Conversation between artist Leka Mendes and Vera Appleton about "Circum-navegação"

September 2023

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Vera Appleton: Let's start our "journey" with the title you chose for your exhibition: "Circum-

navegação”. You've told me that you're fascinated by this whole context of the so-called "Age of the

Great Navigations" of venturing out without means to find land, gold, spices. It';s a subject that

attracts you: the sea, the sky, the horizon, the stars, the light, the dark. All this is linked to these

great journeys, they are elements that put them in context. So, what comes first? The title or the

exhibition?

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Leka Mendes: The title doesn';t always come first, but this time and in my last exhibition the titles

came first. Of course, there';s always research I';m involved in or reading something that makes me

have a few words or phrases in my head and then I develop the idea. In the exhibition I did in São

Paulo, I was researching Alexander von Humboldt and the title was a phrase of his. This time, when I

thought of Brazil - Portugal, my first thought was the navigators, I don';t think there';s much escape

from that. All these characters fascinate me, navigators, adventurers, naturalists, have always been

present in my research. Reading about Fernão de Magalhães, I thought that this term, circum-

navigation, made a lot of sense with my production process, this crossing, sometimes on long

stretches of travel, sometimes while walking through the city.

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VA: I can't resist leaving here a poem by Fernando Pessoa that connects us to the great navigators of

that time, and also to Brazil, immortalized through Caetano;s ";Argonautas" Bethânia';s idea and

Gal';s interpretation:

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Navegadores antigos tinham uma frase gloriosa:

‘Navegar é preciso; viver não é preciso.’

Quero para mim o espírito [d]esta frase,

transformada a forma para a casar como eu sou:

Viver não é necessário; o que é necessário é criar.

Não conto gozar a minha vida; nem em gozá-la penso.

Só quero torná-la grande,

ainda que para isso tenha de ser o meu corpo e a (minha alma) a lenha desse fogo.

Só quero torná-la de toda a humanidade;

ainda que para isso tenha de a perder como minha.

Cada vez mais assim penso.

Cada vez mais ponho da essência anímica do meu sangue

o propósito impessoal de engrandecer a pátria e contribuir

para a evolução da humanidade.

É a forma que em mim tomou o misticismo da nossa Raça.

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Leka, "so much sea"; separates us, and yet we're so close, "sailing is necessary" (“navegar é preciso”)?

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LM: Yes, always, at least for me. The way I work/think, I';m always walking to other ways of sailing.

Perhaps our proximity is what makes us sail together, as is the case now with this Appleton and

Fidalga partnership, where there are exchanges of artists and even this crossing of oceans where we

are always together. I think my artistic training was at Fidalga with Sandra Cinto and Albano Afonso

and I learned from them that walking/sailing is better when you're together. I think that happens

with most of the residents who pass through and join the group, like several Portuguese friends I

met there.

 

VA: As you mentioned earlier, one of your journeys can be a simple stroll through the city. You're an

artist who finds poetry in the most unusual place. Or who transforms banal objects from everyday

life in the city into poetry. Of course, you take us back to the famous 'ready-made', which you

explore in a variety of ways, since you use them both as parts of works and to become the work

itself, don';t you agree?

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LM: I think it happened in two different ways, both because of my research into the photographic

process and because the more I studied the Anthropocene (the interference of human beings in the

Earth's geology) and so many questions about human beings and the environment, these materials

came into play more and more, sometimes as an object, sometimes as a support and also as a

matrix. There's 'ready-made';, but I think there's a lot of 'arte povera'; and 'land art';. I've always made

these journeys. Before, I used to travel by car over long distances and always to places with a certain

"geological tourism";, so I would cross from Santiago (Chile) to Atacama, or from Salta (Argentina) to

Atacama, São Paulo - Cabo Polônio (Uruguay), Iceland, among others, and I would create from the

route and the collection I made - first it was a lot of stones, leaves, earth, and I would also

photograph, sometimes making an installation along the way. Then I started collecting old

newspaper articles, old photos, postcards. At this time, when other elements began to come in, I

started practicing in the studio and my process changed as a result. I started collecting things in the

street on the way to the studio, and I moved from the natural to the "industrialized natural"

construction debris such as some brazilian stones, marble, iron. Over time, other materials were

added, such as discarded plastic, textiles and electronics. I think this excerpt from Ana Roman';s text

(curator of my most recent solo show at Marli Matsumoto) says it well: "The artist collects fragments

produced by human activity in this era: urban-industrial-technological waste are her finds, focusing

on the potential for creating speculation that all objects in the world hold. For Leka, there is no

predetermined arrangement or image, but an attentive listening to the forms and narratives found

along the way. She is concerned with what is more than human and with the memory that lies in the

plants, stones and objects that surround us. The artist's work creates ecologies of our surroundings."

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VA: Is your gaze always the same, in which everything is a pretext for inspiration and creation, or are

you able to go through nature and especially the urban areas of your daily life with your more

dormant senses?

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LM: It's difficult to separate, I think my perception comes from the way I live and think about being

in the world, how my relationship is with nature, with looking at the city, buildings, living, habits,

everyday life, food, waste, garbage... I always try to see everything as a whole, everything is

connected. I think my yoga practice since I was a teenager and all the philosophy that comes with it

makes me have this presence in the moments, attention to the present. The philosopher Emanuele

Coccia has this idea of the whole, of cycles, and I think that's why it's very important in my research.

Of course, we always have senses that are more dormant than others, but they end up being part of

it in some way. I thought that perhaps taste was my most dormant sense, but food is also present in

my work, sometimes as a form (stamping ink on paper) and sometimes as a color (dyeing fabrics).

The term pratyāhāra; also came to me. Ahára means food, or something you put in, and parti; is a

preposition meaning against or outside. Pratyáhára, then means control of ahāra, or having control

over external influences. And it's also a transition between the two spheres, the physical and the

mental, the transition between physical practice and meditation. I think that's what happens

between the crossing and studio practice.

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VA: In this "look at the city" you find Architecture, an important discipline for you. How do you relate

to it? Is living in a city like São Paulo more stimulating (in a good or bad way) for those who

appreciate it?

 

LM: Architecture is very important in life, not everyone understands the importance, but it dictates

the way we live, from the shelter that welcomes us to the height of the kitchen sink, or the location

of sockets, switches... every detail matters, it's from this that your body interacts with the space it

occupies. So much so that I quit my architecture degree in the middle of it, because I felt so

responsible for other people's lives - I felt I couldn't decide how other people would live in these

spaces. But it has never ceased to be important in my view, and São Paulo, being a city that is a

tremendous mess, a constant love-hate relationship, generates a lot of stimuli. Returning to the

previous question, it affects all our senses. Walking around São Paulo is an experience, and it's

certainly a city that gives me a lot of material for creation. There's a beautiful side to all this lack of

urban planning, it feeds me, but there's a very sad side to not preserving our memory, houses,

blocks, and almost entire neighborhoods that are demolished for huge new developments without

much coherence with the surroundings, where our entire horizon is also disappearing.

VA: Let's go back to your genesis, your connection and relationship with photography. You're a

professional photographer and yet you've already told me that when you enter the field of visual

arts, what interests you is no longer photography but its process. So, explain to us how this change

in the way you look at and use photography came about.

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LM: Despite my commercial work with photos, I think that working with technique makes me want

to let go of that part. I've always experimented with my own work, with cameras and film, and I've

always been interested in this period of the invention of photography, the naturalists who went out

to capture these new images, the processes for capturing light. When I got into the visual arts, I saw

that this process could be much broader. I wasn't interested in creating a photo essay or a beautiful

image with the right light, that's all already in the world, just like the materials I collect today. Then I

experimented with supports, ways of transferring an image to the surface, ways of developing the

image, ways of capturing the image.

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VA: I'd say you're an experimental artist, with a lot of intuition and a great deal of spontaneity, but

at the same time with a work full of layers, often subtle, don't you agree? Can you talk a bit about

your working process? Or to what extent is the process the work?

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LM: The process is the most important thing, I love the process and I don't know if I like finishing the

work. It's always a question of these final adjustments and I love transforming the pieces, I leave

them hanging in the studio and often destroy the piece I've made to turn it into something else or I

change it, and that's the desire I have with every exhibition. I want to change things as we go along,

but I know that these are processes and issues to be taken on to the next one. When it comes to

producing, I'm very intuitive and spontaneous, but I'm very rational beforehand, I do a lot of

research, I read a lot, I create methods and systems and when I get to the studio I know more or less

what I want, I have a story in my head to tell. I think that's why it's a work with so many layers, the

issues accumulate, and as I said before, what wasn't resolved in one exhibition is left for the next,

and so I think all my works are interconnected, and could be one big series, even though the

materials and languages are different. I have to let go of this rational side, but it's difficult, it ends up

happening during the process or the assembly. Maybe that's why the process is the most enjoyable,

I have my story in my head and I'm unfolding it based on wha's being built in the studio, with all the

mistakes that take us in another direction, and all the chance that can happen.

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VA: In “Circum-navegação” we find the usual cloths that you cut out, reconstruct, manipulate and

transform into sculpture-drawings. How do these pieces connect to who you are as an artist or can

they even tell a bit of your story?

 

LM: I started working with fabric when I made my first stamps with rubble. I thought fabric would be

better than paper because it wouldn't wrinkle or tear, and I was pleasantly surprised by this

material. There are so many ways to use the fabrics, and it solved the supplier side for the supports -

I could finish the pieces myself by sewing, hanging, inventing supports, stretching them on the

frame. Using different supports, my collections went to a different place too, where I looked at

larger pieces that I could use as a structure for the textile pieces, such as waste material from stores,

supermarkets and junkyards. What bothered me was buying the fabric, I thought there was no point

since the textile process isn't the most ecological, so I tried to buy leftovers from fabric stores. Some

brands were interested in donating the leftovers to me, but it never happened, until a new studio

neighbor, a designer, offered to donate the leftover canvas - there's a furniture factory - and a whole

world opened up with this material. I still use this material, I make collages with the pieces of canvas,

I always try to keep the design I found there, without cutting into the piece, and it is very resistant to

bleach, the material I use most of the time to interfere with the piece and make designs. In recent

months I've started mixing the bleach with pigments. I brought some ready-made bases from São

Paulo and finished the pieces here.

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VA: Your video is the centerpiece of the exhibition, although you don't give it that much prominence.

It's like a summary of what we'e been talking about - your fascination with the photographic

process that arises from the contrast between light and dark, the allusion to a starry sky, to the

cosmos, which is actually the result of an experiment with a very earthly object, and finally the

sound relating us to the sea. How did this idea come about? Was it complicated to execute?

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LM: When I received the invitation from Fidalga to do the residency, I started thinking about what

could be done, and I came up with this relationship with sailors, the ocean crossing. First, I thought

of working with two videos, making a corridor with a projection on each side, giving this idea of

darkness, of the sea and the sky. As I knew that the room would be very dark, I wanted to give the

feeling of being thrown into the sea without seeing the room until the eyes got used to the darkness.

I've read a lot about navigators, and I thought it was beautiful that the first sailors didn't leave the

land without knowing where they were going, if they might fall off the edge. Later on, the bravest

set out to sea with no land in sight. I found this situation similar to someone who is going to do a

residency and exhibition in a foreign country - not taking a ready-made exhibition with them. On the

other hand, I wanted to have a bit of security and bring work with me to set up the exhibition. As I

have the practice of collecting, and not knowing what I was going to find, I felt insecure about

coming without anything ready. The exhibition at Paço das Artes in São Paulo, 2022, had as one of its

references the book "The Fall of the Sky" by Davi Kopenawa, in which, to summarize the book, it

says that in indigenous mythology they say that if human beings don't stop destroying the Earth, the

protective spirits will leave, and there will be no one to support the sky, it would be the end of life.

In this exhibition I produced supports to hold up the skies I had created, and one of the pieces was a

tin can with a magic eye that simulated a planetarium. And it was the starry backdrop for this video

in "Circum-navegação” which I had wanted to do. One of the things I love most about photography is

the lie, whether it's the editing, the cut, the situation or any other reason. And when I made my first

videos, I realized that I was falling out of the sky, that I could no longer sustain it for long if I moved

the light source.

From then on, I created a navigation within the room, a part that I consider to be the land in sight,

where I brought a bit of the production of what I was doing, the lighter side of the room, and the

dark side, the side where I launched myself into the sea, which in addition to the video, has pieces

produced in the residence, on my circumnavigations of the Alvalade neighborhood, collecting all the

loose stones along the way.

The video of the sea didn't make it into the show, but only the sound of it, which I think helps the

exhibition's narrative and makes it present. The sky is one of humanity's greatest mysteries, and for

a long time it was the guide for many navigators and explorers, but nowadays, how can you be

guided by the sky if it's falling?