André Bergamin is an artist based in Porto Alegre, Brazil
TWS –How are you doing in this Covid-19 pandemic?
I’ve never washed so many dishes in my life. I’m alright, Max. Hope you are doing well too!
TWS –Are you being able to telecommute / work from home?
I’ve been working from home for a long time now and always considered a privilege to be able to do so. Still it feels a bit different now that this is not really a choice anymore and I can’t meet up with friends for a drink at the end of a working day.
TWS –Did the lock-down affected your creativity and art making? How?
I’m not as productive as I thought I’d be but I’m not feeling bad for it either. There is a sense of permissiveness that comes with living in extraordinary times. Sometimes I’m lying in bed watching cartoons and eating ice cream and it all feels like a really long day of skipping school. Right now the only things I got going is a large paper on canvass collage that I’ve been working on forever and a few illustration commissions which are really helping financially wise. Other than that I’m trying to do catch up on my reading start on some side projects involving video and cement sculptures. I’ve been cooking a lot also.
TWS –Are you able to track positive moments or things that happened during this crisis so far?
This is all very scary and I feel like we must at least come out of it with a new perspective on things. It’s hard not to politicize the moment specially living in a country like Brazil which has been taken over the extreme right. I hope we are all starting to realize that we do need massive investment in healthcare and social safety nets. That the workers are the ones important to the economy and that we can’t have a system that will collapse on itself if production has to be descaled for a few months. Wow that got serious really fast. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the time for revolution has come, we already got the face masks let’s go out and burn everything to the ground.
TWS –What’s the first thing you would like to do when we can get back to normal?
Go to an empty supermarket and calmly shop groceries without thinking of death. Traveling would be nice too, maybe I could attend the next International Weird Collage Show – wherever that will be – and have a beer with you.
