Sónia Almeida

Interview by Margot Norton

Throughout her career, Sónia Almeida has continued to test the limitations of painting, creating works that extend and upend traditional structures, and allow viewers to alter and shift her compositions. Through bold combinations of images, symbols, and scores, Almeida’s works invite multiple interpretations, and give viewers awareness of their own bodies and behaviors when actively viewing works of art. Intermixing materials and techniques such as Jacquard weaving, bookmaking, woodworking, and wallpaper design, Almeida’s artworks interconnect disparate visual languages, and defy categorization. As the artist has said, “I have always been less interested in labeling where things belong.” On the occasion of being shortlisted for the Foundwork Artist Prize, Almeida and I spoke about drawer pulling, pockets, dance steps, alphabets, her recent survey exhibition at Culturgest in Lisbon, emojis, train tracks, and more.

Margot Norton (MN): One of the things I've been struck by in your work is how you give agency to viewers through interactive components—whether that's flipping a painting from one side to the other or pulling out drawers from within your paintings to create different compositions. Has your work always included interactive elements like these?

Sónia Almeida (SA): I would say my interest was always there, but it was a gradual transformation in terms of being able to actually work with audiences. The first project where I saw the potential for this was Left/Right I am Two (2009), which I showed originally in the context of an art fair. At the time I don't think I was necessarily thinking about people touching the paintings—they had hinges between the panels, which came from a book idea. In seeing people interacting with these works, I realized that they could really activate them, and it slowly evolved from there.

Then I started doing projects with paintings that have pockets so that works could be put in different positions or inside one another. Slowly things got larger in scale, such as with Search Engines (2021), with the prisms that could be maneuvered in space.

MN: One of the things that I appreciate about these works is how they bring awareness to the standardized protocol or choreographies we typically abide by when viewing art. There is a surprise element to these works that encourage viewers to physically engage—they play with our expectations of what is permissible. In your experience, how do people interact with them? Do they approach with hesitation at first, or do they dive right in?

SA: The works with the drawers were probably the most democratic because you could encounter them in any way—with the drawers open, or closed, or partially closed—I had no control over that. Sometimes if they were all closed, people weren't sure where the drawer was exactly, but I discovered that if you put a handle on something, people want to open it; it becomes close to a utilitarian concept. Not everyone operated them—we are not used to being so aware of our bodies in exhibitions.

Left/Right, I am two, 2009

Oil on plywood, acrylic paint, hinges

central_panel: 43 2/3 x 31 7/8 in. side panels: 43 2/3 x 27 1/8 in. painting: 11 7/8 x 16 1/8 in.

MN: It was interesting to hear you say that with Left/Right I am Two, the idea to hinge the works came from books. I know you have been teaching a course on artist books at Brandeis University, and I think of the difference between how one engages with a book or a painting or even with a piece of furniture. How do you think about your work straddling these languages between fine art, books, and design?

SA: I have always been less interested in labeling where things belong. I have made books and sketchbooks for as far as I can remember. Painters typically make sketchbooks, but I started seeing mine as not needing to exist in service of something else.

My maternal grandmother made our clothing and we would go shopping for fabrics together and pick patterns. Eventually I started making my own clothes. I still do when I have the time. I collect a ton of fabrics like she did.

I always separated making clothing from artmaking. It was something I did on the side but, at some point, similarly to the sketchbooks, I realized that it didn't matter where things belong. A drawer made out of wood is also a material that I might paint on. Similarly, graphic design or pattern design started to show up in the work as well.

“I have always been less interested in labeling where things belong. I have made books and sketchbooks for as far as I can remember. Painters typically make sketchbooks, but I started seeing mine as not needing to exist in service of something else.”

MN: One of the things that I’ve noticed in your work is how sometimes there's a score or choreography that echoes the movements that the works can take themselves. There is this one image in Search Engines, which depicts a person pushing something, and this piece also invites viewers to do that precise choreography when manipulating the prisms. You also often depict dance steps, patterns, or music scores that signal what might be possible for people to do themselves when they engage with your works. Is this something that you think about as well?

SA: Initially I saw Search Engines as a mural—I wasn't thinking about it comprising parts that could be activated with wheels. The gray part has a music score, and there are step-by-step instructions that come from this book titled “Fox Trot Made Easy” from 1956 that depicted the foxtrot, which Andy Warhol also painted. I was interested in how these instructions could be read but also could be an invitation to perform.

It is a way to engage with painting, and to encourage the viewer to be present or at least aware of their own body. A painting is a thing in the world and we are, too. The thing that intrigued me the most when I went to museums as a child was looking at brushstrokes, even if they were not that juicy, and thinking about the fact that someone at some point in time was in front of this thing in a completely different space making it. I know it's a weird way to relate to a painting, but rather than thinking about a painting’s construction, I always imagined the context of how it existed in the world, in another dimension almost.

Racket, 2023

Jacquard weave, cotton, wool and polyester fabrics with two booklets

62 x 154 x 40 in.

“The thing that intrigued me the most when I went to museums as a child was looking at brushstrokes, even if they were not that juicy, and thinking about the fact that someone at some point in time was in front of this thing in a completely different space making it. I know it's a weird way to relate to a painting, but rather than thinking about a painting’s construction, I always imagined the context of how it existed in the world, in another dimension almost.”

MN: Something that I also find interesting with the scores in your work is that while they allude to a music or a choreography that exists, there's a non-specificity to them too. There’s an evocative quality where it feels like you know how it could be read or performed, but then you realize that it also doesn't make much sense at all.

It reminds me of when you might partially understand a language but not entirely, and there's these slippages in meaning and communication. When you're making these scores, you’re also approaching them in a way that opens up this territory for slippages to take place.

SA: I think you are so right with the idea of language or a system that needs decoding. I think if I were a musician, and understood the language of music better, I wouldn't be as free to do things such as turning some notes upside down. I am interested in what a musician might do or imagine with this score. There is a spectrum of reading that is dependent on where your experience is coming from.

My work is always about misunderstandings and multiple interpretations. In those pieces with the music scores, I was interested in how you might communicate with a system that you don't have access to. In terms of painting, it’s also a way to liberate myself from the things I'm not interested in, such as compositional balance, which takes my freedom away somehow. I have used little tricks to free myself from what having a painting education imprints on you.

“I have used little tricks to free myself from what having a painting education imprints on you.”

MN: While you don’t have sketches, you do seem to pull from patterns and symbols like a lexicon or a code.

SA: I'm definitely pulling from different sources in my research. I might hit on something that I find interesting, like the music score, dance notations, or instructions for weaving that have this connection to a coding.

MN: What about the alphabet that you have cited where bodies form letters? Where does that alphabet come from?

SA: These illustrations of the alphabet with bodies go back to the Middle Ages. Some are very detailed and resemble yoga poses. The thing that was most interesting to me was that in some of them you need collaboration to form the letters—you can't do it by yourself.

I am working on a piece right now that has an image of a train track. I realized that my studio is next to a train track, and both of my grandparents lived near train tracks. I relate to this sound of a train going by that is almost nostalgic, yet when you're close to the train, it’s really loud and aggressive, almost frightening. Images of train tracks are already in my books. So that's how things evolve. Some images or symbols make it out in other pieces and some don't. It depends on how things evolve in the studio.

MN: Something I noticed in your exhibition,“Ó (ó agudo)” (2023) at Culturgest in Lisbon, that I hadn't seen in your work previously was the wallpapers. I know that you're from Lisbon originally and I wanted to ask about what it was like for you to have that show in your home city? When I saw those wallpapers I thought of how they resembled technological patterning but also how in Lisbon, you're consistently surrounded by all of these tiles throughout the city that resemble pixelations. With these wallpapers in the show, was this context something that you were thinking about?

SA: I'm incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to do such a big show in Lisbon. I left the city when I finished my undergraduate studies, which was a hard time to leave because I just disappeared. I am not represented by a gallery in Portugal, and hadn’t shown there since 2009. It felt incredible to be back and share what I've been doing since.

There are seven rooms in Culturgest and two of them have really high ceilings, which is where we had the wallpaper installations and three-dimensional works: Search Engines (2021), Pockets and Lies (2020), and O Acute (2023). I always wanted to do a wallpaper, and I started filling them with a lot of references from the city, especially the subway, which has a lot of mosaics. When you look at the wallpapers, you might register these patterns as different things—mosaics, or pixelations, particularly near the fabric pieces that contain imagery that looks almost like a QR code. It was interesting to work in such a large context, and also a risk. I had no idea how the works were going to interact with one another once they were installed.

Pockets and Lies, 2020

Fabric piece (cotton, wool, polyester, paper) with 10 works on paper (silk aquatint, pencil, permanent marker, and collage on paper. Hanging mechanism.

85 x 102 x 40 in.

MN: I think it relates to a longer view of technology, such as what you were talking about earlier with weaving and coding, but also in relationship to mosaics and pixel technology. The word “technology” often makes us think about computers, but it's a much longer game.

I wanted to ask you about this take on your work related to technology—the QR code pattern you were describing also feels like it could be historical.

SA: I try not to make distinctions because the less I put things in categories, the more sense it makes to me. A lot of painters have been interested in the effects of the digital, but that's not the angle that I'm coming from. I don't see them as different things, but rather cultural processes that exist in different times. The most interesting thing to me about the digital is the lack of scale and also this idea that you have access to so much because everything is online, and you forget that it’s actually the other way around—there is an entire world out there! But the digital is also a part of us. Maybe my generation is still in transition, but younger people already know this, it's embedded in them.

Ó (O ACUTE), 2023

Printed fabric, cotton, wool, polyester, metal rods

61 x 69 x 81 in.

“I try not to make distinctions because the less I put things in categories, the more sense it makes to me. A lot of painters have been interested in the effects of the digital, but that's not the angle that I'm coming from. I don't see them as different things, but rather cultural processes that exist in different times.”

MN: The access point is going to be different for different generations. There have been paintings that I've seen that weren't made in the computer age, but looking at them now, they resemble pixelations or digital aesthetics. I remember seeing an Ellsworth Kelly painting titled Seine (1951) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was meant to be an abstraction of the light flickering on the surface of the Seine River in Paris, but seeing it in 2022 made me immediately think of something made on a computer.

Tell me about the fabric works that you have been making recently. You mentioned earlier that you have designed clothing separately from your painting practice, but that it's recently merged. Tell me about these newer larger scale works that you're doing with fabrics.

SA: I always had fabrics around, but it wasn’t until 2018, when I made a few suspended pieces with fabrics—Reverse Timeline (2019) and Reverse Timeline Stretched (2019)—which had this figure in a Z shape and cut out pieces of fabric at the bottom that were discards from clothing patterns. I have not painted on canvas or stretched fabric material for the longest time. I've painted on wood.

It was almost a rejection of what I call “killing the fabric with gesso,” which is that if you put gesso on canvas, all of a sudden it's not fabric anymore. I wanted to keep the materiality alive. It’s important that it cannot be super straight or forced into some kind of form, it just hangs. After these works, I slowly started to make more fabric pieces, and some of them included books and pages in pockets. In 2020, I had a show during the pandemic in Denmark called “Tørreloft” and I couldn’t travel to the opening or ship anything huge, so I made Pockets and Lies (2020), and rolled them up to be really small and sent them by mail. It came with ten works on paper—prints, drawings, and one book that you could put in the different pockets. I was fascinated by this idea that if you have a certain number of pockets and the same number of works on paper, in order to take a large paper work and fit it in a small pocket, you would have to alter it by rolling, folding, or cutting—otherwise it’s not going to fit. A small piece will fit in all of the pockets, but it would also disappear. There was this puzzle that viewers would need to figure out when they interacted with the pockets. There were many possibilities, which is what I was after.

MN: The small paper pieces disappearing in the large pockets remind me of the two-sided works you have been making for so long, where you have a painting on both sides of a panel, but you can't see both at the same time. This is similar to the works with drawers—there's this element of unknowing that's an important part of them. It relates to what you were talking about regarding the context of paintings that you would encounter in museums, and how you would imagine different contexts where works were created—there are secret lives to so many pieces.

SA: For sure. The double-sided pieces were definitely influenced by book pages and my frustration that the book format is closer to film than to painting because you can have sequence. That was frustrating for me because I didn't want to put everything I knew in the same painting. I wanted a sequence, and thought that I could paint both sides. That was the starting point. It's interesting to put a show together with four or five of these pieces because while you can't see everything at the same time, you can give the works different connections with each other, which was novel for me in contrast to putting paintings on a wall.

MN: As an artist, you're also giving up a bit of control over how somebody sees your works in relationship to one another. It reminds me of the interpretations of your scores performed by different musicians or performers. What was your experience like allowing others to interpret your works? It feels generous to allow someone the possibility of taking it in a different direction than the one that you perhaps envisioned.

SA: We don't live isolated lives. There is this myth of the artist as this genius who comes up with all these ideas, but I am also a viewer. Not everyone is going to think the same thing about a specific painting or artwork. I was always aware of that and wanted my work to be specific enough to speak to the things that I'm excited about, but without closing it off to multiple interpretations. I created this score for André e. Teodósio, who collaborated with me in the Fabric Arts Festival in Fall River, Massachusetts last year, which was so much fun. I created this score with symbols and emojis and am 100% sure he could have interpreted it a million different ways each time.

Page from Music Score, 2024, On the other side with André e. Teodósio (Fabric Festival, Fall River, MA)

“We don't live isolated lives. There is this myth of the artist as this genius who comes up with all these ideas, but I am also a viewer.”

MN: Again, it's a kind of a language that depends on the ways that it’s interpreted, or how you're entering it. So many of the codes that are embedded in these scores incorporating music notation are modes of transportation or means of getting to and from places—a Muybridge-esque image of a horse, a cruise ship, half a car, a train track... It's interesting how they point to something that's in motion, but you don't necessarily know where they’re going. That idea of the unknown comes back.

SA: I didn't think necessarily about transportation, but more about sound and listening. Growing up in Lisbon, I remember the sound of the warning when boats were coming through and the air is thick with mist. It’s a time traveling sound for me. The train track image also immediately transports me to a different location.

MN: When you see or hear a train moving, even though you are not going anywhere yourself, there is an almost hopeful quality of the possibility of going somewhere, perhaps an escape to an unknown location, just happening in the background or around the corner. The image of the train track really does evoke a sound, almost like a score. It's simple enough that it could be a fence, or perhaps an unstretched double helix, but it is also definitely a train track.

SA: It's interesting to think about the history of the train and the networks of transportation, not only of people, but goods. It's a cultural symbol that has complex histories and implications that can mean a lot of different things to different people. I like that you mentioned the double helix of DNA, because that is something I was thinking about too, something in the system.

Margot Norton

Margot Norton is Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which she joined in 2023. At BAMPFA she curated the exhibition “Gabriel Chaile: No hay nada que destruya el corazón como la pobreza” (2023) and is curating future exhibitions including “To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection and Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection,” co-curated with Cecilia Alemani, both opening later this year. Norton was previously Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where she recently curated exhibitions with Carmen Argote, Diedrick Brackens, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wangechi Mutu, Pepón Osorio, Mika Rottenberg, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and the 2021 New Museum Triennial: “Soft Water Hard Stone.” In 2017, she curated the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E.