VICTORIA DEBLASSIE

O Sol Nos Tempos is a site-specific sundial installation made for the town of Messejana situated at the Quinta da Cerca. The title, O Sol Nos Tempos, translates to the Sun, in Time in English and it’s taken from a poem written by Zé Carlos Albinio that was inspired by my work. I made the sundial with materials I collected on walks around and in the town and the blue and white colors represent the colors of the buildings in the town. The sundial was strategically placed in a position that received the most sunlight and it was also a common place to pass the time for locals. In a place where time moves simultaneous slowly and rapidly, I questioned how our experience of time affects the way we relate to our surroundings.

Dimensions variable. Various fruit peels, salt, and water. 2017. (This project was part of the Apulia Land Art Festival in Margherita di Savoia at the city’s largest Salina in Europe.)This multifaceted project incorporates social practice and land art, centering around an invented quotidian ritual of cyclical amassings of daily-collected fruit peels from local restaurants and from fruit purchased directly from local vendors which are then shared with local residents and artists and then salted, filled with water, preserved, and placed—in the form of a spiral—in front of the massive man-made mountain of man constructed salt, making connections about fundamental needs through community and ritual and memory and preservation. The daily collections of the peels promote community, and the preservation of the rinds recalls the relationships created by collection that serve to elevate the act of eating and social interaction into sacred secular rituals that shouldn’t be taken for granted. The daily placement of the peels in the form of a spiral denotes the passing of time, and at the end of each day, an empty space in the form of a period is made in the salt, marking the end of each daily collection and also the beginning of a new cycle. This installation is also about the salt mine’s history and its passage of time across periodic societal and cultural upheavals represented by salinization and desalination and the drying up of resources. The juxtaposition of the collective but immeasurably tiny size of the fruit peel installation with the enormity of the salt mountain allows for explorations on what power is and who has it and how it can be furcated into multiple parts in a world more and more bent on centralized power and control of all components of the human experience, a world in which each fruit peel is individually small but immensely powerful in unison in comparison to the salt-mountain’s monochromatic power. By collecting one fruit peel at a time, one human exchange at a time, one meaningful connection at a time, these quotidian actions are elevated to the level of the transcendent, in turn creating a sacerdotal rite of daily interaction and allocation that reflects the complex history of the site.

Lakkos is a series of sitespecific street art sculptures made for the Lakkos neighborhood in Heraklion, Crete during my artist residency at LAKKOS AIR that reflect upon the secrets, histories, and stories of this area.

Miradouro das caixas de madeira is the culmination of the work I made as an artist in residence at Atelier Real in Lisbon, Portugal in which I made three particular viewing devices that sat upon a viewpoint where spectators could gaze and marvel at a stylized cityscape of Lisbon that I constructed from discarded wooden crates that I found around the city. I created a Miradouro as a nod to the vast amount of them found in the city and the invaluable purpose they serve as places of perspective both conceptually and physically. In my installations visitors were invited to explore this new environment by utilizing provided “binoculars” that enhance, magnify, distort, and abstract the “view.” When broken down etymologically, miradouro becomes “mira d’ouro” and in English can be read as a command instructing one to “look at gold.” A miradouro, then, is like a finger pointing in a certain direction, saying “Look!” “Look at gold” in this installation isn’t of course literal nor is it just about looking at the warm golden hue that emanates from the wood, but instead it’s also about reflecting on the value and the nature of perspective—for example, what is gold in this context and how is and was that codified?—in every sense of the word. With these thoughts in mind, the artist encourages the viewer to ponder such questions as, ‘in a world that cross-culturally favors visual aesthetics and the primacy of the visual, what is worth our vision?,’ ‘what do we deem to be valuable in general?,’ ‘what are we supposed to be looking at and seeing?’, and ‘just who decides where our perspective(s) should be focused, and why?’” These questions always came to mind during my time in Lisbon. Stuck by the city’s surreal juxtaposition between historical wealth and present-day malaise, and the overall atmosphere of uncertainty in a time of crises, I wandered the streets and saw fragmented past and present realities collapse between space and time. It is a timeless city whose grandiose timelessness in some areas has started to wear down and expose the abandoned buildings and underlining skeleton of the city’s structure itself, and yet a skeleton is what gives support, giving way to hope and revitalization as a means of moving forward. A city in which once looked at closely and whose blocks and blocks of grandeur give way to patches of ruin reminds us of not just of what once was but also what could potential be for better or for worse although those words are relative in problematic times. What is worse? What is better?

The Site-Specific work including, White Diamonds, Azulejo from a Chair, Brancoejo from a Chair, and The Space between the Azulejo and Brancoejo from a Chair, are works that I made while an artist in residence at DE LICEIRAS 18 in Oporto, Portugal. The theme of the residency was the house in which the residents lived. My goal for the project was to bring the outside inside in order to dismantle and reconsider notions of public and private space. This project draws from the range of tile work in the city and well as the historical blue paintings drawn on white tiles, known as azulejo.