Dias & Riedweg

Artist duo sets upstaged encounters

Carlos tells me how the world of prostitution has fascinated him for a long time and how he ended up in it. He is actually talking to the artist who conducted the interview, but the tone is very personal and it feels as if he was telling his story straight to me. Dani fucks for money in order to do what he thinks is the most important thing in the world: music. He does not want to have sex with men, and in the beginning it used to make him sick. Now he does it for a living but thinks about his music. Jean learned the life of a whore at home. For him, it was the normal thing to do. Jorge Luiz took a less simple path: his father threw him out after he learned about his son's homosexuality. Jorge Luiz ended up as a chaperon because there was no alternative.

Alex, Miguel, Adriano... They all have their stories. The names have presumably been changed, but it does not matter. It could as well be Christian, Pedro or Antonin. Or Walter and Maurício. In any event, they all appear as individuals with names.

At the same time, they are also members of a group of people united by certain conditions of life. Most of them have come from somewhere else, from Latin America, Asia, from poor circumstances. They are still young. Their customers are older rich men. They live on the fringes of the legitimate society, in the shadows, and nobody hardly talks about them and many wish they did not exist or at least do not want to know anything about them. Their status is bound to the values and power relationships of society. They exist because there are rich people in society who can pay to satisfy their desires. Some of them may even make quite a lot of money, but they are dependent on the well-off people of society, who in turn are dependent on the services of these despised service providers. The service or product travels in one direction, the money in the other, and there is no question that those with the money are in charge.

The interviewees have a name and a face. However, in the videos and photographs they do not have a face of their own but wear a mask. The fact that they have to hide their faces when appearing in public tells about them as members of their group and the status of that group: belonging in the world of prostitution is not accepted. However, behind the masks they tell their stories in their own voices and words.

ART ABOUT SOCIAL RELATIONS

Maurício and Walter, lying on the same bed with them in a place called 'sauna', are not prostitutes but artists. Known as the duo Dias & Riedweg, they have worked on several projects in which the artwork is created in collaboration between many people or a group of people. Previously, they have worked on projects with two groups of prisoners in Atlanta, street vendors and doormen in Sao Paulo and immigrants in Switzerland, but also with very different 'ordinary' Venetians. The projects are not 'social' in the sense that their purpose was to somehow change or improve the lives of the participants. Instead, the artists stress opening up dialogue as the basis of their art. If something is supposed to change, I think the projects' aim of becoming a public work of art – which is made clear to the participants from the beginning – can only aim at changing the viewers, us, the way an encounter like this can change images and ideas. The artists lay themselves open to change by taking the role of listener rather than trying to influence others in the dialogue.

Works by Dias & Riedweg could rather be compared to sociological than social projects. Realising projects such as Voracidad maxima about male prostitutes requires much research and work in advance: surveying the situation, accumulating information, building contacts and trust, finding the participants, constructing the setting and situation and so forth.

Projects by Dias & Riedweg give visibility to people who are usually kept in the margins, invisible. We use the pronoun 'they' to refer to these people. They do not usually have a chance to tell their stories self; instead, it is told by someone else: a researcher, social worker or civil servant, and power naturally rests with those who have the power to tell the story or create an image of another person. For some male prostitutes, the project was a liberating and inspiring experience. They were able to tell others about themselves, in their own words. "The interview was also fun. It was an unexpected chance for me to think about my life. To turn the film back. To go back. It was good for me." The artists created a forum for telling these stories. "While all the others with whom I spend my days force me to forget who I am, this guy politely asks me to remember it..."

The prostitutes' stories are presented in an art context. Drawing the conclusions is mostly left to the viewers but the artists do direct the viewers' interpretation by means of realisation and presentation.

STRUCTURES OF NARRATION

In Voracidad maxima Dias & Riedweg place themselves in view more than in any other work. They talk with the men in their 'working clothes' – white bathrobes – lying on the same bed. They appear without a mask, and more: they have given their features to the person they are talking with, whose masks reproduce the face of the artist acting as the interviewer. Surrounding mirrors confuse the roles and statuses of the talkers even more. The mask also serves to alienate and underline the other person's strangeness.

Dias & Riedweg call the settings 'staged encounters'. The two-part term refers to both con-scious artificiality and real encounters, and is thus suggestive of sociological or anthropological debates on the impact different methods have on the research subject and the information gained. In art this is done in an emphatically conscious way and it is also shown to the audience. Creating the setting is part of the artwork, not only a framework or defining condition. In addition to staged encounters, the artists employ sensory workshops which are another method inspiring and structuring conversation. They consist of working with and talking about different materials that stimulate the senses – smells, materials that can be felt, noises and so forth. The artists say they aim at dialogical art in which the participants help define the contents and form. They also describe their work as open, collective research or a laboratory.

Dias & Riedweg stress that they are not making pictures of the people or groups they work with. Their goal is not to give some collective description of 'them', but to provide tools for what they call auto-representation. The content and form of the works is created together with the group, as a result of a shared process. Hence it should correspond to the participants' thoughts and ideas about themselves and the issues at hand. The image is often something else than the presuppositions imposed from the outside. The created image obviously cannot be considered the only possible image or 'genuine' in any way. The participants are very conscious of the situation which their participation will lead to. Encounters are of course influenced by many expectations and presumed reactions – pretty much the same forces that always control auto-representation and make everyday living a representation or performance.

Kaija Kaitavuori

Head of Development
Finnish National Gallery