A new publishing project documenting the duo's artistic trajectory with a particular emphasis on their discursive production.
Unpublished essays by Chris Fitzpatrick (independent curator, former director of Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, and Kunstverein München, Munich) and Anthony Huberman (director and head curator of CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco) reflect on the artists' oeuvre, which combines anthropology, drama and scientific research to investigate the unfathomable, a form of heterodox knowledge materializing as "poetical and philosophical fictions". The book also includes a generous anthology of texts by the artists.
"A new grimoire of the natural and metanatural sciences. A book about the work begot by João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva between the years of the grace of our lord 1 and 21 of this century. A list of various matters examined by different authors and authorities on the theoretical and practical arts of aesthetics with selected prescriptions and testimonies: a duck witnessing its own demise, a space knife and a potato planet, the seven and a half lives of a phantom cat (visions and apparitions), a floppy hammer and a similar broom, a two-holed-ball, an eclipse and an un-eclipse, a collection of diaphanous cloths, one two eggs ready to fry and one two three already fried, a set of graphic instructions for fortune telling, a frozen freezer, a sunflower in the moonlight, a winter tyre, three donkeys born from the same mother, flying spaghetti, a mnemonic mirror, a t-shirt from the abyss, the mere tip of a camel's hump, two men, a horse!, a portrait of Rocinante!, a dog with a remarkable tail, a water-melon moon, an open box, oh, it's empty!, the Devil's stuck wheel, a flattened rabbit, a defenestrated photographer, etcetera, etcetera and so on and so forth…"
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Fundação de Serralves, Porto, in 2021.
João Maria Gusmão (born 1979 in Lisbon) studied painting in Fine Arts University in Lisbon (FBAUL) from 1997-2002. During his academical years he met Pedro Paiva (born 1978 in Lisbon) with whom he started collaborating in 2001. Over the years they have produced together a large array of different artwork including sculpture, installation, 16mm and 35mm short films as well as writing and book publishing. In recent years Gusmão and Paiva's production has centred on the idea of movement and duration, both within the cinematographic vocabulary, with references to early film pioneers as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and through the artists' own experiments and conceptual invention.
João Maria Gusmão has developed a long term relationship with other artists and alternative spaces in the Lisbon Art scene, developing content and writings for projects with Natxo Checa and ZdB, and collaborating with artists like Alexandre Estrela, Mattia Denisse, Gonçalo Pena and others.
Gusmão and Paiva's film production has been presented in immersive solo exhibitions all over the world and in several biennales, São Paulo (2006), Manifesta (2008), Gwangju (2010) and in Venice in (2009 and 2013). Their work is represented in several international museum collections like the Tate Modern, Reina Sofia, Serralves Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA and in the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.
