Joana Maria Pereira

Built from disparate figures and fragments, this practice-based research develops provisional chains of connection to contest the hierarchical division between those who have the power to speak and those who do not. Reflecting on how silence operates, I draw out links with the Portuguese Fascist regime and its legacy. One way of addressing this question is to imagine a scene in which a man is called upon to sign his name yet can only leave in its place a fingerprint. This fringe of reality – with which I became familiar in childhood – does not merely highlight the problem of illiteracy in the dictatorship; a full understanding of the cultural, social and political implications of this, and also other scenes, demands a different kind of attention, one which I argue is inseparable from certain bodily manifestations.

Starting from this premise, I explore the connection between the body and silence, while interrogating the relationship between words and power, and silence as the lack of power and mobility. I propose a different approach to muteness that challenges its conception as stillness to include a paradoxical sense of mobility. I learned from John Cage that what we call ‘silence is all of the sound we don’t intend’: this means ‘free of our activity’. Silence thus functions as an interval, or a spacing effect, which in the context of this research is also the taking place of the body as evidence of a certain perception of power.

Without directly addressing the regime, the intention of this PhD is to think about and employ a working methodology based on silence that might disrupt the continuity/unity of speech in order to draw our attention away from speech and its associated hierarchies of power towards mute figures. This means I move away from Salazar’s discourse and any historical facts towards the possibility of discovering a complexity of meanings outside speech and utility, implying the exigency of thinking of language beyond its verbal/abstract dimension.

Throughout this project a process of reorder is often used instead of order. Three key concepts intersect in my reflections on the link between silence and the body: Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘spacing’; ‘punctuation’ in the work of Blanchot, Derrida and Barthes, and the Deleuzian formula of the ‘interstice’. Discontinuity is a way of working (and thinking), used alongside an emphasis on the fragmentary and the provisional as primary methodologies of this research. These are strategies that are also borrowed from non-linear writing, cinematic montage and art-making practices that involve social-political concerns (as is common in postmodernist sculpture, rooted in the nomadic, hybrid and dematerialised art of the 1960s and 70s). Functioning as a work among works, the written component of this project becomes an assembly of texts in the form of notes, letters, micro-narratives and quotations. Fundamentally both the written and visual components of the research draw attention to what is not there (or was not intended to be there): mute, concealed, displaced, replaced. The fragmentary, combined both with the logic of repetition and the material quality of the work, conveys a sense of mobility to undermine the sense of dogmatic control. Reorder can be renamed mobility, because what the experience of muteness seeks to address is the dynamics of a shared vulnerability, allied to the idea of both corporality and openness.