Enorê is an artist from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, currently based in London, where they are completing their MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths. In their work, they think about the relationship between automation and the construction of subjectivity, and what it means when subjectivity is replicated, dispersed and diluted through digital media. For this they create image-capturing algorithms, bots and anything else they can use as an automated stand-in for their eye. They’re also particularly interested in digital technologies' role in shaping visibilities and how this relates to reinforcement of power structures, especially when it comes to identities that have been historically marginalised and their representations.
I wanted to start by discussing your background. You have a bachelor's degree in painting at UFRJ and are now graduating from Goldsmiths' MFA. Could you talk about the institutional challenges you encountered during these two periods and what were the strategies that you created to overcome them?
I would say I encountered institutional difficulties even before deciding to be an artist. I grew up in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, a very segregated city, and most cultural institutions such as museums and galleries were located around Central and South, mostly touristic and wealthier regions, so I didn't really have much access to them growing up, or didn’t even know they existed. I would never have thought of being an artist. That was probably the first institutional challenge I encountered: to be able to realise that I could be an artist.
But when I started college, where I applied for physics and not painting, I enrolled in a course called mathematical and earth sciences, and I didn't even know there was a painting course at the university. I found out about it when I was already studying for another degree and, as I had always liked drawing, I thought about doing a painting elective, just to develop my skills. And that's how I found out that it was a possibility, and that people could become artists that way. That was also when I was introduced to names of artists, museums, etc., through recommendations from my teachers and classmates. After two years, I changed my course and graduated in painting.
Another issue that always upset and affected me a lot was the small number of black people I saw. While I was studying mathematical and earth sciences, I didn't think about it as much because the course was a little more mixed, but when I switched to painting, I had only a few black classmates and teachers during the seven years I spent there. It has been changing since I started my studies over 10 years ago, and there are more black people entering universities now, which is very important.
So, my first institutional barriers were lack of access to anything related to the arts when I was growing up, and lack of black people and representation within the university.
When I moved to London to start my master's degree, one of the reasons I chose Goldsmiths was because of the location, because South East London is an area of London that is quite diverse. From what I had already researched about Goldsmiths, it seemed to be known for its diverse student body and openness. However, it wasn't quite so, and I had a similar experience to my undergrad. Basically, among sixty students, two or three were black, and we had no black tutors apart from temporary ones who would show up from time to time, but most of the time they were not allocated to me.
Additionally, teaching was entirely Eurocentric, both course and tutors. Probably due to being almost all white and British, tutors had a certain difficulty understanding different cultural perspectives and nuances, so I would often feel out of place in conversations. In fact, some of the things that my international classmates and I have heard from teachers sounded insensitive and even racist. I was hoping it would have been a slightly better experience, from what I had heard about Goldsmiths, but it wasn't.
When it comes to my practice itself, institutional racism has unfortunately affected how I choose to develop and present the subject of my work - to put it simply, I have felt the weight of tokenism since I started thinking more clearly about my position as an artist, and how I want to position myself as an artist within a contemporary context. In the beginning, I would often feel like I was being held back on working on certain things I wanted to because they weren't what was institutionally expected from a black artist. I also realized that, institutionally, white artists were "allowed" to make art about anything they wanted to, while artists of colour would often have their identities co-opted and made hyper-visible by institutions, or be assigned as "that work about identity." While it is obviously completely fine to make work about one's identity, white artists are never held to the same standards as whiteness is still considered the default in our white supremacist society, so even if their work consists mostly (or only) of white bodies, that is rarely put into question in a conversation about race, as it should be.
So I would often think of how to avoid being tokenized, how to make work about my identity only if I wanted to, how not to feel like my work had no "value" unless it referred to themes that institutions would want someone who looks like me to refer to. I do not have the answers to any of this, but these questions are always in the background of everything I do.
In your bio you explain that you use methods of manipulating images that are appropriated from the internet or from your personal archive. What is your process for choosing these images? Here I also wanted to reflect on your choice to repeatedly work with self-portraits in the digital realm.
It depends on the work, but before I started working with self-portraits I was mainly using images from Google Maps. It was again a question of growing up in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The work arose from my relationship with my surroundings and places I regularly visited (and commuted to), which were the suburbs. The suburbs also informed my aesthetic development a lot—the colours, the concrete, the deteriorating architecture, the wires on the power poles, etc. The choice seemed random, but I was on public transport looking at the train line, and then I thought, "imagine taking images of this route from Google Maps and making a work with it". And that's when I started to get images from the internet.
And there is the idea of automation, which I really like. I generally choose to work with API (application processing interfaces); these are things that many websites have that allow programmers to collect data.
I started working with self-portraiture when I found a picture of myself as a child at home and I kept it for a while. I didn't do anything with it for months, but ideas started to emerge as soon as I recognized that it was my first institutional photo. I think it was from school, in kindergarten. All the codes are present in the photo, such as school uniform — at school time, girls wore red, and boys wore blue — and my pigtails, characteristic of a black child growing up then. Even the expression I had in the photo, it looked like I was going to cry because I hated having pictures taken.
Still, thinking about the idea that I had this photo for so long, it served as if it were an amulet for me, almost like an object of worship. And that's when I started thinking about this idea of iconophilia. And the image itself as a symbol, for example, a religious one.
Again, I was always interested in the idea of representation. I never looked at myself as something that I wanted to use in my work, but I knew that I wanted to represent something, and the easiest thing to represent is myself. So it did not arise from the need to make a self portrait, but from the idea of representing and being close to myself, to be accessible.
Also, as I said, I always had a problem with my own image. You can imagine what society is like in relation to black women, or people that society understands as black women. So I had my self-esteem wiped out since I was born. And that was a way I found to claim my self-esteem, using my own image over and over again, almost like therapy.
Float is a Data Type I (2017)
I wanted to hear more about the Float is a Data Type series and Post-Hardware.
Float is a Data Type started basically from free association. At the time, I was taking a course at Paço Imperial. And I was thinking about ideas related to the cloud and data. Not exactly cloud computing, but the most basic way in which we look at clouds and try to make associations with existing images. I thought of clouds as codes, codes from which you can, through associations, extract data and information, from the simple act of looking.
The title is a reference to data types we use in computing - such as integer (whole numbers), float (numbers with decimals) and boolean (true or false values), among others.
In my titles I like to create metaphors and tangential meanings. I don't like descriptive titles. For this series, I first came up with the idea of the name and then thought of the work.
My first thoughts were about the idea of the surface in the digital, which was how I started working with clouds in Photoshop, deleting and leaving only the background of Photoshop, and I recorded the screen as a performative act.
In Float is a Data Type II, it was again using this idea of associating the cloud with the rock, making a physical contrast but with a formal approach. I don't remember exactly how this work's algorithm works, but if I'm not mistaken, it will dissipate the cloud over time.
In Float is a Data Type III, I continued with the association from the word cloud, and the idea of working with Google Maps, capturing the information it collected while facing upwards. And so I did a mapping of the sky too.
The work Post Hardware was created during a course I made related to computing and art, and this work was a performance. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of how the performance happened. Still, I put two iMac computers, each facing the other, and programmed the two to photograph each other during the exhibition period. These photographs were automatically uploaded to a Tumblr page. The intention was to create a recursive "view" between machines. Basically, the idea of doing this work came up because I wanted to create a mechanical performance. The machines "looked" at themselves and registered that look during the time allocated for the performance, so that the performance itself was the recording.
enactment for self-offering (2019)
And also about enactment for self-offering.
This work was for last year's interim show from the MFA at Goldsmiths. That was when I was working with my childhood photo, and ideas related to religious images. And, actually, this work is related to the work efface replace repeat, and the untitled arrangement, because I like to recycle works, and that's also something that I have tried to write about.
I think a lot about the idea of the non-discrete; discrete in the sense of a closed object or set. I don't like the idea of a work that is just one work alone. I love this mixing and flowing from one work to others. With these works you are offering an image, offering something, offering yourself. And again there is the theme of reproduction, with a small raspberry pi screen which has this picture of me as if it were a mask. All the photos captured by the camera are mixed with my own portrait; it is as if they appear behind it, and this is updated periodically. So there is this interconnection between the offering and the environment as part of the creation of a subject.
Finally, I wanted to talk about your relationship with the digital space, as it does not seem to be a space that escapes Eurocentric narratives. So what are your ways of exploring this space, what are the challenges and possibilities that you encounter?
I have always been a child of the computer. Since I was three, I've had an attraction to technology, and I started to discover the internet when I was eight. I always had this connection, but there was still this stereotype that places white people as the ones who know how to use computers, and I grew up with that as context.
I took a computer technician course during high school, and the students were mostly white. I always felt excluded, although I really enjoyed studying the topic. I thought about working with it, but I did not apply to the university for anything related to computers because I felt I didn't belong to that world. But in fact, I have felt like an outsider in every sphere I’ve entered so far.
When it comes to the digital environment, it is white male-dominated. The internet content itself has always been Americanized and Eurocentric, so much so that I learned English by navigating the internet. Even today, I see the predominance of Eurocentric speech imposed on the internet. I have always been perplexed by this.
Even when it comes to identity discussions, it is still mostly focused on the US and Europe. And that was something that bothered me a lot because I didn't know where I fit. Even on social media, like Instagram, it continues to be so. The only strategy I found was to follow more Brazilian people and people who are not in Eurocentric standards and prioritize their voices instead of American voices, mainly because Americans can be very loud.
When I was a kid, I didn't have many examples of Brazilian people on the internet to be inspired by, read about, or admire. It seemed that there were barely black people on the internet in general.
Nowadays, through the internet, I see many more black references in fashion, in politics, everywhere! And much more than I had access to when I was a child, which I believe has contributed to my low self-esteem. For example, when I was a child, I dreamed of having dyed hair, but my family said no, that I couldn't dye my hair because I was black, and coloured hair was not for black people. Since I had no references, I really thought it wasn't possible. I am happy that black children are now growing up with more references through the internet.
In terms of possibilities that I find in the digital space, I would say there is more freedom to control the "consumption" (for lack of a better word) of my work/practice as opposed to institutions, in addition to greater creative freedom (not considering physical work). I think it's a matter of reframing — museums, galleries, etc. are all ways of framing and contextualizing an artwork. Digital spaces as a framing mechanism for my work feels more appropriate as I've had a much closer connection to those than to physical, institutional spaces throughout my life.
Comments