A Claim for All Emplacements
Francisco Menezes
‘A Claim for All Emplacements’ is a long-running investigation that sits at the juncture between photography and objecthood. This project is informed by the portrayal that Baudrillard makes of things, namely that everything that cannot be invested in human relations is invested in objects. Rewriting a history of thingness from the point of view of objects as agents and actants might lead to an understanding of the shift from technical objects to transformative ones. At the same time, accepting that the camera only captures surface and not space also means arriving at an impasse. The mismatch in question then takes place between the infrastructure, the material conditions, and the superstructure, the domain of representation. Through existing or made-up artifacts and repurposed relations, we see here objects acting out this minimal difference. Still, at the heart of this project one question remains: to what extent will objects go to assess their own determination in a time so prone to accumulation and accommodation like our current Capitalocene era?
Francisco Menezes (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. He studied photography at Ar.Co, completed his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and attended the Maumaus Independent Study Programme. Comprising installation and photography, Menezes’ practice interrogates objecthood alongside the original notion of the ‘absolute’ — from ab (off) + solver (to loosen) — or as philosopher Hent De Vries puts it, ‘that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts’. This serves as an entrance point to poke at our current systems of emplacement of the Capitalocene age. It’s the detours around this very emplacement occurring between the delocalized and the hyperlocalized that constitute his body of work. Selected exhibitions in the past include the ‘Paula Rego Prize’ at CHPR (2017, 2018), ‘Lovers’ and ‘Our Slice of Time’ at Zaratan (2022), ‘Paródia Cega’ (2024) at Museu Bordalo Pinheiro, ‘Poetics of Approximation’ at Budapest Galéria (2025), among others. In 2025, Menezes was awarded the Lisbon City Council Grant for an artistic exchange in Budapest. He is currently part of the applied research group ‘Organismo’ from Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/TBA21.