Olho (Eye) | installation

After the impact caused by the reading of 'Island', Aldous Huxley’s novel, I challenged a group of artists to read the book and use it as a starting point for a collective exhibition. At that time, my most pressing concern was the continuing experience of a kind of divorce with the idea of collectivity, to witness a persistent alienated individualism around me - the kind of ideas that are repeated in a contempt against one's own country, giving way to generalizations. 'Island' was a first act against isolation.

No longer in a state of anxiety to create a collective - which always seems to have an expiration date -, to seek a union of dissidents, and thus attempting to materialize an utopia, but as a result of an everlasting obsession with the body, with its limits and its meanings, this time I decided to suggest Georges Bataille’s 'Story of the Eye' as a starting point for creating a work of art.

As the perception of our body expands, the notion of how it is confined to didacticisms, rules and norms, expands with it. The body is the place where one acquires knowledge, Georges Bataille could have written. But he did not. He wrote transgressive fiction with autobiographical nuances, adopting everything that was rejected, feared or despised. And it was in his trail that we were inspired to realize that we are also characters confined to the norms and expectations of society, and that the more we try to free ourselves from these chains the more we are rejected: a free person in a society without freedom becomes a monster.

Therefore we sought in 'Story of the Eye' an opportunity to assume ourselves monsters, terrorists of the imagination, in an 'organized transgression'.

- M. Bonneville

19th November - 18th December 2015, Livraria Campo Grande 111, Lisbon, Portugal