Na banheira não há peixes...

You know the story of the crazy man who was fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatments asked him 'if they were biting', to which he received the harsh reply: 'Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub.' (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 2016 p.123)

 

 

We take this situationist description by the French writer as the starting point for the project. In fact, it is not normal for fishes to be in a bathtub, nor is it normal for fishes to be caught in such an absurd place as a possible bathroom of its resident. Na banheira não há peixes…, intends, based on the appropriation of the narrative presented by Camus and exploring the absurd as a method, to try to speculate about the narrated event, enhancing it and reformulating it through its possible reconstruction, in a dilution between reality and fiction. A figure carrying a bathtub resting on a mobile structure, walks along the huge seafront walkways located in the coastal area of ​​Espinho and its surroundings. At each exit to the sea on these pedestrian routes, the figure proceeds to “pull up” a bench, sit down and with a fishing rod begins to fish in the bathtub, with her back to the ocean, to the place that gives her access to what it supposedly seeks to obtain: the fish (?) Despite the connection with Camus's description, the very territory where the performative act was performed is also highlighted, the walkways located in the city of espinho, a fishing town with a strong relationship with maritime activities, thus allowing contact with the local population and enhancing the creative process. Espinho, becomes the ideal place, a point of relationship between the performative narrative, the inhabitants and the local history, where the ever-increasing restriction on fishing, the Arte Xávega (or fencing and hauling for land) has recently been called into question. or the progressively and more accentuated and demarcated aging of local fishermen, reveal possible subjects triggered by the action, of asking questions about everyday life, its movements and iterations. To seek contact between the city and the performer, between the inhabitant and the author, in short, between people who walk in their daily lives and cross paths. Carrying a bathtub with water, as an action that generates encounters: this is the updated power in the gesture of walking, which re-enacts the city as a relationship between anonymous and uncoordinated trajectories.