Question about the ‘Chicken Feet’

Tonico
There is a link to the voodoo works, and also because I had these chicken feet in my studio, they’re lovely, they’re all dried and people like looking at them, they look really spooky. In the upper part you have a kind of circle structure made with the chicken’s wishbones, so all the wishbones are used already, it’s like I would make a wish for each and then there is no more wish left. Then they are restored, so what you see is all these broken restored wishbones with resin. The resin looks like plaster, so it’s like they change their configuration.

Comment
The show upstairs is partly about making sculpture outside the gallery; you’re not making an object which then you sell to a museum which then goes into the museum collection. There seems to be some kind of thread running through there of things which can be made, put together or packed away; it can take shape and then loose shape, you can do it on the street or you could do it temporarily and then you can put it in a suitcase.

Tonico
Yes I know, I always suffer because of that. Like this piece I did last December, it’s something like 500 gems and I have to install it in a place, there’s someone who takes a picture of it, and I have all these bags, I feel like crying and I say, my God, where is the work, it’s going to be another couple of days. But it is very interesting, I quite like this, it’s somehow unattainable.

Comment
It’s interesting how temporary interventions suddenly take permanent shape... Even in the last gallery, there seemed to be things which began on the street as temporary interventions but in the end they’ve become permanent artworks.

Tonico
Once they go to gallery space or into an essay or when they become sort of a historical thinking…

Comment
They seem like actions in a way, like paint balls or putting currency notes together or weaving political posters, they seem like temporary actions…

Tonico
…which end up as a product. In the end, you have a product.

Comment
But it seems to have to do with the commercial galleries, the art world changing in Brazil…

Tonico
It’s the thing with temporary pieces… the gallery of course wants to make money out of it and the artist needs to survive of the works, so then they use photographs of the sculptures, which obviously is not the same thing, but I respect those kind of decisions because it’s what will enable you to do the next project. The photograph is not really the piece or it’s not really an artwork – I don’t think they are as engaging and interesting as the carpet – but they are necessary because the piece is ephemeral.

Comment
It’s striking that you’ve taken the ICA photograph from above… you have a totally different sense of it.

Tonico
They were from the fox, that’s the tail. Yes because the trace of the drawing is very strong on that particular section of the carpet, so that was the way of being able to capture it in an image.

Question
You’re talking about these almost like drawings. Do you make drawings?

Tonico
I do, all the time. It’s like a thinking process. I’m really obsessed with drawings and I love to see artists’ drawings. When I was in college I curated a show with the gallery I still work with now, which was about the straightforwardness of drawings, the quick message, the lightness they contain.