Two simultaneous events—the cutting down of a palm tree and the sound of a demonstration against austerity outside the Portuguese Parliament—become related, in unison, reflecting the present situation. While the trees are being cut due to the red weevil plague, that is affecting specific types of palm trees brought from African ex-colonies, the demonstrations against austerity are identified as the roots of economic crisis.

João Ribas: The Current Situation begins with a prologue connecting the language of our present with its ecological and material reality. This is something that the film goes on to suggest governs the logic of the “now,” in terms of our contemporary condition—of hypercirculation and abstraction—uniting the natural world with the economic one. The work suggests the credit system has become our version of natural chaos...

Pedro Barateiro: In the prologue I use three different short texts, one about the fact that the word “Culture” was considered by Merriam Webster Online Dictionary as word of the year 2014, in the sense that culture can be applied to anything, music culture, food culture, etc; he second was an article from The Guardian about an accident involving a giraffe killed while being illegally carried in South Africa, and the third was from The Economist’s The World in 2015 special edition, in which Ann Wroe, the editor of obituaries, claimed a “Farewell to Escapism.” I could talk about each of these events individually—for example, I was intrigued by the giraffe because the animal became humanized, acquired human characteristics. It is a minor incident, no longer relevant, a human death on a freeway, but as a resourceful angle, the bizarre death of an animal taken illegally is more appealing to readers. Although other events could have been chosen in their place, these three events seemed like the the most relevant when I finished editing the film, functioning as landscape, a sort of preparation or even a curtain-raiser for the narrative that follows. I’ve chosen to have the articles placed as book pages over footage of a rock sculpted by water to create a relationship between nature and the cultured way of looking, reflecting the way we're constantly objectifying nature.

JR: How do you see this sense of assessing the present, this abiding interest in the contemporaneity of our historical moment, this continuously lived present that seems distinct, yet totally allusive?

PB: While making this film I was obsessed with the idea of how continuous present is forged by economic structures, the way economy mimics nature by trying to find patterns and using the concept of controlled chaos within a certain environment. Economic systems tend to establish themselves as a replica of natural systems in order to survive. Not long ago, when the financial crisis erupted in Portugal, a system was designed to create the illusion of a continuous present, in which the idea of future was erased. Both the Portuguese government and all the news feeds manipulated by market laws, tried—and were successful—to make everyone in the country believe that there would be no future in sight with that amount of debt. The concept of present was stretched in order to become elastic within a specific agenda—to save the European banking system.

JR: Let’s talk a bit more about those political and ecological events that inspired the work: the virus that infected and killed the palm tree in front of your window, and the “virus” of abstracted financial markets—what the narrator describes as a “system with no logic,” that caused the financial crash.

PB: In a text I wrote in 2012 called The Sad Savages, I try to create a relationship between two events happening at the same time in southern European countries: a plague, caused by the red palm weevil which destroyed the palm trees, and the financial crisis. The text is a deconstruction exercise of the title, separating two words, “sad” and “savages,” in an attempt to find meaning between these two events, discovering a parallel and trying to relate them to one another. In The Current Situation I bring these two events to the forefront again, addressing them with more personal details. One day I was watching a palm tree being cut down from my window, while at the same time I was listening to the demonstrations in front of the Portuguese parliament, down the road from my house. The sound of the two events was joined in my head, as if they were a consequence of each other. It was impossible not to find connections between them and realizing how things are inevitably linked. At some point in the film there is an image of a caravan parked in front of the parliament. The crazy coincidence was that the caravan had a beach landscape with palm trees painted on it. That caravan belonged to protesters. This was just one of the many forms of protest that took place in front of the building during the past years.

JR: There is a subconscious image of the euro that appears in the film, in the rings of the tree, which brings things together in this fantastic moment…

PB: True. I didn’t notice it at the time when I was filming but then while editing it became clear. That specific palm tree at Lisbon’s Tropical Botanical Garden was one of the few dozen dead trees waiting for funds to be cut down. Especially during the wintertime these standing decaying trees are potentially dangerous for visitors. Before, in the beginning of the 20th century till the end of the Fascist Regime, the Tropical Botanical Garden was called The Colonial Garden. These palm trees where brought, together with many other species of trees and plants, from the Portuguese ex-colonies, like Cabo Verde or Angola.

JR: One of the often-remarked things about the “current situation” is the immaterial, digital nature of capital. What strikes me about the work is how it seems to assert that there is something always effected: something always sustains the effects of the apparently immaterial, be it the body or the environment...

PB: In the film, when I say that economy copies biological structures and tries to organize everything, I’m trying to underline that immaterial forms of abstraction are constantly reshaping the forms of circulation, finding its materiality through representation (images) and objects. Although capital is inherently abstract and manifests itself immaterially, all its consequences are real. I'm interested in the idea of looking, of browsing, as a form of consumption. I’m thinking of Instagram and Tumblr, for instance, and the way they work as a form of projecting our subjectivity while at the same time objectifying ourselves through images, giving shape to desire and immediate need. We’ve always tried to capitalise nature. Landscape painting was a way of appropriating nature, and art, for me, works within a concept of deconstructing established rules. Particularly now when market laws manipulate the systems of experimentation in science, we should think about how these rules can change the way scientific research is made. I'm bringing this up because I think that there are similarities in terms of speculation and experiment in science which can be mistaken as similar to the ways in which art is produced. Modern forms of capitalist consumption are so extremely embedded in human evolutionary processes that I would argue that they effectively manipulate, conscious and unconsciously, our forms of perception. Our relationship with nature is measured within many parameters (also by an aesthetic judgment, as a strategy to give a certain form to thought), but nature has no distinction between good or bad. There’s no moral or ethics in nature. And the modern economic systems are designed to forget about it too.

Film presented on the occasion of Pedro Barateiro’s exhibition “Palmeiras Bravas/The Current Situation” at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, until May 24th

Credits

The Current Situation, 2015

Video (HD, color, sound, 11’52”)

Voice: Lula Pena

Sound composition: Margarida Magalhães

Translation: Susana Pomba

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon