Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child is a work of articulated fiction and art history. Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009), the "enfant terrible" of Portuguese painting, left Lisbon as a teenager for Rio de Janeiro and Paris, where a Gulbenkian fellowship and the mentorship of Júlio Pomar shaped an art of ladders, staircases, cacti, and tricksters, of Heidegger's fourfold made animate. She returned with the Carnation Revolution of 1974, worked among the children of Trás-os-Montes, loved the poet and philosopher Cristiana Veiga Simão, was committed by her father to the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, and died in 2009.
Omar Kholeif tells her story through two searchers: Blake, a museum director on the eve of retirement who buys a small watercolor and cannot let it go, and Mar, a graduate student who assumes Blake's research and walks a dead woman's streets in a dead man's footsteps. Between the chapters run letters from Luísa's cousin, recalling Paris in the spring of the revolution and the "uniform grey veil" that lithium assumed.
With a foreword by the philosopher Maria Filomena Molder, and a screen interlude by Sarah Perks, this sixth and final volume of imagine/otherwise asks what it costs to be remembered and who does the labor of dreaming on an artist's behalf.
/World Child at Work/
If a body can resist or avail to resist, to consent that it is not a single being, then it too, can serve as a nexus of multiple forms of embodiment. It is a site of several forms of knowledges drawn from different seats of lived experience. It is with this conviction that the material for this book and its methods were determined.
Life’s assessments rear in the crack of time. But they need not fall in the interstice. Each chapter in this book is constructed to stage the event of looking at the artwork. Looking here can be assumed as a
cursory glance, or an intense form of observation. Painting here is the space of resolve, release and reckoning. It is the consequence of all movement—estranged, or otherwise.
Temporal movements cut across time. The act of time travel here is more than a mere dramatic flex. It also denotes how sets of archival knowledge have been gathered, studied, interrogated, and how they extend to a celestial epoch beyond the Earth. The art of Correia Pereira, like the artists published in this imprint before her, transcend present states of
consciousness, connecting to ancestral knowledge—to the coming together of the soil and the sky, the divinities, and the immortals. The result of this method is what I refer to as a work “articulated fiction.”
Professor Omar Kholeif is Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art History and Academic and Research Lead: Curatorial Study and Practice at the Glasgow School of Art in association with the University of Glasgow. An artist, author, cultural historian, and curator, Kholeif has spent 20 years examining picture theories and their errant life.
Professor Maria Filomena Molder is a philosopher and Professor at Nova University, Lisbon. Previously a member of the Science Council of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, she lives and works in Lisbon.
Professor Sarah Perks is a curator, filmmaker, writer and cultural leader who is currently Professor of Curating at Teesside University, School of Arts and Creative Industries and MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), UK.
Editorial Board
Skye Arundhati-Thomas, Madrid
Dr. Zoe Butt, Bangkok and Chiang Mai
Carla Chammas, New York and Beirut
Alison Heart, The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Prof. Sarah Perks, Teesside University, Middlesborough
Sofia Victorino, Teesside University, Middlesborough and Nova University, Lisbon