“I think everyone benefits from a different view of what they do”
Those passing through the lobby of the Egas Moniz Building (EMB) during the week 21-25 March have not remained indifferent to the installation of the artist in residence at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) and Santa Maria Hospital (HSM), Maria Manuela Lopes.
"Acting and re-enacting the archive" is the name of the installation the artist made in the IMM and which allowed all who passed by floor O1 of the EMB to watch the work processes and interact with the artist. Maria Manuela Lopes recreated her atelier there, and it was her place of work during the time the installation was shown.
Maria Manuela Lopes is an artist in residence at the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Santa Maria Hospital, where she is preparing a case study for her PhD.
The artist is interested in the theme of memory and works with the Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Unit and with the Clinical Research Neurological Unit, Dementia Group, of the IMM, Santa Maria Hospital branch. She approaches loss of memory, specifically through Alzheimer's disease, by re-enacting scientific representation strategies. We went there in order to know her work better.
What is your artistic career?
I have a degree in Fine Arts, Sculpture, from the School of Fine Arts of Porto. Then I came to Lisbon, where I started working, and after two years I went to England to do a Masters in Fine Arts. I went to Goldsmiths College intentionally, because I wanted to put an end to the disciplinary barrier. I did not want to do my Masters at a school that forced me again to choose an area (painting/sculpture/photography). I believed that the medium was defined by the actual work, and that it was not necessary to restrain things right from the outset. I started to work with video and photography at Goldsmiths. When I returned to Lisbon, I began teaching. I have had installations and sculpture exhibitions since the 1990s, and, particularly from 1998 onwards, a lot in the field of multimedia installations. In 2006 I became a resident artist at Ectopia, which was a laboratory of artistic experimentation just starting at the Gulbenkian Institute for Science. That particular project - Ethology I - in which I explored the frontiers around the idea of the 'self', took me to IMM, to the Immunology laboratories. Meanwhile, the artistic residencies of DGArtes and Living Science joint programme were launched, and this took me to the IBMC in Porto, where I produced the CAGE SSI.
How is this residency at the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Santa Maria Hospital part of your artwork? How did it come about?
This particular project emerged with the need to do a PhD. Once again, I decided I had to do a PhD that would involve thinking, doing, and have a strong project-basis. I met a person in England (Kathleen Rogers) who works on the border of the arts, science and technology, exploring themes of consciousness and mythology, which fascinates me. Meanwhile, I also presented my initial project to Professor João Lobo Antunes, who lent me his support. I started working, exploring existing research about the memory carried out at the Institute and which would allow me to do a project-based PhD associated to a British university. Given that it is a vast field that profoundly interests me, there were several parallel research areas that appealed to me. However, in this case, memory loss was chosen and research focused specifically on Alzheimer's disease. I can learn by advancing research on how other areas build an understanding of this matter.
My goals are always artistic, of course. Basically, they are to understand my own work process. My proposal is how I use the representation strategies that science uses – such as a neuropsychology exercise, for example, the type of tests that measure cognitive ability, patients’ memory capacity, and the reduction scale used in Molecular Medicine. My purpose is how to use this information, these methods, metaphors, for example, so that through the art installation I can evoke autobiographical memory. How do I treat the visual part of the tests they do? I film and photograph the gestures of scientists, neurologists, auxiliary medical teams, and patients in their parallel attempts to understand and deal with the situation. I film myself in the atelier doing the same neuropsychological tests that patients have to do; then I use these records and try to interpret them, by evoking the very nature of the functioning of biographical memory.
How do you evoke these half truths using science’s tools, which subsequently present us such objective texts? The other side of the coin is how I challenge them to look at the work they do in a much more visual way.
How do you interact with the laboratories and scientists? How do they contribute to your work?
Interaction is excellent. Labs are physical and social spaces with hierarchies and protocols. No interaction is exactly the same in both groups, and I am possibly responsible for that, as it is easier for me to share the language of the Dementia group, which deals more with the social side, the personal and clinical record of patients. I find direct contact with patients more powerful, because it is more intense from a human perspective, where the disease is not fragmented and mediated by scientific protocols and filing strategies. However, the relationship is excellent; everyone is very cooperative and interested in seeing results.
From an artistic stance, what interests you in Alzheimer’s disease?
Artistically speaking, what interests me in a disease is its representation from a non-medical perspective: how is the disease represented in society? Alzheimer's disease is a disease that is still culturally under-represented; the dramatic side of the situation, which does not need to be slushy, has a very complex dense side to it. This is the side where the separation between concepts, objects and images is progressively increased and people become dependent on a translation of the permanent world. Existing models are either excessively based on behaviour moralizing attitudes towards dependents, or are tight, enclosed in a scientific discourse inaccessible to the general public.
During the week 21-25 March you recreated your atelier in the lobby of the Egas Moniz Building. What was the purpose and how was the interaction with researchers and students?
I wanted to see how objects, for example, a petri box, leave the lab door and get to a place like a lobby (a lobby just off the bar). I wished to explore where the border of what is an exclusively scientific association to the object gets lost. At the same time, I thought it was a more democratic form of surreptitiously entering my project in the community fabric of the building. There is a more sociological side to it, which is this relational side that objects possess to get to staff working in the building, dealing with maintenance, the audiovisual part, with animals, etc, and who never have the time to understand what happens inside each laboratory or in presentations made in the auditorium. This reconstitution of my studio somehow aimed to bring to this place the complexity of the various routes that come to my research and which are then filtered and translated. When I depict my work, I show a purification of the universe that moves about in an installation. Most of the time it is through video or photography, which deals with the space-time of that place, in the context of that place and extending it to the place where it is shown and to the time of the viewer. Therefore, I have subverted a little the logic of the standard and closed scientific study as an artist’s studio closed to the public gaze, and the result of both actions in specific exhibition contexts for selected audiences. Here, the logic of the circulation network of objects, people, concepts and relationships between all proposed by Latour was dismantled for a week. If we had done a prior awareness campaign before, if we had had very explicit plates saying "if in doubt ask," I think there would have been more questions. There was curiosity, but not too many questions, because we do not interfere. There were amusing people who thought they were being subjected to a study, and that I was some sort of bait so that their behaviour could be studied. Then there were also many people from here, ranging from employees to researchers, who asked questions very openly. Whenever I got up and left the area, more people came closer.
How do the scientists of the units that receive you and the patients with whom you interact see your work?
They see it in a positive manner. They are aware that it is another dimension of what they do, which does not oppose what they are doing, and that my aim is not to challenge the understanding that science has of itself or that society has of science, but help extend it. I think everyone benefits from a different view of what they do. My own production exercise is production-research based. It forces me to self-reflexivity: I have to look at what I do, question it, set it within a context that others build in order to validate what I do as research. I believe that art can bring psychological and paradoxical information, igniting debates about scientific research that go beyond the aesthetic re-presentations of its images or documentaries.
Unidade de Comunicação e Formação
Instituto de Medicina Molecular
http://www.imm.ul.pt
Those passing through the lobby of the Egas Moniz Building (EMB) during the week 21-25 March have not remained indifferent to the installation of the artist in residence at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) and Santa Maria Hospital (HSM), Maria Manuela Lopes.
"Acting and re-enacting the archive" is the name of the installation the artist made in the IMM and which allowed all who passed by floor O1 of the EMB to watch the work processes and interact with the artist. Maria Manuela Lopes recreated her atelier there, and it was her place of work during the time the installation was shown.
Maria Manuela Lopes is an artist in residence at the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Santa Maria Hospital, where she is preparing a case study for her PhD.
The artist is interested in the theme of memory and works with the Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Unit and with the Clinical Research Neurological Unit, Dementia Group, of the IMM, Santa Maria Hospital branch. She approaches loss of memory, specifically through Alzheimer's disease, by re-enacting scientific representation strategies. We went there in order to know her work better.
What is your artistic career?
I have a degree in Fine Arts, Sculpture, from the School of Fine Arts of Porto. Then I came to Lisbon, where I started working, and after two years I went to England to do a Masters in Fine Arts. I went to Goldsmiths College intentionally, because I wanted to put an end to the disciplinary barrier. I did not want to do my Masters at a school that forced me again to choose an area (painting/sculpture/photography). I believed that the medium was defined by the actual work, and that it was not necessary to restrain things right from the outset. I started to work with video and photography at Goldsmiths. When I returned to Lisbon, I began teaching. I have had installations and sculpture exhibitions since the 1990s, and, particularly from 1998 onwards, a lot in the field of multimedia installations. In 2006 I became a resident artist at Ectopia, which was a laboratory of artistic experimentation just starting at the Gulbenkian Institute for Science. That particular project - Ethology I - in which I explored the frontiers around the idea of the 'self', took me to IMM, to the Immunology laboratories. Meanwhile, the artistic residencies of DGArtes and Living Science joint programme were launched, and this took me to the IBMC in Porto, where I produced the CAGE SSI.
How is this residency at the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Santa Maria Hospital part of your artwork? How did it come about?
This particular project emerged with the need to do a PhD. Once again, I decided I had to do a PhD that would involve thinking, doing, and have a strong project-basis. I met a person in England (Kathleen Rogers) who works on the border of the arts, science and technology, exploring themes of consciousness and mythology, which fascinates me. Meanwhile, I also presented my initial project to Professor João Lobo Antunes, who lent me his support. I started working, exploring existing research about the memory carried out at the Institute and which would allow me to do a project-based PhD associated to a British university. Given that it is a vast field that profoundly interests me, there were several parallel research areas that appealed to me. However, in this case, memory loss was chosen and research focused specifically on Alzheimer's disease. I can learn by advancing research on how other areas build an understanding of this matter.
My goals are always artistic, of course. Basically, they are to understand my own work process. My proposal is how I use the representation strategies that science uses – such as a neuropsychology exercise, for example, the type of tests that measure cognitive ability, patients’ memory capacity, and the reduction scale used in Molecular Medicine. My purpose is how to use this information, these methods, metaphors, for example, so that through the art installation I can evoke autobiographical memory. How do I treat the visual part of the tests they do? I film and photograph the gestures of scientists, neurologists, auxiliary medical teams, and patients in their parallel attempts to understand and deal with the situation. I film myself in the atelier doing the same neuropsychological tests that patients have to do; then I use these records and try to interpret them, by evoking the very nature of the functioning of biographical memory.
How do you evoke these half truths using science’s tools, which subsequently present us such objective texts? The other side of the coin is how I challenge them to look at the work they do in a much more visual way.
How do you interact with the laboratories and scientists? How do they contribute to your work?
Interaction is excellent. Labs are physical and social spaces with hierarchies and protocols. No interaction is exactly the same in both groups, and I am possibly responsible for that, as it is easier for me to share the language of the Dementia group, which deals more with the social side, the personal and clinical record of patients. I find direct contact with patients more powerful, because it is more intense from a human perspective, where the disease is not fragmented and mediated by scientific protocols and filing strategies. However, the relationship is excellent; everyone is very cooperative and interested in seeing results.
From an artistic stance, what interests you in Alzheimer’s disease?
Artistically speaking, what interests me in a disease is its representation from a non-medical perspective: how is the disease represented in society? Alzheimer's disease is a disease that is still culturally under-represented; the dramatic side of the situation, which does not need to be slushy, has a very complex dense side to it. This is the side where the separation between concepts, objects and images is progressively increased and people become dependent on a translation of the permanent world. Existing models are either excessively based on behaviour moralizing attitudes towards dependents, or are tight, enclosed in a scientific discourse inaccessible to the general public.
During the week 21-25 March you recreated your atelier in the lobby of the Egas Moniz Building. What was the purpose and how was the interaction with researchers and students?
I wanted to see how objects, for example, a petri box, leave the lab door and get to a place like a lobby (a lobby just off the bar). I wished to explore where the border of what is an exclusively scientific association to the object gets lost. At the same time, I thought it was a more democratic form of surreptitiously entering my project in the community fabric of the building. There is a more sociological side to it, which is this relational side that objects possess to get to staff working in the building, dealing with maintenance, the audiovisual part, with animals, etc, and who never have the time to understand what happens inside each laboratory or in presentations made in the auditorium. This reconstitution of my studio somehow aimed to bring to this place the complexity of the various routes that come to my research and which are then filtered and translated. When I depict my work, I show a purification of the universe that moves about in an installation. Most of the time it is through video or photography, which deals with the space-time of that place, in the context of that place and extending it to the place where it is shown and to the time of the viewer. Therefore, I have subverted a little the logic of the standard and closed scientific study as an artist’s studio closed to the public gaze, and the result of both actions in specific exhibition contexts for selected audiences. Here, the logic of the circulation network of objects, people, concepts and relationships between all proposed by Latour was dismantled for a week. If we had done a prior awareness campaign before, if we had had very explicit plates saying "if in doubt ask," I think there would have been more questions. There was curiosity, but not too many questions, because we do not interfere. There were amusing people who thought they were being subjected to a study, and that I was some sort of bait so that their behaviour could be studied. Then there were also many people from here, ranging from employees to researchers, who asked questions very openly. Whenever I got up and left the area, more people came closer.
How do the scientists of the units that receive you and the patients with whom you interact see your work?
They see it in a positive manner. They are aware that it is another dimension of what they do, which does not oppose what they are doing, and that my aim is not to challenge the understanding that science has of itself or that society has of science, but help extend it. I think everyone benefits from a different view of what they do. My own production exercise is production-research based. It forces me to self-reflexivity: I have to look at what I do, question it, set it within a context that others build in order to validate what I do as research. I believe that art can bring psychological and paradoxical information, igniting debates about scientific research that go beyond the aesthetic re-presentations of its images or documentaries.
Unidade de Comunicação e Formação
Instituto de Medicina Molecular
http://www.imm.ul.pt
