Joana Vasconcelos: Mask of mirrors

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2:01Welcome to In The Studio from the BBC World Service, the programme that investigates the creative process. In this edition, we return to 2018 and to the making of a sculpture called I'll Be Your Mirror.

2:24I'm Anna McNamee, and this week I'm in Portugal's capital city, Lisbon, visiting the studio of one of the country's most prolific and successful artists ever, Joana Dasconcelos.

2:40The truth is, I really understand how you make things, and the construction is a very important part of the process, and you have to be connected with the process, otherwise you won't be able to do something that was never done before.

2:58Doing things that have never been done before is how Joanna has made her international reputation. Whether it was her sculpture entitled The Bride, a massive yet elegant chandelier made out of tampons that was the must-see artwork of 2005's Venice Biennale, or the huge pair of silver stilettos made from saucepans and the pink feathered helicopter which drew record-breaking crowds to her solo exhibition at France's Palace of Versailles. Joanna's work is always monumental in scale and ambition and her solo show, opening at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, promises to be her most ambitious yet.

3:40It will feature some of the most famous and emblematic works from her career so far, but there will be new pieces too. One of them is the first thing that visitors will see when they enter the exhibition, a giant, glittering Venetian mask made from dozens of mirrors with richly decorated frames. The title of the piece is I'll Be Your Mirror, inspired by the song with the same name, written by Lou Reed, lead guitarist of the rock band The Velvet Underground.

4:20It's late April, only two months until the exhibition is due to open. And in Joanna's vast studio space, located in the heart of Lisbon's industrial docklands on the banks of the River Tagus, they've started to build the sculpture.

4:39There's a smell of molten metal. Is this a bad time to ask what's going on? He's welding the first piece of the mask, the first frame. It has been taken us a while. What is this? You know, they told me when I came, they said, oh, if you can pick up the frame, to give us an idea of how big it is, pick up the frame. The frame, just so people know, is about three times as tall as I am.

5:20In keeping with the size of Joanna's work, her studio is also huge. A massive repurposed sprawl of warehouses with lofty ceilings, doors big enough to accommodate an 18-wheel lorry, and filled with the buzz and hum of industry, made by the dozens of workers on site. There are studios for metalwork, ceramics, sewing, embroidery, inflatables, even robotics There are kitchens and a whole floor dedicated to the physical health and well-being of Joanna's team Complete with a masseuse, a therapist, a yoga studio and even a fight club It's practically a miniature city All watched over by Joanna Who moves almost constantly from space to space overseeing the smallest of details of each and every piece being made.

6:12One of the things I want to start by asking you about is the actual piece itself. Can you tell me a little bit about what was the gestation for that idea? What was the seed? How did it spark? Well, one of the things that I've been thinking, and that's a lot of the concept, It's how you take your masks off, how you get rid of the identities that you put into yourself, which are not real. Everybody has their own masks, sort of speak. And so there's a moment where you decide to take off the masks and to deal with who you really are. And so when the invitation for the Gunga Man came along, I thought, OK, this is the moment to take off my mask and to show to the world who I really am.

6:55So the concept came alive, and I developed the piece of saying, okay, this makes sense now more than ever, because it's, you know, 23, 24 years of work. It's not done Venice, Biennales, and Versailles, and this and that. But actually, to get to the Guggenheim has a special meaning, because it's a very important institution. It's a moment where you have to look through your work and see what you've done well, what you haven't, what you've achieved. And so in a way, it's to take off the mask. So how did the Lou Reed song come into it then? Did it come into it at all? It does, of course. It gave the name because the Lou Reed song is I'll Be Your Mirror.

7:37It asks you, invites you, the title invites you to participate. You know, people that are going to come to this show, they are going to reflect themselves also into the mask. So it's a game from who you are to the world. So when you started to work on this piece then, what's the first thing you do? Oh, the first thing I do is a drawing in my notebook like this. After that, the ideas are here and I will take them to the architecture department and I will look into them and try to bring them alive with scale and with contents and with a kind of, you know, reality check. And after that, we do the budget.

8:20We say, okay, to do this, how much money would we spend? And so the financial department constructs a project. But to do that, we have to go to production area, and they will define, I say, well, I need some mirrors. But how in the world are they going to be done? And I say, okay, in bronze. And so they have to find out, you know, a bronze company to produce the mirror, to know how much does it cost. And so then the financial area have the budget done. And when we have finally the client or the people that are going to buy or produce the piece or the museums or galleries or collectors, the financial area receives the money, the production area spends the money.

9:02And when everything is already in motion, we start producing the piece. So it has been quite demanding. And to come to the moment where actually you're welding the frames, it's already like, it took us so many months to see this. until you actually do it, you're not really sure that it will work. So the good thing is that we'll see the result in an hour or so to see if actually it was a good idea.

9:31How many people work in here, Joanna? 57. 57? Yes. So this is the architectural department. I see. Where we do all the maquettes. we did the maquettes for the baroque frame the maquette for the mask and so it's where we plan all projects and where we do all the technical drawings engineering project and you know see the colors and these are the projects that we are producing at the moment so the mask is one of them and that's the wedding ring also we have a maquette over here These are all for Bilbao? Yes, these are all for Bilbao. So we do all this small 3D printing. And so this is the place where we test, where we organize, and also where we design.

10:24So this is all to scale, presumably? Yes, this is all to scale, yeah. And so how important is it for you, then, how the actual different elements work together? That's the curatorial part. That's what I work with Enrique Juncosa, Mike Ureta, and Petra Joost from the Guggenheim, how to put the pieces together in one space. In previous shows, I did one room, one piece, one room, one room. And this is the first time I joined a few large pieces together. So actually, I'm quite curious about it. I still don't know how it's going to work, but it will. Joana had said that it was not necessary to join these two points, but it was to stay behind.

10:59And this is right ahead. See if it's like this. Go on, I'll go. What's this? Your colleague just came with his phone with a picture of the frame downstairs to see if we should fulfill the space with welding or not. Because the frames, did you want them to butt up against each other? Yes, I want, but sometimes if you put a lot of quantity of welding, it gets very heavy. We'll go and see. These are the details. That's why it's good to have a big team because in place I can decide. If it was elsewhere, I would never be able to decide the details. The details are very important in this artwork, So I can actually, having everybody together allows this communication, which is I can go downstairs and at the same time continue with this and at the same time continue with something else.

11:47So I can run different things at the same time. They say the women are good at juggling. Exactly. This is crazy juggling. It's crazy juggling.

12:02Ultimately, Joanna's goal is to make her mask from dozens of double-sided mirrors. slightly overlapping like fish scales, to form a giant reflective skin. But today is only the beginning of that process, and what we're looking at now are dozens of empty mirror frames, like a sea of bronze oval hula hoops, tied together with plastic cables, in what's beginning very much to resemble half a Venetian mask. So we're coming back into the welding room to check whether or not to put solder between the different frames. Let's see how it goes. Let's see how it goes. Joanna is checking the work of the welder.

12:49This is curious. There are four or five people standing, all contemplating the sight of this sculpture.

13:03occasionally Joana goes up she has a rubber mallet in her hand and she kind of bangs at the frame of one of the mirrors making what look like infinitesimal little changes

13:18my name is Ricardo Pereira and I'm an architect my name is Tiago, Tiago Batista I'm an engineer I'm helping Ricard with this piece. So tell me, what stage are we at here in the construction of this piece? It's the first day of welding and the first day of assemblage and the first day of many, day and night. Really? How many days and nights do you think it'll take? One month. Yeah, one month? The engineer's going, oh, I don't know. Every time Joanna comes down, she kind of moves things around a bit and she gets out the mallet and she bangs it a bit. Joanna knows the place. We understand Joanna's because the art is very complicated and very specific.

14:12No here, no here, but here. Is it ever difficult to work with somebody who's so exacting, who's so concerned with detail? Is that hard? It's difficult, but it's very fun. Yeah? Yes. Joana's success, I believe it comes from that, I don't know... Precision. Yes. Yeah, that exactitude. The fact that she is so... She is very precise, isn't she? Yeah. We're going to get this to the side, this to the side, this to the side. No, it's the opposite. What are you going to do? we're just going to move them a little bit around so they can be one on top of the other with the same rhythm instead of being one too far away apart and the other too, how do you say overlapping because you want the effect for them to be sort of undulating?

15:07yeah, I want it to be like a snake skin like the, how do you say the scales it will look like scales going one over the other So if you do it carefully, they can be scaled quite regularly.

15:24I think when a lot of people imagine a studio or an atelier, they imagine that there are individual artisans who are working on projects kind of by themselves, but they're quite... I was thinking about the image of the artist from the 19th century. That's the image that was contrasted in the Romantic period. but it's not true that you can paint all the big paintings that are in all these palaces and castles all over the world and they were painted by a depressed guy in an attic with psychological problems. All the other centuries there were always big studios and so my studio is quite a classical studio that of course to achieve a certain scale and a certain degree of demand you have to work in a team.

16:12Why do you think we have that idea, though? Because I think you're absolutely right. We do have a very romantic idea that an artistic vision is something that is very solitary. It is. It doesn't mean that it isn't. I have to decide every step of the way by myself. Nobody's going to tell me that they think that it's right or wrong. It's my own decision in the end of the day. But in order to produce big-scale things, you need the help of other hands, of tools, sometimes of machines. So it depends on what you're doing and the scale will dictate the needs. And you have to have all those things. That's why very few women that go into monumental sculpture, really, because it's so difficult and you require a lot of help to make it happen.

17:06Back in the metal workshop, welding the frames together has been meticulously slow work. While half a dozen frames are now welded into place, there are pallets piled high with more empty frames waiting to be used and approved by Joanna before they can be permanently soldered to the rest. If you step back, you can just about see what the final shape of the piece will be. But they're a long way off yet. So today, how much will you finish today? I believe that we're done for today. We need to wait for the welding. And we're making some adjustments as the welder goes... As he goes along? Yeah.

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20:26You're listening to In the Studio from the BBC World Service. In this programme we're in Lisbon to witness the creation of a monumental new sculpture by the artist Joanna Vashconcellos. When I was here just over a month ago, the mood was relatively relaxed, as work on I'll Be Your Mirror was just getting started. But with only a few weeks to go before the exhibition is due to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the pace is feeling a little bit more frantic.

21:04Hi Joanna, how are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm good. Busy, busy, though. Craziness. You're eating breakfast? Well, I'm eating, yeah. Every time I come, you doodle. Does doodling help you think? I think so. I think it helps me to concentrate. Last time I was here, things were pretty mellow, quiet. I came through downstairs, the studio. It's a lot busier now. Last time we were here, we were figuring out the connection between the mirrors. And that's a very conceptual moment because the connection between the frames and it has to do with a kind of a scale and with a kind of sequence of how they are one under the other and how they connect to each other, how many empty spaces I leave among the mirrors.

21:57then when you solve that aesthetic thing you have to solve the technical problem which is where the is going to happen and how you cut it so that you can open it and put the mirrors inside so uh the moment you came here i was still figuring out how to do it and when i did actually the dynamics changed so since you've been gone we start doing it so what you feel now is a strong activity because now we have a deadline and we need to finish all this technical process until a certain date so the mirrors just arrived i was seeing them right now and so i'm really like super happy that i'm finally gonna see everything together because i haven't so i because we we put the frames now we're separating the mask in eight pieces and they're working on each piece because it's easier to be so big you know the six meters wide and and four meters tall and and the connection of the mirror with the friends is going to be a very special moment, what we're going to see today.

23:06Downstairs, Joanna's metal workshop has been cleared of all other work and is now dominated by the vast Venetian mask in several pieces. Standing proud, two giant cheekbones and an An eyebrow, made from hundreds of bronze frames and weighing almost two tons, fill the floor. And to one side, half of the other eyebrow is hanging, suspended from a heavy-duty industrial scaffold. Held in place by several thick pulley chains, it's being closely inspected by Joanna and half a dozen of her team members. you see all the bits they are being cleaned up and they are being you know brushed so you can see the gold of the bronze coming out because it was too dark and to have a contrast with the mirrors i wanted to bring out all the the golden color from the bronze and we've been trying out so i think now we got the right color if you come here you'll see see it's already in the light you already feel the bronze but at the same time it's shining no it looks fantastic it looks good it really looks like a mask now too yes actually don't now you don't see it all because you have the bits here yeah we're missing a cheekbone but other than that a cheekbone and half an eyebrow but otherwise there's one part here and that's why they have the cuts also you can open them see these marks here yeah so we can actually take out and place the mirror and then to close it again.

24:42It's like a clamshell, basically. It's already cleaned. Let's see. Now it's going to be cut. It smells really... Is that the polish that I smell? Or is it the metal? The polish is being applied here. When you stand beside it like this, you really get a sense of how huge it is. Because we're just standing... This is the right eyebrow we're standing beside. And it's taller than we are. Yes. And that's just the eyebrow. It is. The truth is, you see here, you can see the marks, so now we're going to take them out, and we're going to place the mirror and frame them back. Podemos experimentar aqui os mirrors?

25:20So the mirrors, when they go in, they're going to be double-sided reflection? Yes, so you're going to see them from each side. Actually, you have to get inside of the mask to see one perspective over the space, but you can't see them from the front. So did you have to have the double-sided mirrors specially commissioned? Yes, we did. Because if it had only one side, we wouldn't need to have all this trouble. Because the trouble to frame, to have this sequence from the back and from the front, you'll see different things. And you will experience a different thing. Because here, you are surrounded by the piece, you're inside of the piece.