Raphaël Moreira Goncalves

You are a multidisciplinary artist, what led you to touch various mediums of expression such as sculpture, video or augmented reality?

"I don't necessarily think in terms of mediums but rather in terms of ideas and desires. In an ideal world with unlimited means and a neural configuration that would allow me to be ultra-lucid while having several personalities and having lived 1000 lives, I would simply try to make one film a day. Film is one of the places where I have had the most intense life experiences. And storytelling is what I enjoy the most. Knowing that every choice we don't make necessarily exists in an alternate reality, making up stories and worlds gives me the power to communicate with a reality that only exists elsewhere. Knowing that all it takes is a few electro-chemical reactions for my brain's thoughts to organize themselves into a dialogue with an existing alternate universe brings me indescribable exhilaration.

But in the end, if one could summarize my practice it would essentially revolve around sculpture. Whether it is the sculpture of a physical or virtual form, or whether it is the sculpture of time through my films, my music or even in my paintings where it is finally a question of adding solids and voids, of seeing which lines, which colors and textures can influence and guide the glance. I only remove or add material somewhere to see if the balance holds. And it is this global research that drives me. There is a long time needed to elaborate a story told over a specific period of time. I like this time, the fact of planting a seed and waiting to see which trees will develop afterwards, which solutions I will have to find to tell what I want with a classical scenaristic approach or not at all. Yet I also need a more impulsive practice that allows me to test forms and ideas more quickly. And what can emerge from all these experiments is my relationship with the virtual. I have always had a particular relationship to the "elsewhere", to these almost elusive otherworlds. Even as a child I had a period when I wanted to be a priest, just before I finally wanted to be an inventor of planes and spaceships. So this desire to explore other worlds next to ours comes from far away. I remember that in elementary school I invented a story about a person who woke up on another planet where he was a prince, and that his royal family was waiting for him to wake up for several years because he was in a coma. Unfortunately, the shock was so great that he fell back into the coma to plunge back into our reality where he was just an ordinary person on our good old earth. I had not yet seen The Matrix, and besides, my lawyers should think about investigating this possible plagiarism.

But in short, yes, this relationship to the virtual, to ghosts, to alternative realities has always been there and I try to mix some elements of my personal history, of my dreams, while choosing the most adapted medium to translate my visions. Because finally the contemporary confusion on the question of what is real and what is not remains rather banal in itself to focus its approach only on this theme, on the question of the artificial etc... All these mediums I use serve me to tell the stories I wish to see and hear, serve me to interact with what I deeply believe to be a kind of total chaotic and inter-dimensional history!"

What did your time at Le Fresnoy, from which you graduated in 2015, bring you? How has your practice evolved since then?

"I dreamed of Le Fresnoy as early as my second or third year in the fine arts. For me it was a hybrid film school that I had to get into at all costs, and that would allow me to experiment with incredible new things. And like my time in kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, and then fine arts, I would say that Le Fresnoy provided me with a learning environment that one must also learn to forget now in order to not base one's practice solely on the expectations of a school era with its reward system where I had to account for in exchange for a diploma. Of course, I learned a lot of things and I measure the chance that it is to have evolved in this island of the great north with all its means. Like all renowned art schools, Le Fresnoy was also lucky to have us as student-artists, and I was especially lucky to be in a class where among my talented classmates I was able to meet generous and benevolent people who allowed me to get through these two years of hyper-intense work without too much damage and with whom I was able to keep long-lasting friendships. As well as some people, guest artists, technicians or others, who brought me greatly by their meeting.

In concrete terms, I was able to make two short films with real filming and post-production teams for the first time, which was a change from my DIY films from the fine arts where I did almost everything myself. And it was an absolutely magical experience to discover this at 25 years old. The second year devoted to a more 'technological' approach allowed me to do violence to myself and to learn new tools. Even if this fascinating relationship to technology was not new to me (for example, my 5th year thesis at the fine arts school was an essay on how humans, through technological singularity, were going to be able to transform themselves into immortal gods by reigning over universes populated by artificial intelligences and thus make their lives an experience of total cinema that it will be pleasant to control and contemplate to satisfy this creative impulse specific to humans), at Le Fresnoy I was able to embrace different techniques and to get my hands on them by looking at millions of tutorials made most of the time by 15-year-olds on specific software. But finally what influenced me the most were the social networks where I was able to totally dive in and discover strange people completely ravaged and artists from all over the world who were not only in the contemplation of a 'new' technology while being perpetually in search of the last advance to be able to hope to remain relevant while incorporating pompous terms and concepts to legitimize themselves, but who were simply trying to put these 'new' tools on the same level as a brush or a pen to create new forms without it looking like a blinged-out gimmick. Just consider technology as a means to express oneself intimately too and not an end in itself that would only speak for itself. This is perhaps one of the differences that can exist between a certain vision of digital art and what was designated a few years ago with the already obsolete term of post-internet art. But whether it is in the fashion of the return to painting of these last years, or the most conceptual art, we are inevitably in a relationship with the Internet, since the Internet is part of us and vice versa, whether we like it or not.

To come back to my work since I left Le Fresnoy, I simply continued my experiments by trying not to limit myself to one medium. That's how I created a video game, that I made several films, that I started working with augmented reality in 2015, that I started making watercolors, robotic sculptures, writing more assiduously, etc. I feel like this might be misinterpreted from a marketing point of view in art, but I need to touch everything and only the advancement of my process matters, with or without recognition. And if I had ever given too much importance to everything that is well seen, I would have also probably surfed on the dismal term of 'emerging artist' at the intersection of art and technology. This term 'emerging' that we find almost everywhere, including in events in which I participated, is finally for me only a disguised agism so that some collectors have more chances to make a surplus value on the potential future sale of the works of their young foals. Or there is clearly a problem of understanding between being young and having a correct reading of the contemporary period. Fortunately, I sometimes dream of calls for projects exclusively dedicated to artists over 70 years old, where there would be an appellation like 'platinum artist' or 'survivor artist'. The simple vision of this future possibility fills me with joy. I'm drifting a bit from the subject but I wanted to write these lines. And while we're at it, to finish with the things that go through my mind while writing, I also discovered this fear of being used by people who are masters in the art of tokenizing artists like me, while continuing to have a paternalistic and contemptuous attitude. I don't want to be able to be put where I should be, where I am expected to be, in a hollow discourse where the only interest found in my work would have been related to the color of my skin, or with a verbose political-poetic-new age practice that would denounce at all costs the conventional injustices of the world while playing the sociologist's apprentice to entertain the small bourgeois world that would continue anyway to see me as an entertainer while being able to gargle with the ostentatious virtue that the presence of my 'diversity' could bring them. Or else I would have to find a great financial interest in it because I secretly nourish the project of one day being able to offer myself a private yacht in order to make genetic manipulations still illegal on my body to be able to increase me physically and mentally."

How do you relate to politics and technology in your work?

"Anyway, any practice is necessarily political, my presence in this environment is already political, and it doesn't just consist in displaying one's vigilante posture to the world. The simple fact that I choose to make art instead of something else is already political. I'm being a bit of a smart ass here with my lyrical flights of fancy when I think of certain practices, but it is true that to relativize I often keep this analysis in a corner of the head when I find myself in certain flashy cultural places where the subversive odor of the small fours with the roasted organic sesame seeds let trail their perfume on the white walls and the concrete grounds glossed by the sneakers of a very well brought up target public where the vision of a certain art absolutely serious and/or self-proclaiming 'engaged' relegates inevitably the remainder to the simple entertaining and puerile decoration. This does not mean that I do not take my head when I create, far from it, often I stare at a sheet of paper or my computer screen and I wait for my brain to bleed. But once I get past that painful moment, I try to find something more intuitive with the tools I use. Something that appeals to visions that go beyond me and beyond any consideration of our human condition and our giant ant power over the fascinating chemical reaction that we are. And I thank God for having put on my way artists, works, films, books, curators, or just people from the internet or elsewhere, who are in the same approach of art as me, or who respect my vision of things, and with whom it has been possible to establish strong connections.

Like many artists, contemporary technologies fascinate me as much as they frighten me, given what it is now possible to do to control the population and its collective thought. But we are already perpetually in a pessimistic episode of black mirror, only worse. Even if sometimes ultra-beneficial advances for the world are also hatching at the same time. I try to remain optimistic as far as possible about the self-destruction of the oppressive systems linked to the joint work of the states with the big technological corporations, I believe that from a certain moment it will be possible for a lambda citizen to seize all these tools to really and durably emancipate himself (what we can already see with the blockchain technologies for example, I believe that at some point it will be possible for a normal citizen to take hold of all these tools in order to become truly and sustainably emancipated (e.g., those that allow certain African countries or other regions of the world to have a decentralized banking system and therefore a fairer one, given that they are often excluded from the world's banking systems), and if this never happens and ends up in a globalized civil war, then so be it. I imagine that the extra-terrestrial civilizations will be happy to create some memes about the tragic end of our civilization.

Of course, one must also be aware of what it means politically to have the chance to create and make art today. And even more so when it comes to using recent technologies that are the result of many natural expenses and human sacrifices. Yet I believe in intelligence as such, in its absolute value, whether it is organic or "artificial". I believe that an acceleration of things can lead to a less unjust world, even if we have to go through some rather 'folkloric' moments. But as far as my practice is concerned, on my own small scale, it is important to reappropriate these technologies which are increasingly opaque in their functioning. It is as if the belief in something supernatural has moved from the belief in God, to the belief in a banal and everyday miracle that can fit in our pocket. And this does not mean that I will use these tools all my life in my art, but there will necessarily be a particular relationship with them, in what they deploy as a magical and frightening imaginary.

It is unfortunately totally unfair that kids work so that I can do what I do in my art with my electronic tools. Whether it's in coltan mines or whatever. And these are questions I ask myself quite often, yet we find these same injustices at all levels of consumerism in our countries compared to other over-exploited countries. As an artist I don't have the power to change the world on my own scale, except by trying to invent others, but this is not what will have a major influence on the cosmos except in the case of a particularly exceptional butterfly effect, you never know. But I think that we cannot simply be content with a comfortable and binary moralizing posture based on current events, by only trying to designate good and evil in our societies or more easily in distant societies where we do not live, otherwise we might as well be journalists and hire people to decorate our speeches. I think that it is necessary to go further to try to really touch a kind of essence proper to the interstellar mystery of the existence. Not that we should absolutely shy away from giving our opinion on political issues, there are obviously a lot of causes worth fighting for. But for me there is a balance to be found, and focusing one's practice solely on a facade activism with shameless aesthetic and conceptual laziness bothers me and seems to me to be pure charlatanism. I need to put myself into what I do, whether it's through tiny touches or more direct things. Fortunately this is not the only way to see things in art, and I don't claim to hold the absolute truth, but this is mine today. I need to feel something sincere in the works I see and I do that too. And so this is how my practice has evolved over the last few years: I have tried́ to step back from the customs of the milieu and its random codes, in my practice I have elaborated a personal plastic vocabulary that allows me to navigate without any restraint among several forms, physical or virtual, without necessarily imposing a distinction between the two. And I also think that in the years to come, writing stories, scenarios, will take a more important place in my work.

You are a recipient of the "2-12" program of the Cité internationale des arts, can you tell us a few words about the project you are developing during your residency?

"As part of my residency I am interested in paranormal communication techniques, forgotten languages, ghosts, waves. I am originally from Cape Verde on my father's side and from Italy on my mother's, yet I speak neither of these two languages, Italian and Cape Verdean Creole. I wondered to what extent languages engraved in my flesh by my ancestors could appear in auditory pareidolia from devices used by ghost hunters. There are machines, called Spirit Box, that allow one to 'dialogue' with entities by interpreting radio signals. The question is not necessarily to know if I believe in these devices which are often very dubious, but I like this devotion which exists in certain people seeking at all costs a tangible answer to their existential questions.

In the conception of this piece which will be a virtual world accessible via a sculpture, I ask questions to my Spirit Box to try to see what formal choices are proposed to me. I am also doing research on reflection holograms (analog holography) as well as on the observation of my brain waves through an encephalography device. I would like to find a link between these forms that would allow me to hunt more precisely the disorder that nestles behind this idea of the paranormal. So here it will be a question of waves of all kinds which will enable me to advance a little more in the quest that our dear simulation entrusted to me."