«If a work of art provokes at all, it is said to be intentionally provocative, and this is one way of dismissing it. The works that are considered great works of the avant-garde, those that have created movements, etc., are always those where the artist, consciously or not, in order to convince, has put so much into the work that he has gone beyond reason or logic. That’s what they call “provocation.” But I say no: that’s what I call “responsibility”.» […] No seu texto, é talvez a primeira vez que as relações do indivíduo e da sexualidade são clara e decididamente invertidas; já não são as personagens que se apagam em proveito dos elementos, das estruturas, dos pronomes pessoais, mas a sexualidade que inverte a situação do indivíduo e deixa de estar «submetida». Ao aproximar-se deste ponto, foi obrigado a despojar-se daquilo que tornava o Túmulo acessível; teve de fazer rebentar todas as formas e todos os corpos, acelerar toda a grande maquinaria da sexualidade e deixá-la repetir-se na linha direita do tempo. Terá de contar, receio (estive para dizer: espero, mas é demasiado fácil quando se trata de outra pessoa), com bastante oposição… Haverá escândalo, mas é de outra coisa que se trata. Michel Foucault Q. Your work appears to be a cosmology made up of different orders of being (divine, animal, human). Within this cosmology, prostitutes are almost divinities. Whores rather than prostitutes. Prostitution is something else entirely. ‘Whore’ is a state of being which is a non-state, which has something to do with a theological reality which goes beyond ordinary social categories. That’s possibly the biggest driving force in my work: to take individuals outside of the social, to place them beyond social categories and labels. Q. Does the whore figure allow you to do this? Exactly. It allows me to really get humanity out of the inevitability of the social system. When I write, I try to reach beyond the social, and even beyond the human state. It’s something that I’ve been doing for a long time. Q. Does this lead you towards more order or more chaos? Towards reason. That’s what guides me. I’m not a logician, I don’t know much about it, but I’m haunted by reason. You can see this in my recent work, in which the search for rationality, for logic, is always present, even for very small things, which have a great importance for my characters.
