Lisboa, Bairro das Colonias,

12.02.16, 14.30h

Joana Bertholo is a woman with a thousand talents.

She studied painting, dreaming to become a Picasso, or to become a plastic artist, and today she is a talented writer.
She always liked to read and she started writing as a form of drawing;

Her last book called

“Inventario do Po'” is a collection of 18 stories and much more:
it is a tribute to the plastic artist Renè Bertholo, an approximation to one of his music albums, and a dialogue among the different Arts;
it is a book where Joana approaches different languages and genres allowing herself to get away from her usual forms of expression.

“Arqueologia Horizontal” is one of the first stories written and contained in the book, questioning the

between art and life, their essence and the materials composing an Art piece.
Joana likes to think in metaphors and allegories and to use them. She says they are a beautiful and direct way to refer to what they do not say; they permit to take a distance from our preconception, suggesting new forms of reflection.

The protagonist of “Arqueologia Horizontal” is a child growing into a man, being an exception in a society where the action of painting is the key to the survival and where everyone, beside him, knows how to do it.

How to survive when we do not manage what every one does?
How to face it?

With her imaginative and intuitive way of writing Joana paints a rented room where her tragic, mystic, illuminated character creates his own precious lonely reality, collecting what others throw away, assembling objects, giving them a new existence.

In her story Joana writes about parenthesis between one object and the other, and about the possibility of materializing the silence between two words…
I ask her which is in her life her relation with this special silent/parenthesis space…( )…

Joana mentions as references for her life/literature names as John Cage, the Suprematists, Rothko, Zen philosophy, Japanese thought and the traditions dealing with absence, with the mysticism of what is not present, of what exists behind things…
She herself lives all these questions as an intellectual and a spiritual exercise, trying to stay in touch with something that goes beyond her eyes, almost in the need of a constant invocation of the immanent mystery of things.

This is readable in her literature and in this book “Inventario do Pò” intended as a catalog of tiny and subtle realities.
An Art piece, she says, can exist as piece in itself, but also as its smell, its shadow, its aura, as the empty space left in case of its absence…an interlaced relation between presence and absence, visible invisible that she lives with art, but also with the objects of her daily life.

I ask Joana about her relationship with her house, with the space;
Joana appreciate emptiness and tries to resist accumulation: she would like (but she admits she does not completely manage) to have just the objects she really needs and uses…even with books she is selective.
The I Ching is the book she would always keep in her library together with some pieces of Calvino, Perec, and the complete work of Nuno Braganza…she would like to manage to reduce her possessions to an essential collection…of 10 book and no more…

Her flat on the top of a building, on the top a hill is her first personal space:
she is in love with this house she decided to buy, now as on the first day (something that for a person like her, disliking repetition and routine, is quite exceptional!).
…she finds here her refuge, and until now she has never felt any saturation;
here she feels indeed secure and happy with the possibility of establishing her own rules others from the one existing outside.

Before experiencing this house, she would have explained her need of security in a different way: now, she has finally the feeling that she has found something she was looking for for a long time, even without knowing it.

Feeling at home is for her a personal intimacy, a condition of being alone, with no need at all of attention for the space of the other.
This also means silence, a sort of negation of the outer world in a “here and now” attention dedicated to herself…a solitary experience accompanied by the sound of the wind, the birds, and the neighbors.

For Joana every thing is in permanent transformation as the I Ching always reminds her: “Life is a trip” and traveling can be intended as a physical/geographical displacement (a call that for Joana is hard to resist), but also, in stillness, as the discovery of a different interior dynamic movement.

Joana speaks about freedom as internal circumstances: freedom as the possibility of being exceptional, intended as the exception, as in the case of the character of “Arqueologia Horizontal”.

...to listen is to imagine...

Thank you Joana, for this colorful conversation and for making the beautiful words of your stories even more alive!!!

Good listening!

SPACE:

This interview recording took place in a lively coffee bar in Bairro das Colonias.

We sat in a corner starting our conversation while the space became slowly emptier and more silent (as the lunchtime break for the most of the people come to an end).