Artists

Vasco Araújo

Press release

Vasco Araújo: Telling Stories, Remaking the World

In a recent interview with Vera Appleton, Vasco Araújo states:

Reality doesn’t exist. What we call reality is a theoretical — and, of course, practical — construction that allows us to understand one another. Isn’t it? We speak a language… it’s a code for mutual understanding… Because everything is a performance. Reality is staged. It’s false. It’s perfectly constructed. I am interested in precisely these things — how we construct our identity, how we build ourselves as human beings. How we act as human beings, in society, with one another.

With his usual candour and panache, the artist condenses, in just a few sentences, a significant part of the philosophical foundation of his work. For Araújo, reality functions as a system: a network of conventions, languages, and rituals that allow us to coexist and to make shared meaning out of the world. Everything is mediated and represented. The performative nature of experience — an experience that in turn shapes human identity — is reflected in Araújo’s recurring engagement with theatre, opera, and performance, as well as in his use of quotation and reference to pre-existing texts.

Everything in Araújo’s work points toward the symbolic dimension of life. Without denying the phenomenological aspect of human experience, his art foregrounds discourse as the arena in which the human world is continually made and remade. If there is such a thing as truth, it resides first and foremost in action. The “substance” of reality lies in the “forms” through which it is performed. In Insula (2010), one of Araújo’s most reflexive works, this phrase appears on screen: “Truth is not discovered. It is created.” What is at stake in almost all of his work is a notion of reality and a notion of art that are fundamentally inseparable. Both are rooted in fiction, creation, and potentiality, rather than in any mimetic attempt to represent the world as it is.

If the Romanesque tradition — culminating in opera, Vasco Araújo’s first great passion — and later humanist theatre (the line “To be or not to be, that is the question” recurs throughout Araújo’s body of work, and Hamlet [2004] is in fact one of his titles) taught us that life and the human condition are composed of stories lived by characters who are, to some extent, also the authors of their own narratives, and that those character-authors are each one of us, then modernity brought that awareness decisively into art by making it one of its central concerns. In this sense, Araújo’s work may be understood as an artistic inquiry into the human condition: how we create reality by living and recounting the stories that shape it, and how, in doing so, we construct ourselves both as singular beings and as collective identities.

The method through which the artist explores these ideas often involves fiction. In truth, Vasco Araújo is a storyteller-artist whose works stage the very act of narration. More than that, they reveal the potential inherent in storytelling: the capacity to help us make sense of the world and of existence, and to graft new and unexpected meanings onto them. What interests him most is measuring what new stories owe to ancestral ones, which is another way of saying how modern humans owe so much to the ancients. The world of Vasco Araújo is one of the eternal return of episodes, characters, and gestures. Yet he approaches this not as a historian or theorist, but as someone who tells the stories that fascinate and animate him, the stories that shape his worldview, his imagination, his dreams, and his own reading of the past, of the present world, and of its social, political, and psychological structures.

Vasco Araújo is a contemporary bard who, having read his Walter Benjamin, strives to resist the philosopher’s famous claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”, and to affirm that this art can still endure in the age of post-information and post-truth. That stories can still, and increasingly must, enchant and unsettle us. For Araújo’s works are indeed stories, but they are also, simultaneously, a personal and political affirmation of the possibility and the responsibility of continuing to tell them: a privileged way of fostering encounters, of creating a genuine “community of listeners” who may, through an act of shared attention, dream of new “models for the world’s becoming” (Benjamin, “The Storyteller”).

Regarding the title of this exhibition, “some stories”, the phrasing is significant. There is no claim to totality here. Bringing together disparate works suits an oeuvre that is grounded in fiction, precisely because it embraces multiplicity and resists overarching narratives. Above all, it reflects the principles that underpin Araújo’s poetics: a practice based on assembling echoes and forming a constellation composed of small, otherwise autonomous points.

This principle is embedded in the exhibition’s spatial design itself. Occupying the entire ground floor of the Fundação Leal Rios, the videos are distributed across four contiguous rooms, with no doors separating them. As a result, the light from the different projections traverses the space, travelling between rooms and allowing the films to touch one another through that very light which is, ultimately, their material substance. Sound — which, as the vehicle of music, voice and text, is always a crucial element in Vasco Araújo’s work — likewise moves between rooms, inevitably crossing over. When a viewer is watching and listening to a given film, they are also, unavoidably, watching and listening to the remaining films at the same time, and are thus compelled into an exercise of attention (Vasco Araújo is, quite evidently, not an artist for the inattentive). Operating through porosity and contamination, the exhibition mirrors the polyphonic structure of Araújo’s oeuvre: the central idea that each work, while autonomous, functions as part of a network (another term for the previously invoked metaphor of the ‘constellation’), and unfolds as an efflorescence from a single core — the mind of Vasco Araújo — across which all elements are in constant relation.

Interestingly, the diversity of the works presented in this exhibition resonates with some of the artist’s central thematic concerns.

Hereditas (2006) stands out as the fairy tale of the ensemble, and perhaps the most emblematic example of a lyrical, dreamlike, non-discursive tendency that, although rarely dominant, permeates Araújo’s entire body of work. Hovering between the gothic and the surreal, it is a silent film (as dreams are usually silent) of lost children in a forest, haunted houses, skeletons that resist being pieced back together…

Eco (2008) gives voice to another, more dominant line of inquiry: self-reflective, or operating in a Narcissus-like register (Narcissus and his echo-reflections return in Pathosformel [2021]). It is a philosophical tale. Araújo lends his voice to several characters seated around a table, each one a kind of reflection of the artist himself. They discuss, or rather Araújo discusses with himself through them, questions that, while central to his artistic reflection, can also be recognised, not without a touch of melancholy irony, as the “great questions” of philosophy and of humanity. In an almost programmatic gesture, it is the child (and childhood is a recurring motif across the films gathered here) who poses the questions: What is reality? What is rhythm? What is instinct? What is making? What is echo? What is love?…

Hipólito (2003) is the political tale, with allegorical overtones. Image and text engage in an intriguing play of (dis)junction: on the soundtrack, we hear only the hero’s lines from Euripides’ Hippolytus, which, extracted from the play, invite us to question his heroic status; the images, meanwhile, show a strange scene of seduction (or is it simply innocent play?) between a boy and a girl, both wearing the uniform of the Mocidade Portuguesa. This is one of Araújo’s most disarming works, prompting reflection on tensions and power dynamics within communities, on desire and the dominance of passion over reason (how such forces could destabilize the polis was, indeed, what most interested Racine in his 17th-century reworking of the myth in Phèdre), on gender, and on the ways myths are appropriated and distorted across history. Here, the abuses of fascist regimes and their appropriation of classical heroes as paradigms of masculinity, strength, and power exemplify how the complexities and flaws of the original myths were deliberately erased.

Finally, All the Stories (Todas as Histórias, 2013) is the metafictional tale, the one that embodies the epic breath running through Araújo’s entire body of work. It is the film that most clearly gives form to the line of thought I have tried to develop here. A kind of art history and literature lesson set inside the British Museum and structured around ceramic pieces from Ancient Greece, it offers a meditation both on and through the legacy of classical narratives, but also on the history of humanity, historical memory, and the human as a transhistorical “thing”. As if Oedipus, Hippolytus, Narcissus, and so many others were also ourselves. And indeed, they are, as any attentive viewer of Araújo’s work will eventually recognise.

Yet All the Stories should not be mistaken for a film about fiction and the human as nothing more than a playful collection of gestures. Reflexivity, as a process, is far from being at the centre. In this sense, Araújo is post-Calvino. As a storyteller, he does not simply recount stories or reflect on their place within reality. Following Benjamin, his aim is to help create a community of active, attentive, critical, generous, open, and unsettled human beings and spectators. All of Araújo’s works seek, as we hear in this final film, “to conceive a principle of perplexity. To live in perplexity. Forcing us always to choose the path of knowledge over that of ignorance”. Because “knowledge is tragic, but it makes us all more human”.