-growing neighborhood of Marvila, following an overall interest of real estate and venture capital in this part of Lisbon. The changing scenarios of this neighborhood and the city are the background for speculations of all types. New developments and constructions take shape at a fast pace, coffee shops and craft beer define our current mood, while the living costs rise quickly fast, making it more and more difficult for lisboners with normal salaries to live in the city. The economic is growing, so they say, and these are its growing pains.
The exhibition titled Private Property departs from the film Maat by Fox Maxy, a Payómkawish and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians filmmaker based in San Diego, California. Maat means land. This compelling, playful collage film constantly ignores and challenges the rules of what film should be. The film revisits sites that belonged to Indians in South California before the settlers arrived to colonize the land. Time and again, activism squeezes itself forward through the background, which gives the entire film an inescapable political layer. Fox Maxy uses self-archive of films, phone videos, found footage, and computer game screen recordings, giving invigorating expression to contemporary Indigenous culture and identity, the film shifts between temporalities while mixing instances of sociality, play, dance, and activism.
Private Property is an exhibition about the obsessions with ownership and the constrains of development. In the frame of post capitalist neoliberalism, property is a guaranty of privilege and class. Property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operations for profit. Ideas about and discussion of private property date back to the Persian Empire, and emerge in the Western tradition at least as far back as Plato. Prior to the 18th century, English speakers generally used the word "property" in reference to land ownership. In England and Europe, "property" came to have a legal definition in the 17th century.
In the 19th century, the economist and philosopher Karl Marx provided an influential analysis of the development and history of property formations and their relationship to the technical productive forces of a given period.
It is argued by critical race theorist Cheryl Harris that race and property rights have been conflated over time, with only those qualities unique to white settlement recognized legally. Indigenous use of land, focusing on common ownership, is distinguished from private property ownership and Western understandings of land law.
The works presented in this exhibition claim their own position within certain forms of presence and escapism. Mariana Tilly presents a group of two drawings, Suíça (2021), a depiction of a coffee cup from the now extinct Pastelaria Suíça in Praça do Rossio closed due to real estate pressure, and the drawing Mercator Contents World Cup (2021) shows a cup where the map of the world is printed in the way we’ve been accustomed to within Western imperial narratives that define the global north and global south. Beatriz Neves Fernandes sculptures reflect the presence of a body and the instruments of transformation of that body in the space. Sofia Montanha presents the work Bella Rosa (2023), appropriating a readymade object of a blue rose incapsulated in a glass dome, protecting it from aging. The tent-like structure that overtakes the former object, stretched by a blue silk ribbon reflects on the delicate yet precarious forms we create to protect any living body. Bruno Bogarim’s cutout sculptures are inscriptions in the cave-like space of belo campo, creating a contrast between the golden shinny surface of the works and the exposed cement walls of the space.
A gallery deals with property in a particular manner. Artworks perform an idea of value that is similar to the action of selling/ buying any object, a car, an apartment, a piece of furniture, a piece of land, yet completely different from other objects. Artworks have, ideally, an intrinsic value besides the material value, an intellectual component that establishes or not its relevance and necessity. Legally, when an artwork is sold, the artist is in a way “letting go” of the intellectual value, that stays fixed in the object. The property of one, the artist, becomes the property of another, the collector, in a transfer that enhances the particularities of this object.
The production of capital is about an obsession with form, or rather, the processes to engender form, to objectify. It’s the obsession to contain, to tame, to own, to find significance in something, and to create a representation of it. And art isn’t something you name, and it’s not even the opposite, the unnamable. It just doesn’t work like that, I think. There’s an object and everyone calls it art. You can buy it and then you think you own it, but you don’t, really. You can possess certain aspects of its appearance and physical characteristics, but you don’t really own it, it owns you. Artworks have the capacity to belong to everybody. It’s the immaterial aspects, the things you can’t actually grab with your hands that make an artwork.
Bruno Bogarim, You can take me out of the real estate business but you can't take the real estate business out of me, 2023. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Beatriz Nunes Fernandes, Dicionário de B a S, 2023. Photos: Beatriz Pereira.
Mariana Tilly, Suiça, 2021. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Beatriz Neves Fernandes, Se o corpo treme a luz quebra, 2021. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Bruno Bogarim, Totem (saber de ti), 2018-23. Photos: Beatriz Pereira.
Sofia Montanha, Bella Rosa, 2023. Photos: Beatriz Pereira.
Bruno Bogarim, Pianhas sobre pianhas, 2018-23. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Marina Tilly, Mercator Contents World Cup, 2021. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Bruno Bogarim, Totem (saber de mim), 2018-23. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.
Fox Maxy, Maat, 2020. Photo: Beatriz Pereira.