By Kerry Wright Zentner
I’m walking along Queen because in a short time, I’m supposed to be meeting with a friend of a friend. The idea is that since we’re both weird artists, we’re supposed to get along. I was told he’s only in town for a week before he continues on his journey, with no fixed address, to Montréal. So he’s a vagabond, eh?
I’m struck immediately by his fashion style and his thoughtful composure. There’s a cerebral calmness to him which is offset and complemented by his youthful jauntiness. We talk for a long time, discovering that we have a lot of interests in common. For a while we discuss our current thoughts and our (literal) dreams. We watch the beautiful people walk by, and talk of secret emotions and lost loves, and of the difficulties and the despairs, but also of the great lusciousness and the terrible beauty.
By the end of the conversation (signified by the three-legged dog walking by), I’m highly energized and exhausted (must be the sleepless nights). I go home to occupy myself with menial chores and let my mind cool down, it having been overflowed with ideas.
The following conversation was conducted via email.
MONDO: You have an interesting background. Tell me how you got into each discipline you’re involved with. How did you decide to become an artist, and what inspired you as a child?
Aghostino Demarr: Well, I’m not sure I ever did decide to become an artist. I’m still not fully confident in that description. Both of my parents have backgrounds in science, so I really think of myself as a scientist on some level. A scientist of art, not to sound pretentious. The result of my endeavours is art, but the process itself feels very scientific; it’s about being methodical and there’s a lot of researching and dissecting and stitching back together in building these aesthetic compounds. I feel the difference between being an artist at heart and being a scientist at heart is the attitude you approach something with (although the two can be very similar). I don’t consider mine an artistic process — creative yes, but aside from that it’s more like data gathering, but through the filter of my aesthetic. I’m finding the solution for a conundrum, creating little equations.
I have always been deeply affected by beauty, however. When I was young, I was surrounded by strange things, the type of which you might expect to find in a scientific household (things in jars, bones, things in tubes), as well as a lot of nature. I was born on an island in the Azores (on Sao Miguel), which is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. My mother was working there [in Sao Miguel] as a biologist, and we used to have a lot of animal specimens around the house. I remember being scared of them, but eventually it became ordinary to have some dead thing staring at me from its jail of formaldehyde. I’d say that definitely affected me. As well as the animals, my mother collected ceramics which were made by people on the island largely as art pieces for the tourists to buy. In this era, I developed a certain kind of respect for artefacts, a sense of there being these objects which were sacred or mysterious, and precious. We had small sets of archeological material: these ornate fossils, and little dolls made of painted human bone. Our whole house was sort of a museum, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. When I was a little older, we moved to Paris; that was when I discovered real museums.
MONDO: You make visual collages as well as write poetry. Who or what inspires your current work? What does the collage process mean to you, and how do you interpret the work?
AD: Pretty much the same things that inspired me as a kid still inspire me now. Treasures and artefacts, nature, and anthropology. The museums in Paris are fantastic. I recently watched this film called La Jete, in which there’s a scene that takes place in a museum full of taxidermy animals. I’ve been there in real life and it’s amazing to contemplate these animals in their state of preservation. They led lives of growth (roaming and resting and killing), and had no idea they would end up in this silence, no concept of this kind of place where all different species of animal stand finally equalized, ending their life-long tumult. I find that state of exhibition enthralling. This singular and untouched sacred stasis that is given to certain objects.
When I left Paris to move to Canada, I really missed my house and the other museums, and I wanted to recreate that sensation of going through an exhibit. Collage gives me the interesting opportunity to combine multiple, dissimilar ideas into one single idea. This more accurately represents the sensation of viewing something at a museum, because you are usually processing a bunch of different non-visual information about a piece, such as its period, or its historical applications. So mainly I [make collages] just for personal nostalgic value. With poetry it’s the same. I’m trying to synthesize fond sensations from my childhood. My father reading children’s fables to me in English, growing up in a Portuguese community, reading from tomes of science texts; all of these things affected my sense of language. In re-creating that in my cut-up collage poems, I often use bits of translated French and Portuguese, a lot of science text, and also children’s stories.
MONDO: Tell me about your process. What methods do you employ? How does the method you use change or reflect your intentions with the content of the work?
AD: My work is largely about finding disparate elements and combining them to form a unique sensation. I’m not interested in isolating and distilling an entity or an idea, I’m interested in having different types of information absorbed simultaneously. I like to be selective about the elements, though, so I can control that sensation. I won’t combine [just] any two things, they have to be two or three specific things which appeal to me.
MONDO: You come from a scientific background, but a lot of your work has religious elements. Where does this come from and how do you personally reconcile the elements of science and religion?
AD: Well, I don’t subscribe to a particular religion, but I consider myself religious in my contemplation of “The Inconceivable.” People seem to have this idea that science and religion (or specifically, belief in God) are at war, which they aren’t. Even though their ideas about reality sometimes contradict, as practices they are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, they are each just different perceptions of Truth. They each ask you for a degree of faith in trusting their theories and methods. We usually don’t describe it as “faith” in science, but as far as larger philosophical enquiries are concerned, that’s what it is. None of us know what’s going on here. We don’t know what experience itself is. None of us have a definition for what life is. We don’t know why there is animate matter, and why there’s inanimate matter, and what causes that central difference. We cannot conceive of the nothingness or eternity which must have preceded this universe. We cannot conceive of the nothingness or infinity which lies at the borders of this universe. We cannot explain our own sentient state of consciousness. We should be interested in philosophizing and hearing as many theories as we can. They are always going to remain theories, because many of the questions they approach are unanswerable, so there’s no point in pretending that it’s actual knowledge.
As for the images, the concepts of worship and of being religious with something do interest me. Even though my childhood was rife with scientific elements, I remember observing religious experiences. There is a dominant Roman Catholic tradition on the island, but aside from being aware of that, I was aware of a sense of sacredness in the natural world even at that young age. I remember visiting Fire Lake, which is in the crater of a sleeping volcano in the centre of Sao Miguel. We actually climbed down inside to swim there. The water is incredibly clean and pure. I swam on my back and looked up out of this volcano, imagining its history of eruption, and I discovered this intense spiritual connection to my existence. It was a really incredible experience.
So, I abide by a type of intuitive belief. I like the idea of there being something which we don’t understand and which is constantly altering the world in ways which we cannot comprehend. Life is inherently absurd, so an absurd notion will fit. I would place my definition of God as “that which is eternally inconceivable.”
MONDO: Lastly, what do you have planned for the future? Projects, events, or travel? Where do you want your art to go from here?
AD: I’m not sure where the art thing will go. I’m doing an album cover right now, which is exciting, but I can’t imagine making a living off that. I’ll always keep it as a method for cataloguing personal sensations. It’s just a mirror for me.
Obviously, I’m traveling right now, but I have no idea where I might end up or how long I’ll be there for. It’s frightening and exciting, and I’m worried that it will become the only way to live. I’m not doing it very expensively, so lacking certain conveniences becomes stressful after a while.
I regret that I’m not more political. Some people who are comfortable with their lives begin to get apathetic, especially in first-world societies, and no matter how aware they are of their negative impact, how many movies they watch about it, or how many opportunities they have, they still don’t change their lifestyles, or contribute in any positive way. I’ve decided not to be like that. I want to have no negative impact, especially environmentally. I get called an idealist a lot of the time, as if it’s a negative thing, like I’m delusional and living in an imaginary world (I think people are scared to use their imaginations). But idealism is a really good thing. People should work towards ideals. A change has to be conceived of by someone before it can come into existence. That’s basic cause and effect.
I also want to travel into outer space, but that isn’t likely to happen, and it conflicts with the whole low impact attitude, so I’ll just have to visualize it instead. Never underestimate the power of this human mind we’ve got.
