Anatomia do fazer

Anatomia do fazer is an editorial object that gathers a set of materials created around the work Terceira Pessoa has developed over 11 years in the performing arts and in cross-disciplinary practice.

It essays connections between the creative thinking of artists and co-creating participants and the way they themselves perceive the artistic objects – how they experience them while immersed in the creative process.

The process is not regarded here as an evolving sequence of achievements in steady progression, but as an opening onto the unexpected, onto possible inflections and detours. The book reflects on and dissects the non-linear, many-sided nature of artistic thinking and of the spaces of individual subjectivity, invoking free self-performance and the time(s) and space(s) proper to each member.

The process began with an invitation to four authors to write texts around the various lines of action that have run through Terceira Pessoa’s projects: Diogo Martins wrote on artistic creation; Hugo Cruz was challenged to take the dialectic between art and community as the starting point for an essay; Isabel S. Silva, for her part, thought about artistic practices and their social impact; and Maria Sequeira Mendes reflected on the movements between art and education.

Each of these texts set off a ‘chain’ made up of a series of ‘responses’ that Ana Gil, Diogo Martins, Nuno Leão and Óscar Silva produced and exchanged over time. Day by day, each member had access only to the latest response and, from there, continued the chain and created their own proposal, which would in turn be taken up by another member of the collective.

The result is this unconcluded body, deferring its own end. Perhaps that is why it speaks more of what is not visible in it than of what is set down on its pages. And so, perhaps, it challenges and sharpens the immediate constraints of a book that is one and indivisible, probing the mental and physical relationships readers may form with the various materials of which it is made.

As it reaches its readers’ hands, the hope is that this gesture may find ways to continue. That this body-sketch may begin again with every attempt: matter that makes and remakes its own unfinishedness.