Bárbara ASSIS PACHECO (1973)

Bárbara Assis Pacheco was born in Lisbon in 1973. She currently lives and works in Lisbon. Assis Pacheco graduated in Architecture at the Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 1997 and concluded her studies in Drawing and an Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Ar.Co, Lisbon. She is currently a 3rd year student of Philosophy at Universidade Nova, Lisbon.

Assis Pacheco has exhibited her work in group shows since 1997. Her individual show at the Sala do Veado (Lisbon, 2002) is of great importance to the understanding and visibility of her work. Two double editions of Colóquio Letras (159/160 and 161/162, of July and December, 2002) were illustrated by her.

One of the main thematic universes which her work encompasses is that of the animal world. Her search, located between attraction and repulsion, defacement and play, has directed her attention to Museums of Natural History, zoos, circuses, compendiums and laboratories of anatomy, abattoirs, collector’s archives and documents related to genetic experiments.

Images of cooped up pigs for slaughter, sliced meat, rabbits, cows, birds, fish, dogs, rats, elephants, frogs, seals, rendered by views of bones and cartilage under gaunt skin, ribs, necks, paws and tails, hanging, cutting, labelling, the positions inherent to slaughter, transportation, incarceration, sickness, putrefaction, stains, diverse sections, wrinkled, emptied or non-existent skin, the stomach in all its affect and vulnerability, heads and larva, all result from the fascination and catharsis with violence, death and perverse mutilation (related to survival, investigation, collecting or entertainment).

Gestation in animals or people is a particularly attractive factor in this private interpretation of the world. With seemingly negative prints or specimens preserved in alcohol, transparency is imposed as a theme and technique, with views of bodies with dense shells and fillings. The issue of maternity (human or animal) disturbingly appears linked to death within a cycle that relates the uncanny malleability of the bone structure with the potentiality of shapelessness and the formation of cavities.

In one of the drawings acquired by the CAMJAP, three rats, hung head down, are traversed by their empty eye sockets. In another drawing of a more serial nature, Assis Pacheco illustrates rat skulls, arranged in little boxes in blue, according to a display at the Museum of Natural History. This same collecting and repetitive principle organises the works that she presented for the CELPA/Vieira da Silva Award in 2003; different types of insects, buttons, toothbrushes, bottles, scissors, tweezers, scalpels, and bistouries were accordingly arranged and stuffed for a showcase.

She has also curiously occupied herself with mothers’ wombs and the dissection of the male sexual organ. Within this field, where she explicitly or unconsciously pursues the issue of the reproduction of the human species, it is seemingly difficult to explain the “pools” that she paints; enclosed spaces with murky or semi-transparent water; the promise of fertility and the hypotheses of drowning and submersion.

Assis Pacheco collaterally works on other projects like objects and photography: a series of coins with stamped words, such as “beauty” and “horror”, or “pretty” and “repulse”; a pack of cards with images of animals; or photographs that she relates to tombstones and wishes… or the photographs of empty spaces she entitles Crime Scenes– probably the crime of being born and dying without the condition to understand why.

LEONOR NAZARÉ