“OBSESSIVE CONTROLLING TOOLS & TOOLS FOR INTIMACY AND SOCIAL DISTANCE SECURITY” by TERESA MILHEIRO September 2021
A syringe is the device that rapes the body with what is strange to it. A threatening psychopath is the declaration of imminent physical violence. A tweezer that instrumentalises the distance between bodies is the sanitisation of the sensorial connection. A spying eye that penetrates the nasal cavity is the instrument of thought control. The preliminary encounter with Teresa Milheiro’s work is intensely linked to this formal literality, guided by a refined ergonomic concern, a declared summoning of the body, which functions as one of her fundamental intentions. The design of each piece targets the skin and the flesh, and seeks to induce the sensation of the suggested experience, the consummation of an aggression by the blunt and sharp instrument, and therefore the shock and the shiver. It is an unyielding awe, a disquieting disturbance. And yet, like the captor before the victim he takes hostage, Teresa Milheiro skilfully manipulates the primary emotions of anxiety and fear, making her work irresistibly seductive.
Everything that goes beyond this formal literality escapes.
On the one hand, it reveals itself as effectively contemporary, by extrapolating the strict domain of jewellery, adopting everyday objects found by chance, intentionally integrated as raw material, creating a hybrid artistic field that combines a sculptural aspect and photography, in this case as documentation of a performing action. Above all, her objects become artistic works of exquisite finish.
On the other hand, it proceeds to a thematic reflection, settling the specificity of personal daily life, and transfigures itself into a speculative field of social participation. In this exhibition, the artistic projects “Obsessive Controlling Tools”, “Tools for Intimacy and Social Distance Security” and “One Way System II” are presented, created under the umbrella of a more global concept, “Fear Addicts”, which extends to other works presented in the Reverso Gallery and the Alice Floriano Gallery, in the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes.
“Fear Addicts” is driven by the penetration of an unique and undisputed vision, by notions and feelings such as fear, threat, surveillance, dependency, physical and mental hygiene, and by the problematics raised by metaphorically applying the notions of apathy, alienation and dissociation, seeking to interrogate the establishment of a state of power and restrain, which renders the mind and consciousness vulnerable, weakening and standardising individual freedom.
It is, after all, the ignition of this question that hovers over, or manoeuvres under, “Fear Addicts”.
Ricardo Escarduça
1st Lisbon Contemporary Jewellery Biennial Off
Window project “SPY ON” at Gallery Reverso September 2021
“THE POWER OF FRAGILITY” April 2019
Exposition of Teresa Milheiro and Leonor Hipólito 03.05 – 01.06.2019
Bookshop Sá da Costa – Gallery – Rua Serpa Pinto,19
TERESA MILHEIRO
A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1)
Exquisite ornaments and objects can be the most cruel weapons.
Delicate glass forms, finished with chrome details imply a beauty full of strangeness. The objects are elongated and pointy, Delicate and at the same time threatening like knives.
Each piece is so well finished and polished as if it was in fact in a kind of formal wholeness, although, at the same time, revealing the closeness to recognisable shapes – a déjá vu of something that already existed and has been re-used, not being clear to what end.
In her creation process, in the course of several years, the artista collected hospital equipment to use in her sculpture jewels.
Most of that equipment is composed of glass, like test tubes, high frequency glass electrodes for beauty treatments, and syringes. Others are metal objects like vaginal speculums used in gynaecology, as well as other objects created by her from already existent tools and machine parts.
The works of Teresa Milheiro have, in their contradiction, their main strength. It is exactly due to its ability to cause disruption that her work leads us to think about the concept of oppression.
Along her path Milheiro chose jewellery as her medium for artistic expression. Since the 1980’s, when she started to work consistently in this media, she conformed to a way of life connected to the punk movement. A certain behavioural anarchism that already framed the taste for a creation totally opposed to all types of standardization..
Thus, all that could be connected to ornament and opulence gained discursive outlines against women disempowerment and all the domination mechanisms.
In her productive chronology first came the jewels connected to self-defense. Then the works that allude to torture.
In this exhibition, Milheiro reflects a research carried out on madness and, specifically to lobotomy as a “treatment” method. The word lobotomy, or leucotomy, means literally the act of cutting a lobe of the brain. In the beginning of the 19th century, mental illness was no longer a social issue but a medical matter. It is then that leucotomy appears as a surgery intended to reduce and prevent symptoms of behavioural disorders.In fact for thousands of years some ancient cultures had already adopted the practice of making holes in the skull to free the individual of malefic spirits. But the idea behind lobotomy reached the status of state of the art medical research when, in 1935, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz during his research at the Lisbon University found out that patients with obsessive behaviours had defective circuits in their brain. Egas Moniz advocated the use of that type of mutilating surgery just in cases of severe depression and when there was a risk of violent behaviour. However its use spread worldwide, with many countries performing the procedure. In the beginning, lobotomies were made with ice picks, present in almost all pieces presented by the artist in this exhibition. The tip of the tool entered the brain through a hole punched behind the eyes of the patient. At least 6% of the patients didn’t survive the procedure. Others became irreversibly apathetic, ruined, and mentally mutilated.During her research Teresa Milheiro found out that, although this procedure had been intended for both genders, 85% of the lobotomies performed in psychiatric hospitals as a way to silence madness or erase traces of hysteria were performed in women. The ranking of gender connected to the exercise of power gains clearer outlines in the thinking of Michel Foucault. The French thinker relates the discipline of the body to the institution of power. The silencing of hysteria is also a submission of the body, a key strategy to the exercise of power.In a patriarchal society, the feminine body is by itself a docile body, as opposed to the body that detains the power. But the surgically tamed body, the silenced body incapable of any type of opposition becomes the highest expression of the body submission discussed by Foucauld. Besides the lobotomy, Teresa Milheiro also states the institutionalisation of women as an effective way of standardisation and submission. The artist mentions the case of the sculptor Camille Claudel who, although she was not submitted to a lobotomy, was hospitalised for 29 years in a psychiatric hospital where her own brother took her because he was ashamed of having a sister who was an artist, who never got married and had no children. It is a split body, taken away from its political and creative capacity.Keeping in mind the silencing produced by the disciplinary power, I look again at Teresa Milheiro’s small pieces, delicate and at the same time so radical.They all make sense now. The fragility of glass adds to the industrial coldness of chrome. All the forms evoke the brain or the vagina and their construction, although they might not be completely decipherable, consistently trigger a sense of silent violence, submission, and power games.
Nota:
1- The book Discipline and Punish was written by Michel Foucault in 1975.
São Paulo, April 2019
Katia Canton
Autor: Teresa Milheiro
year: 2019
photos: Ana Verde
WAY THROUGH ONE ANOTHER SIDE”
Teresa Milheiro’s Puppets
Teresa Milheiro, an internationally recognized and acclaimed artist belonging to a Third Generation of Contemporary Portuguese Jewelry, develops in her work a clearly conceptual approach which not only gives the jewel an unprecedented communicative significance but also expands it into unusual territories.
For Teresa Milheiro, a jewel is, as it always should be in a contemporary approach, a predominantly communicative vehicle, a privileged portrait of our time and of the world we live in, which the artist uses to develop her fascinating analytical comments on the daily reality that surrounds her/us.
In Teresa Milheiro’s jewels, we often find profound, at times finely ironic, reflections on Fashion or on Beauty, phenomena which today’s Media fuel exceedingly and which the jewel apparently supports, or, in a more profound dimension, wise reflections on the human condition itself, life or death.
Unleashing the jewel into new territories, Teresa Milheiro has already used sculpture in her work, creating sculpture-jewels that recall fantasy insects, and now she does it again with superior mastery.
Resorting to the totally universal masterpiece that makes up the trilogy of Autos das Barcas, which the immortal Gil Vicente bequeathed to us, Teresa Milheiro has transformed her jewels into fascinating puppets: Hell, Purgatory and Glory (or Heaven) are summoned here in a poignant portrayal of the Contemporary World and of our human and mortal condition.
The preciseness of Jewelry combines with a meticulous narrative that, starting with our first great dramatist, dissects the reality of our time.
Do you remember the Alcoviteira (Procuress) of Auto da Barca do Inferno who brought with her Seiscentos virgos postiços / Duas arcas de feitiços (Six hundred fake hymens / Two trunks full of spells)?
She seems innocent compared to today’s Procuress who, reviewed by Teresa Milheiro, summons human trafficking networks or the corresponding octopus mafia with hypnotic eyes, crafted in symbolic gold.
The crushing power of multinationals, greed, insane materialism, the emptiness of values, the duality of Good versus Evil inherent in human beings, Innocence, the global economic system, alienation, clerical hypocrisy (perhaps more alive today than it was in Gil Vicente’s time), racial and civilasational hate, are other possible interpretations of these puppets of adults who are perpetually evolving on the World Stage.
Rui Afonso Santos
“WAY THROUGH ONE ANOTHER SIDE” Teresa Milheiro at Museu do Dinheiro, Curated by Sara Barriga 2016
Temporary exhibition that took place between June 30 to October 15 2016.
Within the scope of Plano Tangente: a program of temporary exhibitions of the Money Museum that aimed at disseminating the emerging artistic productionz in various media. The program presented the work of Portuguese contemporary artists in dialogue with the museum architecture and the collections.
During the course of the exhibition there was a guided visit by Teresa Milheiro.
“WAY THROUGH ONE ANOTHER SIDE” Teresa Milheiro at Museu da Marioneta curated by Maria José Machado 2014
“WAY THROUGH ONE ANOTHER SIDE” Teresa Milheiro at ARTICULA Gallery 2009
