Theme: DIVERGENCE
Title: On-Line
Online is a term which has become of common use nowadays. The emergence of the internet, and the more and more sophisticated phone lines brought us closer to each other. Air connections, low-costs, transnational companies and globalization in general also contributed. All these are virtual, material or imaginary lines that fade borders and link us to all kind of information, in all directions, ways and in constant exchanges. They make us become citizens of the world. There is a growing variety of media, ways of expressing ourselves and also ways of circulating beyond frontiers. Distance has softened. Families scatter in search for each element’s personal dreams. The new relationships are no longer restricted to our circle of friends, either from school or from the neighborhood we grew up in. Today we face and infinite range of possibilities. On-line represents such wide range, infinite and variable as it is, it becomes more organic, with a new shape, expressed in lines and information.
Being in one of those lines is being in all of them, connected to the world, the immense global network. Being online is belonging to the big virtual network which dresses our planet with contradictions, ideals, feelings, relations, choices, diversity, suffering, creativity, ideas, paths, life. But this knitwear is extremely complex and even in a world that still shelters so many inequalities and exclusion, everyone has their own lines, their own branches of lines, their own path of life.
Divergence isn’t only about the more or less selfish dreams of persons and families, the ambitions or disappointments when facing the same problems, but is worsened by the myth of harmonizing thought and life, while the existing net uniting men and nations is more interrupted than continuous.
And so it becomes necessary to provide a new perspective on divergence, and even to oppose to long standing ideas. The theory that today there is a smaller divergence between different people than before, only hides that this divergence presents different shapes, and is based on messages in which the media try to proclaim the idea that one which is not an equal is, therefore, opposed.
The flow network which covers our globe is ours. We are, all of us, its reproducers. We are, all, its multipliers. We are all, without exception, responsible for the dynamics of our Earth. But it is each of us that, individually, weave our own lines, or choose to take part in some and directly face their crossroads. It is each of us that, individually, feel the effects of this global knitwear in our body and understand them in our own way. That is why, for this project, I propose a look at this world dressed with my knitwear. I will weave the connection between men in their divergences, in their mutual respect and not in the grayness of a supposed equality. According to my own perspective, my life experience as a citizen of this world.
The world, of course, will not be wearing any shirt, trousers or shoes, it has its own shapes and it will have its own clothes. And this world, the one I lived, also has its unique shapes. In it, Europe and Asia, more specifically Macao and Portugal, are the spine, which will be well protected, well dressed. Even tough, they will not be isolated in their realities, as islanding them is no longer possible. They are two world territories, extremely dynamic, economically and even in a fantasy way inserted in the world, in my world.
I grew up divided between two continents. They are two contradictory and complementary piers, my inspirations in life and in art…
I grew up in Lisbon, but my school for life was Macao. I have family, friends and roots both in Portugal and in Macao. These are two places both peculiar and very intimate for me. Macao with its exuberance, mixtures and food, a mix of China and Portugal with its cobbled streets, its people, its world.
When you have two nests, in nearly opposite sides of the globe, you go through lots of things. Working with art, in touch with what happens, enabled by the artistic dynamism of both places, I was given the chance to meet other continents, to dream of meeting new places, creating various real, virtual, social and sensible relations throughout the world. It is this relation, of artistic restlessness towards the world of access, of proximity and distance to everything that connects me, that raises my awareness to cherish it through the knitwear of my life in flow lines of wool. On-line.
