Inside and Outside the Fantasy: New Age Kids, by Pauliana Valente Pimentel

Pauliana Valente Pimentel’s latest exhibition is hosted by the historic Galeria Diferença in Lisbon, with a curious sense of appropriateness, given that difference is a central theme in the artist’s photographic work. 

Since the beginning of her career, Pauliana has focused on various minorities and marginalized communities, paying special attention to identity, ethnic, and gender issues, and often showing an interest in younger generations. Some of the most impactful series in this thematic field are Make-up (2011), Quel Pedra (2014-16), and O Narcisismo das Pequenas Diferenças (2018).

The project that the photographer is presenting in 2024 revisits some of the topics explored in previous series. Beginning in 2022, New Age Kids has been part of her PhD in Contemporary Art at the Colégio das Artes of the University of Coimbra, where Pauliana is developing a thesis that combines a written dissertation and photographic work on, in her words, “young people from Lisbon who do not identify with a normative gender.”

This is the first solo exhibition originating from this project. However, some results had already been presented to the public in the group exhibition “Motel Coimbra 6” at the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra (2023-24), and especially in the book Lisboa Mesma Outra Cidade, published by GHOST in 2023 and edited by David-Alexandre Guéniot. Several of the images on display at Diferença had already appeared in the pages of this book, which, in addition to Pauliana’s photographs, also includes drawings, writings, and photographs taken by the group of young people who are the objects of this work.

I write “object” out of habit. In fact, it is important to remember that, in the text that accompanied the initial promotion of this exhibition, Pauliana clarified that these young people from Lisbon are “object (and subject)” of her photography. 

In an economical and discreet manner, the artist thus claims a certain modus operandi according to which the photographs result from an eminently collaborative work, which in turn reveals an affiliation to a certain tradition in the history of photography, from Nan Goldin to Sally Mann—whose name we see on the spine of a book, in one of the photographs, a book upon which Pauliana’s own son is lying (after all, family, whether biological or chosen, is also one of the themes of this work). By sharing the function of subject with her photographic objects, thereby denying an absolute authorship in the Romantic sense, Pauliana also underlines a set of qualities that have marked her work: a remarkable generosity and a true sense of humanism (natural, reactive, empathetic, and never stemming from discourse or ideology) that prevent her work from being merely thematic, and (fortunately, I believe) preclude its belonging to the increasingly popular category of “art about”, which António Guerreiro characterized in the insightful article “A arte ‘bienalizada’”. Avoiding the risks of some socially engaged art that disappears within the interest or urgency of its own theme, Pauliana’s art is not “about”. It is “with”. And it is above all “by”, in this shared authorship with the photographic object-subjects.

In New Age Kids, the artist follows a group of young people who are, in fact, part of her own son’s social circle. These are queer youth—gay, lesbian, transgender, non-binary—currently between 15 and 16 years old. The queerness revealed here is markedly different from what we witnessed in Quel Pedra, and this influences the very nature of the photographs. The strength, vitality, and provocation of the photographs taken in Cape Verde are now diluted. Times have changed (about 10 years have passed), the territory has shifted (from Africa to Western Europe), and the social context of the subjects has evolved (from slums to condominiums and art schools in Lisbon). The young people in New Age Kids are more composed, more reflexive, more careful in how they stage their appearance and identities. Here, queerness is conceptualized, and it is collectively and scrupulously—more than intuitively—performed. Nails are painted in front of impressionist paintings hung on the walls (one of the most beautiful and suggestive photographs of the series); rooms are filled with posters, plush toys, and action figures; the youth play musical instruments or sit in front of their laptops; rainbow-patterned socks migrate from individual to individual like a carried flag: they tread the same path.

The apparent blasé tranquility of the objects (and subjects) in these photographs transfers to the images themselves, which thus acquire a certain placidity. The selection by the artist and the curator Helena Gonçalves seems deliberate in this regard, as they have not included in the exhibition some of the images we see in the book Lisboa, which are more staged or constructed according to the principles of canonical portraiture or fashion photography. These photographs, due to their formal characteristics, expressive power, and greater immediacy, would more easily seduce the observer.

On the contrary, most of the images presented here do not seem to aim to attract through beauty or virtuosity (and we know well that Pauliana is a virtuous portraitist)—this is actually one of their most captivating qualities. These photographs are delicate, whispering, and thus invite us to spend time with them, to frequent them in silence, seeking an entry into the tumult that we know lies beyond the placid surface. We can undertake this exercise by looking at the images affixed to the walls or refrigerators of homes, studying the awkward way some bodies pose or the excessive compensation of certain ‘fierce looks’, as they say in queer jargon, but also, for example, by participating as accomplices in the playful act of recreating a pregnancy (whether ‘hysterical’, imaginary, or symbolic, but certainly playful).

In a work like Quel Pedra, one did not feel, as is sensed here, the inadequacy of photography to penetrate the surface of bodies, because the bodies photographed in Cape Verde had inscribed in them, as a force, the scream, the cry, the laugh, seemingly turning outward. In New Age Kids, however, we are faced with a more sphinx-like expression of queerness: these bodies elude interpretation. These young people, still in the condition of learning to decipher themselves, express themselves more through what they hide than what they reveal. This is why this work stands out as a radically photographic proposal. By inviting her objects to also be authors of the photographs, that is, to make these portraits also self-portraits, Pauliana creates a network of images that document both an act of exhibition and (paradoxically—but there is no adolescence without paradox) concealment. It is in this game full of subtleties that these images and these beings come to life.

In a gesture that proved productive, Pauliana invited her new age kids to write on the gallery windows, making explicit in language what in the purely iconic nature of the photographs can only be intuited—that is, what goes on inside their heads. Unsurprisingly, we find that ontological inquiry is central: “I just want to be”, “Am I real?”, “I don’t want to be or not be”, or “Who is the government to decide if I am or am not?”. But much of what is written also rests on a visual paradigm, a relationship between identity and image—which is also unsurprising in young people who are forced to rethink their appearance in light of what they understand as their true essence: “I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the reflection” or “A body that isn’t mine”. Other phrases are formulated as characteristic queer existential anxieties: “I feel like a free androgynous being”; “I started doing drag but still don’t know how to walk in heels”, “I don’t know can anyone feel attracted to only one gender”, “Fitting into a binary world is suffocating”. And finally, there are phrases that could have been written by any teenager, queer or not (because the particularity of this work does not ignore universality, and queer identity doesn’t gain much by ignoring it): “These mood swings annoy me”, “I’m trying to accept myself”, “Stupid thoughts”, “I try to find the meaning of all this but the strength is running out”, or an unexpectedly Fassbinderian one—I hope these young people have the opportunity to see Fassbinder’s films, because there is a history of queerness that can only consolidate and enrich, by historicizing, their queer identities—“Fear of fear”.

The photograph taken at the amusement park seems to consolidate some of these tensions between staging, truth, play, fluidity, performativity, concealment, instability, and metamorphosis. One clown looks at us, another looks off-frame. Both laugh and cry simultaneously because, from a queer perspective of the world, makeup is never in the realm of the false: it grafts truth onto reality. These beings of disguise are simultaneously inside and outside the social sphere, inside and outside the imaginary and fantasy, in the real world and in the photograph.

May 2024  

José Bértolo