Pedro Barateiro (b. 1979, Almada, Portugal) works in a variety of media, including sculpture, film, performance, writing and drawing. His work focuses on the deconstruction of Western binary narratives. He had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Münster, CRAC Alsace, Kohta, among many others. He has participated in different group exhibitions around the world and his performances have been presented in various institutions. Barateiro organises events and exhibitions in his artist-run space Spirit Shop. In 2020, together with a group of artists, he initiated the first association for visual artists in Portugal (AAVP).

—
Love Song is a work on growing up with technology and the bonds between human and non-human agents, a work that is both autobiography and autofiction, but also documentary and essay. The work deals with subjectivity and the realisation of the changes that transform the individual and the collective. The work starts from a personal perspective and experience to later address universal claims.

Love Song departs from Barateiro’s teenage years and an awareness of the body—of the so-called self—as a space where the interior and exterior are confronted, and the layers they engender. The film takes the example of the artist’s parents, who dated mostly by correspondence, and the romanticised aspects of their interactions set in late 1960’s fascist Portugal, between immigration (mother) and colonial war (father).

Love Song rejects any form of identification. It started as a soundtrack for a film that is still being made and that will grow into something else. The work is about the conventions of narrative and how they’ve been manipulated by capital. It connects Romanticism and Capitalism and the binary systems fostered by biology and religion, to question forms of production and the changes generated during the expansion of European colonial empires. Love Song tries to address the uses and misuses of the word “love”, and how it’s appropriated in neoliberal western societies under an imminent collapse of social and natural systems.