Cum Laude, 2021/2022

Rita GT’s work is always political. Even when she resorts to earthy tones and forms which blend with nature, there is an underlying political grammar that organizes and permeates them. When the term political is used in this instance, it is moving away from the partisan and pamphleteering towards the sensitive inscription of a vernacular based in the commonplace. This is what determines what is visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, what can or cannot be said.

In this way Rita GT’s politics operate in a territory which aims to include the ideals possibilities of equality, of community, of that to which human sensitivity can aspire. However, equality cannot be understood here as an intrinsic condition of humanity, but in itself describes a critical state, a crisis of what is common to us all. It is demanding a constant attempt at resolution. And it is here that the aesthetic and the political meet: « It is at the level of the sensitive cutout of what is common to the community, of the forms of its visibility and its organisation, that the question of the aesthetic/political relationship arises» as Rancière states. And politics is just that: active participation in the public space that reveals images, voices, needs, priorities, without divisions between aesthetics and ethics.  This is the field of investigation CUM LAUDE.

The works made of stoneware and which include engobe (a white or coloured clay slip coating applied to a ceramic body to give it decorative color or improved texture),latex and iron, sometimes sculptural, sometimes objectual, remind us of the organic and sometimes the anthropomorphic. There is no room for the symmetry or geometry that architecture, technology, and most large-scale human industrial creation imposes on us in everyday dialectics and literacy. The familiarity one should have with the natural (without linearity or sharp edges), either in palette or in shapeless expression, is summoned, even demanded, in these works of art, by the necessary humanity. In the relationship with them. Rita GT’s porous sculptures demand an empathetic and corporeal posture. Each work is a body which seeks the closeness of touch and gesture. After all, only a body recognizes another body.

These sculptures are accompanied, even guided by the voices of singers from Viana do Castelo, more precisely the Neiva Valley Singers. The presence of the singing voice reflects the will and the truth that each sculpture declares about the status of women, whose bodies and existence are rarely accepted in the public and political space as being equal and relevant.

Yet here, it is impossible to escape the presence of women. In each moment sung, their historical presence is assured in a social field of which the construction has always been based on strategies of obliteration and devaluation. This dynamic becomes all the more acute the further one moves away from the center of politcal decision making. The peripheral and rural seem to count even less, in a centralized idealogical ordering in all its forms.

This both fetishizes and excludes the diversity of places of speech.

The title of the exhibition adds a layer of significance to the whole, and it is no accident it is materialized in a disruptive and polysemic neon-title. Cum laude, a Latin expression which means « with honor» or « with distinction », normally used in academic contexts for the appreciation of academic works, is here recovered as a semantic of the « dignification» of trades and representations. However, the neon- title reminds one of Anglophone meanings – cum laud – which have their origins in Latin and suggest a reflection on sexuality. It could be just a hint, if sexuality were not a recurrent feminist and emancipatory artistic trope. The ways in which sexuality is considered and represented condition the historical and social discursive construction, and there is a canonical masculinity that functions as a structural reference of the way to represent drives and desires. It is no mere coincidence that sexuality is central in feminist and queer, LBGTQ artistic production, in a desire to expand access to the regions of expression of sexuality and the sexual.

The works of Rita GT presented in this exhibition are not orphans that have arrived out of nowhere. They are preceded by a continuous body of work about the rôle of women and of bodies in the pursuit of equality, of understanding and of the common good, of the eruption of a status quo which feeds on silences but also on public deafness, on impassiveness, on ignorance, on the inequality of groups of beings subjected to discriminations of gender, age, location, etc.

CUM LAUDE is resistance in practice, methodology and will. In CUM LAUDE, each action is and was (un)foreseen, as it is simultaneously guided by creative impetus and ethical-aesthetic awareness, which Rita GT cannot escape. In the impulse of the artistic gesture, a political consciousness of feminist desiderata prevails.

CUM LAUDE is the result of this action. CUM LAUD is a scream when nobody seems to want to hear us.

Ana Cristina Cachola

Curator