<p>Galeria Filomena Soares presents the exhibition Poems for Tourists, a group of new works in sculpture, drawing and sound by Pedro Barateiro. About the exhibition, the artist wrote the following:<br /> “This is an exhibition I made for a city in transformation and for the those who are transformed in it. I felt like presenting drawings, despite feeling too exposed. The drawings are like letters or messages to the world, the environment, nature and those who inhabit it. I returned to a theme that has always existed in my work: the landscape, the horizon, oppression in representation, the attempt to escape and the search for personal and collective freedom, the limits of language, the political. It seemed necessary to reveal some things, to be direct and to be able to speak without writing or making a long manifesto. In drawing this happens in a natural way. The act of drawing requires being present, without distancing, or just the distance between me and the paper. And there it stays, all inscribed.<br /> We live in a time of discourses that are very centered on form, and I am interested in questioning what is behind this excess of representation, the emptying it can produce. My concerns remain the same as ever: what can art and the artist do in times of radical change of social and political paradigms, in the face of the growing colonization of human and non-human language within the framework of global and digital neoliberalism. We must continue to ask questions without accepting answers that do not seem plausible.<br /> The exhibition is very focused on the drawings. I returned to larger formats because I needed to go back to a scale where I could put several elements in conflict. The drawings are mostly landscapes, views, there is a constant horizon line that I try to cut in different ways. The drawings reflect not only the last 2/3 years of my life, but also relate to the consequences of this recent past — that already seems so far away — with the pandemic, political and social instability, the war in Europe, the accelerated growth of the libidinal economy through AI and manipulation of algorithms, the decay and point of no return of the blue planet, which is increasingly orange.<br /> Changes happen all the time in our lives, in the world, but sometimes we feel them more present. There is an amplification of voices, through digital platforms, as if we were all speaking at the same time. Like at a party where we can’t distinguish the tones and subtleties, until we meet someone we can talk to, but who probably doesn’t understand us either. The culture of the festival, of the event that is bigger than our lives. I still think that the disorientation we feel has always been there. And that sometimes it’s hard to see the way.<br /> The drawings are my writing. That’s where all the ideas are, or almost all of them. And with the drawings I decided to show some sculpture works, two from 2022, which were included in the exhibition at CRAC Alsace. They are two characters that inhabit the exhibition: the cowboy and the hammer, both looking in the mirror asking questions. The other work, which gives the exhibition its title, is an installation and has that name — poems for tourists — because it is a conversation with the city that transforms and objectifies itself, that is capitalized, fetishized. It is both model and ruin. It is a reflection on the history of a city and its links to trade, from colonial to neocolonial, and the things we never knew how to solve.<br /> We have nothing and we want everything. Passaging by this place we call ours, made of events and connections, energies and conversations, must be done with an awareness of ourselves and others, of everything around us. We have to pay attention to the blindness caused by the intensity of the light. I’m in direct speech. Shut me up if I’m too annoying. I don’t have time for filters. I’m saving the words for what comes next.”</p> <p>The exhibition Poems for Tourists has the support of Unidade de Coordenação Territorial and Direção Municipal de Cultura, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa.</p> <p>Download press-release <a href="https://www.gfilomenasoares.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/PedroBarateriro-Poems-for-Tourists_PRESS.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.</p>