The Universal Theater of Vasco Araújo

“All of reality is a performance: this reality is one performance, but there is another, there are many others… Hence we are constantly acting, we are constantly performing; here, now, we are representing something, but when we go out onto the street, we represent something else […]. My work is a performance. It is an act from beginning to end, that is, I can only think of it if I act it, if I stage myself.” *


These words by Vasco Araújo (b. Lisbon, 1975) inscribe themselves in a certain manner of thinking to which there are no facts, only interpretations. By this I mean to say a specific way of seeing things and facts, not just as essential parts of reality, the basis and material of things, but the understanding that the horizon where art is inscribed is similar to the location where life is inscribed. This terrain is precarious, unstable as its configuration depends almost entirely on the subject. In philosophy this “discovery”, termed perspectivism, corresponds to the evidence that the world corresponds to a certain physiognomy that is projected and constructed by us all: to perspectivize is to always see the world as a construction, a project, an intention. In the case of Vasco Araújo, these principles serve as the basis for the construction of a body of work which is hinged on the so-called principle of staging or, one might prefer, installation. This situation affects both his videos and objects: everything is submitted to the principle of installation, everything has its own environment. All things – images, texts, objects – emerge integrated in an atmosphere that enables their interpretation, not as isolated elements, but as parts of a set or whole.

In the case of Vasco Araújo, the range of this act of staging is wide. Besides corresponding to an aesthetic and existential motto, it also has to do with a kind of unveiling of the originary forms to his work. In many of his pieces, opera is not only a fundamental musical reference; it is one that underlies their compositional rationale. Araújo’s stagings speak of the need for composition. As in the opera, elements from different families must coexist: text, music and visuals. What this means is that each work is a synthesis (in the sense of the movement that the intellect undertakes in order to discover the different connections between things and to create the necessary hierarchies) as opposed to strict analytical gestures: a synthesis of poetic, visual and material elements. This is the reason why structure is not just narrative in this artist’s work; the texts he writes and appropriates need to be delivered and heard, they need images in order to come to full fruition: the way they are declaimed, the manner in which they are expressed guarantees their meaning. Such is the case of Far de Donna of 2005: this story tells us of a boy who discovers he is a singer on the day that his mother loses her voice. The Oedipian chain is evident. So is the fact that the tale has to do with a universal image of a certain kind of personality, comportment and human phenomenon. In a certain way, it is the discovery of the types of personality and the social existence that Vasco Araújo is constantly undertaking. Classical references (see Hipólito of 2003, Hamlet of 2004, Jardim of 2005 et cetera) serve him not only as a formal slight of hand, but as a method of determining human nature, which has essentially remained unchanged throughout time. We have always been frightened by the same things, suffered from the same maladies, committed the same injustices.

If Araújo finds a world of text, voice and image in opera, the dramatic spectacle he has in view is that of Wagner, that is, the understanding of the work of art as a totality (Gesamtkunstwerk): a concept that embraces the artist himself and the reception of his work. In other words, this is a totality not only because it employs all of the available elements to construct the work, but also because the viewer finds him or herself imbued in a unmitigated sensorial experience, an experience where all our senses, imagination and intelligence form an inseparable whole that is the result of a powerful unity of meaning. A fine example is that of Sabine/Brunilde (2003) where two videos function as a single work: here the theatrical dimension is signaled by the use of scenarios and the arrangement of the space in the form of an amphitheatre (it is no chance event that Araújo trained as a sculptor). In the two videos - which operate like a kind of symbolic mirror – there is a woman that sings/tells her story. In the one, she would like to sing but cannot, in the other, she tells the story of her tragic life. 

Both videos contain the same female character: in the one, she sings; in the other, she narrates her life story in the first person: the decision as to the veracity or fiction of the narrated facts is of minor importance as to the construction of the experience to be had. What propels the images is the discovery of how identity is weaved, the tension of the discovery of the many lines used to stitch the psychological fabric: here the universal figure is that of Brunilde. She is a mythical figure that the artist uses as a guide to unearth the phenomenon under analysis. We can locate in the surprising amount of attention that is paid to the other – Araújo discovers the alien as a location to anchor his gaze – many of his works. This is the reason for his unbounded attention to language and different codes of communication; language (the words we use, the way we say things, the gestures we make, etc.) appears as (in Heidegger’s words) as the house of the spirit, the place of the human, and one might add, of art, apparition.

The place of difference and the foreign is an important axis in Araújo’s work. An example of this is Jardim (2005), a piece where black rock sculptures cite Homeric verse. The quotations have all been arranged around the experience of being a foreigner: the garden, built during the Portuguese dictatorship, symbolizes the oppression and expresses the terrifying effects of colonial rule prior to the Portuguese revolution. The same thing happens in The Girl of the Golden West (2004): a Negro comments on the love triangle in Pucini’s La Fanciulla del West. She extends the range of her comments on justice and injustice to the world at large, placing and recovering fundamental issues of human rights, especially the cardinal points that guide human relations. In these two works, the touchstone lies in the way a change of perspective corresponds to a new set of things, that is, if we change our way of seeing, new things are born, new facts, new words, new feelings.

Following Nitzsche’s dictum that there are no facts, only interpretations, this alternating perspective demonstrates that facts are not only dependant of interpretations, but that everything is dependant on one point of view: what we recognize in the totality of landscape that is known to us as the universe depends on our fixed point of observation, the thoughts and judgments we adopt. In the case of Vasco Araújo, the crux is to emphasize the game that is needed in order to construct identity and discover intimacy, the latter being just another human construct built not in isolation, but in the public realm of the human community. This universal theatre by Vasco Araújo is comprised of this medium, it at once reflects and is a reflexive surface. The artist explores this duplicity to an extreme: his work corresponds to the successetion moments that mark the discovery of ingredients which we are made off. In his most recent work, About Being Different, the piece’s visual and musical density is large. Priests and priestesses of Newcastle (the location where the artist filmed this work) speak about the injustices incurred upon those who are unjustly cast to the margins of society for their sexual orientation. The crux in this case is not sexual gender altogether, but the detection of mechanisms that bring on exclusion.

None of the works mentioned proposes a thesis or theory, they are always sensitive experiences about the world and then, about art. The social, political and artistic consequences are a second moment. This is why everything seems to take place on a stage where a blinding spotlight follows everything that exists, giving us the chance to detect the movements that happen on stage, moments that range from utterly brutal to extremely subtle movements. The different relationships between elements, people and things that Araújo traces and composes are fruit of the discipline and of the exercise in attention which has as its objective not the construction of a gaze that penetrates things – like windows that look out on to distant scenes – but a gaze that seems to be willing to install itself in the centre of what there is, in the intimacy of each and every one of us so as to discover what perplexes, frightens and inspires us all.


*Interview by Alexandre Melo, published in Vasco Araújo, Pathos, Salamanca: Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, 2006/7.

originally published in ArtPapers, September/October, 2007