background: Susana Mendes Silva

I have been always fascinated by artistic processes. And, in general the processes or the modus operandi are very influential in my work. What I mean by this is: that knowing and understanding the process that lead to a specific artwork was and is one of the most interesting things for me. I think that one of my fascinations is reappropriating and recombining processes.
In a wider sense I believe on of my thematics is the permanent process of combining and negotiating between different elements. Those elements come from stimuli from art in general, from media culture, from everyday life, from my own life experiences, from the places and situations that I am working with. It is a practice of interweaving. I am very interested in dislocating or subverting either concepts, dichotomies, rules, prejudices, points of view and even common situations. In this sense my work can be seen as committed to an ethical and critical vision about art and about the world.
Due to the nature of my practice, I am interested, in the written element, to explore and to write just about one branch or a specific part of it. My interest in the subject, that I propose to develop, derives from my practice, specifically from my performance and performative practices. Since 2002, I have experimented and developed performance projects that are conceived for a one-to-one (or to a very small audience) encounter, as opposed to an audience, as a group of people attending an event. In some of these performances there is no recording of the event, as the performance rely on an environment in which confidentiality, secrecy, and empathy are required. There can be some images or descriptions of what happened, but there is no voyeuristic access to what really happened between the performer and the participant. Either one participated or not.

If I look back in time, I believe my interest in mediation goes back to my fascination by the telephone and by the playful and performative uses I made of it. In the 1980's as a child and as a young teenager, I would pick up telephone directories, and I would phone unknown people pretending I was someone they knew or just trying to engage with them in a conversation. This was always easier if I had a pretext to do it. Even, if it was a false one. I also loved pen friend clubs, because I could exchange letters with unknown people of my age, and some of them were based in distant countries. And I grew up in a world where telecommunication devices were not only affordable and available to an increasing number of people, but they were rapidly developing and becoming more mobile: telephones, fax machines, walkie-talkies, walkmans...
Since the mid 1980's, my brother had a citizens' band station (CB). This is a radio service that is a two-way, short distance, communications service that can be used by any person for professional, recreational or domestic purposes. The CB was very popular during the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. It had some similarities with Internet voice chat rooms, although its use was much more codified, because a number regulations and rules had to be respected. However the CB allowed people to communicate with one another in a quasi-anonymous manner. It was also regarded as an alternative communication device, as it was mainly use by people who needed a way of communicate that did not rely on the landline telephone network. There could be multiple speakers at the same time on the same channel. People talked about their lives, a specific theme, or you just to give traffic or weather information. One interesting thing was that a number of people would become a special kind of familiar strangers: I knew them because I usually talked to them and knew things about their lives, however I have never met them personally. We would have to use a codified language - a specific slang - in order to be only understood by each others, and in order to respect the common space. Some days were really special: when at night and with specific weather condition we could speak with people as far as Spain or Italy (because by the law no citizens' band user was allowed to use a signal amplifier in Portugal, and that would limit the geographical range). Since the wide and rapid developments of mobile communications, especially mobile phones, and later the Internet, the CB has lost much of its original function and allure.
When I was about sixteen or seventeen I worked during the summer in a local radio station, and I remember quite distinctively that thrill of being in the middle of a sunshiny day inside a sound-proof studio and imagining all those different people that were listening to the program on the beach, in their cars or homes. When I was allowed to use the microphone, it was as strange as appealing to imagine my disembodied voice in all those places.
I started using the World Wide Web, at home, around the end of 1997, and that was a huge breakthrough with the email and chat software. The computer was no longer an isolated device, but was enabling people to establish de-territorialized connections, and access and share knowledge and information in new and unexpected ways. However, in those days, the speed of the connection was still very slow (I remember always had a notebook, on my desk, to draw whilst I was waiting for a webpage to download), and it was also a very expensive commodity.

Maybe, I should also add almost as an endnote, that my interest in performance and performativity does not arise from my education, as I have never studied Performance Art in an academic context. I studied Art and Design in High School and Visual Arts/Sculpture at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon.