Photo: Miguel Ângelo and Lília Machado.
José Pedro’s Toolbox -Rui Gomes Coelho
José Pedro’s Toolbox (faience, leather, newspaper) is Rui Gomes Coelho’s art/archaeology contribution to the Ineligible exhibition at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture (MIEC) in Santo Tirso, Portugal (March-September, 2020). In constructing a faience cube for this work Coelho rebuilds a conceptual home for his grandfather who lived in southern Portugal. As Rui informs us:
“My maternal grandfather, José Pedro, was a shoemaker in the rural town of Odemira, in Alentejo, Portugal. My mother remembered being a kid in the 1940s and watching him sitting by his work table in the house’s hallway. There was a pipe-hole on the wall right behind the table where he used to keep a mysterious roll of paper, which he never talked about. It was the communist newspaper Avante!, which circulated underground during the entire Salazar dictatorship and was the only regular periodical published by the opposition. For working class people like my grandfather, the newspaper was his escape from want and oppression, and it was the means that kept him connected to people who were struggling for social justice. However, it had to be kept out of sight.
“When I received the bag of leather fragments for the Ineligible project, I immediately thought of my grandfather, whom I met long after he had retired and stopped making shoes. In a way, it felt like those bits of his trade had been concealed all these years and were somehow brought back home where I could make sense of them. The shoe pieces were remains of a trade that has been fated to disappear for a long time, and just like many other manual trades, José Pedro and his comrades had disappeared. They were “ineligible” for public memory, just like the thousands of underpaid, precarious manual workers who inhabit the streets and workshops of many towns around the world.
“The leather pieces had been forgotten for decades somewhere in a faraway place, and I was finally able to bring them home, give them a context, and then display what had been hidden for so long. However, I wanted to invert the original visibility/invisibility relationship (i.e., José Pedro’s activity as shoemaker was the only visible side of a deeper political commitment that was forbidden and had to remain underground). I wanted to invert this, to bring in the political outside while keeping his trade behind the curtains.
“My point is that all we do is inherently political, either as shoemakers or archaeologists. With its uneven surfaces, the white faience box of José Pedro’s Toolbox is reminiscent of the whitewashed houses of Alentejo in Portugal. They are painted every year, adding layers of paint to the walls and paint stains to the ground around the walls. The pipe is entirely visible, and you are able to check the newspaper, which is also replaced every week or whenever the new issue is out.
With José Pedro’s Toolbox, Coelho reaches out to a man with whom he never had the chance to share his own political vision (Coelho identifies himself as a Marxist archaeologist), though it was a shared vision.
Rui Gomes Coelho is a faculty member in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. Before joining the team at Durham, Rui worked at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, and in the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program in the Department of Art History, at Rutgers University. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Archaeology, University of Lisbon. His current interests are driven by a fascination with the sensorial constitution of alternative modernities, and for marginal communities who mobilize material culture against traditional, nationalist-oriented approaches to heritage.
The Ineligible exhibition at MIEC that was one part of the Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/archaeology show co-curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro. For more information about Creative (un)makings, follow these links:
Portuguese TV spot about opening of Ineligible
Other Featured Work from Ineligible that have been featured on artarchaeologies include the following:
Remember Wounded Knee (Laurent Oliver)
Omission: Sterile Landscape (Tiago Costa)
Decadence (Jéssica Burrinha)
Door Knob (hand held) (Ilana Crispi)
L OST and FOOUND (Shaun Caton)
The catalogue from the Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology exhibition in which Ineligible was installed is available as a free pdf download through the following link:
One part of the Creative (un)makings exhibition was a conference addressing the issues of the installation. Free pdfs are available of the conference book through the following link:
If you are interested in participating in the Ineligible Project and using disarticulated (former) archaeological materials to create original work that has disruptive social and political impact, then email dwbailey@sfsu.edu with the subject line Ineligible Contributor Request.
Photo: Miguel Ângelo and Lília Machado.
Photo: Miguel Ângelo and Lília Machado.
Photo: Miguel Ângelo and Lília Machado.
Photo: Miguel Ângelo and Lília Machado.