When we were preparing for the opening of the exhibition, I told Jandir Jr. that I would wear a black blazer to reference the artists. It was a joke: since I'm providing a service for the company Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd., I should behave like a legitimate representative of the firm. At some point, I received a message in which he raised the possibility of the public mistaking me for a real security guard and approaching me to ask for information. Among a few laughs, a question: "Are you ready?". More than prepared, I was eager to experience this place, having heard so much about the unusual situations these artists experience in their performance expeditions. However, it was all just speculation, since I wouldn't necessarily be following the pattern of the uniforms.

 

On June 22, 2024, less than five minutes after the gates opened, I went to the entrance of Casa França-Brasil looking for a friend. At that moment, a visitor approached me full of questions about an exhibition taking place in the central hall, in which I had played no part. In an interaction lasting just a few minutes, I drew on my entire repertoire of "museum floors" - especially those more precarious experiences where the mediation team parachutes in to welcome the public without any contextualization with the curators - and was able to talk about the different perspectives and artistic languages presented in that exhibition. Feeling like a bit of an imposter, in a very amateurish scenic practice, I experienced the irony of letting myself get carried away and keeping my understanding of what was really going on to myself.

 

If I expected trivial questions about the location of the restroom or the opening hours of the institution, this experience highlighted what underpins the entire existence of the work of Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd. It is from this place, from everyday situations and the effervescence of the meeting between the two artists in the workplace, creating jokes that follow the most unusual events, that the performances take their shape.

 

Antonio Gonzaga Amador and Jandir Jr. are educators, artists and researchers, PhD students at public universities. They had already worked as educators in museums and cultural institutions before founding their company and are continuing in this career at the time of writing. Their stories are permeated by contexts in which educators spend their working hours as a body available to the public for 40 hours a week, to monitor and mediate contact with the space and the artworks. This mediation takes place in both the conceptual and material fields: you can't run, you can't touch the works, you can't take flash photos. It is a body prevented from reading the books that would help it provide a better service, even if the space is empty, because it needs to be in a permanent state of alertness to ensure the safety of the works. It's also a body driven to exhaustion, unable to move freely, eat or opt for more comfortable clothing, outside of the rigor required during their working hours.

 

Property security, a function that has so many confluences with these conditions that it often aggravates them, becomes the vector for these discussions. The extreme formality, objectivity of their duties, readiness and an almost inviolable posture take the notion of precarious work in loco to the extreme, enhanced by ethnic-racial and class issues. Working with this image transforms the performative actions into a platform from which the discomfort, foolishness, embarrassment and even violence - disguised as naivety - of some privileged audiences who see this dress code as a sign of subalternity can be observed.

 

Although the critical perspective, which provokes both the public and the artistic institution itself, is latent, what I'm interested in accessing are the layers that show a conception of art developed based on the experience of artist-educators who started out in suburban and peripheral areas, with all their cultural references, and who crossed the city to work in central and more elite areas. A strategic look from someone who circulates through various spaces and can see, from the inside, how far the visual codes of a particular contemporary art are from the repertoire of life of the majority of the population, forging an unattainable intellectual supremacy.

 

There is a great advantage, not always immediately accessible, in appearing in exhibition spaces as a security guard wearing a suit and tie: this is not an image we only find in art spaces. It could be a security guard at a shopping mall, a supermarket or the entrance to a party. This uniform is a familiar language, which makes these subjects go unnoticed until the public addresses them with a generic demand. A supposedly neutral figure, until something is affected in the expected order. Even though they may symbolize a potential for violence for certain collectivities, they are recognized and legitimized as part of the racialized working class.

 

If the art gallery can be a foreign environment to most people's daily lives, easily confusing and disorienting, the uniformed human presence in this space is a point of contact with reality, helping people to situate themselves, to tread this terrain more firmly and to access its codes of behavior. In a contradictory movement, the security guard can increase or decrease the public's sense of vulnerability, but will always be a reference point.

 

The exhibition Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd.: neither professional nor senior proposes a radical twist in what is understood as the image of artists and an art exhibition and, in doing so, establishes several silent pacts with the working people who pass through the exhibition, whether they are working or having a moment of leisure. It is impossible to remain indifferent to what is on offer in this space, even if the initial sensation is one of embarrassment or confusion.

 

Located in the side room of Casa França-Brasil, overlooking the institution's old safe with the records of the "Cofre" performance, the exhibition takes place in a space that is normally used for the activities of the education teams of the exhibitions on show in the central hall. A work room. The exhibition space is divided between two complementary areas. Upon entering, we can see a wide variety of services offered by the duo, with precise illustrations and descriptions of the actions that will be carried out for the contracting institution. This is where the performances materialize, claiming their place in the artistic circuit, even before the artists transpose them into action. At the same time, we can also see panoramic shots of the services in full execution.

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What could have been, until then, a conventional exhibition of performative elements, receives a noise that cannot be ignored, and which can make visitors hesitate as to whether or not they should enter the room. The second area of the exhibition, present in the field of vision from the entrance to the room, raises the question of whether this is a public or private space. While we look at drawings and photographs, we have to deal with the strangeness of having a television on with programs from free-to-air TV, a microwave, an iron cupboard with clothes hanging on it, a large table with a battery-operated radio, dominoes, a card game, other offal, plastic chairs with a backpack and jeans. We go behind the scenes of the security guards' operation and establish a surprising relationship of intimacy and complicity. A contact with the more human, subjective and uncompromising dimension of those who maintain an austere posture most of the time. The moment of the break.

 

The game present in the space is the same one that partly underpins the services offered by Amador and Jr.: even in the face of strangeness, a dystopian feeling and the doubt of how (and if) to interact, the work presents some anchors, small elements that access affective memories and transpose the reality of the daily lives of working people and even children into an artistic institution. Between flip-flops, kites, Styrofoam with beer, a photo with a cell phone and a space for distraction and gossip, the artists go beyond the critical dimension and point to desires. And there are more and more people in these spaces who identify with these desires.

 

I often say that for someone to be a good curator, they must first be a good educator. Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd. provoke me to extend this somewhat pretentious statement to artists. The truth is that only good educators could communicate so easily without falling into clichés and simplifications, promoting this versatility of reflections, interactions and provocations. Perhaps the service provided by this company really is public utility.

 

Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd.: neither professional, nor senior, by Carolina Rodrigues