The wind blows. The Elbe marches against the pontoons. Night falls. The silhouette of a man can be seen against the afternoon sky. The Undertaker. [1]

Pedro Paiva’s solo exhibition revisits Wolfgang Borchert’s play Draussen von der tür (The Man Outside), translating it into different media. It addresses the tireless quest for answers by the soldier Beckmann, having returned to his homeland after the war, where he finds nothing but apathy and incomprehension from those around him. Pedro Paiva pulls out of the rubble this play, seemingly forgotten in Portugal, with only one translation made in 1965 and never reissued.

Wolfgang Borchert (1921-1947), the author, was a German writer who came from the so-called Rubble Literature, meaning works produced shortly after the Second World War. The play was initially broadcast by radio and debuted on stage the day after Borchert’s death, on November 21, 1947. The writer was eighteen years old when the war broke out and twenty-four when it ended. He spent the last two years of his life translating his reality into writing, spending them “like someone in competition with death” [2].

Pedro Paiva tirelessly manipulates clay, churning out more than sixty sculptures that fill the entire first room of Galeria Francisco Fino. The works recall scenarios from the play Draussen von der tür and other short stories by the author, along with connections based on Heinrich Theodor Böll’s writings, also part of the Rubble Literature. We are presented with indefinite faces, roof tiles, socks, door handles, shoes and the imprints of their soles, building fragments, stairs and words. The pieces focus on homelessness, memory and ruin. They are all different, but their gestures display the exact same urgency. A raw and non-precise movement, brisk and repetitive, just like Borchert’s words, like the journey of the soldier Beckmann who knocks on every door he comes across.

Repetition is always a quest. We do it because we hope to find something, we do it to stress the urgency of the matter at hands, to make ourselves heard, to bolster an idea, to find an answer. Borchert does it, as does his character Beckmann, and Pedro Paiva reflects this anxiety-fuelled rhythm.

We are permanently standing outside the door in this first room. A door haunting us all the way through the sculptures, looking at us, separating the known from the unknown, the real from the dreamlike. In dust and weathered signs, it calls out to us, and we step inside.

The darkness on the other side overwhelms the eyes and the voices sharpen the imagination. A speaker in the centre of the room broadcasts the voice interpreting Beckmann, and the other speakers are the characters talking to him. This is where the play’s indoor scenes occur, places where Beckmann tries to reintegrate himself. Dialogues spring from these encounters, revealing the huge distance between the soldier and the world around him, and a tragic song emerges from his voice:

Laughter was everywhere
I alone was bawling.
The night kept its stare
The mist itself crawling.
Light the only guide,
As luck now dried,
Through a hole in the hide. 

As I walked up to my door
Someone else was sleeping there…
Like a coward, I went on a run,
I’m alive but she is no more.
(…) [3]

There is always the thud of a closing door behind Beckmann. Along with it comes the disillusionment that brings him ever closer to the abyss and despair.

The installation is also split between two monitors in the preceding rooms. These show Pedro Paiva’s adaptation of the play. The soldier is given a face in a murky blue image, and we witness his lucid delirium and visions, where the dreamy atmosphere deepens.

The artist’s personal motivations linger in the shadows, the reason why the tragedy of soldier Beckmann drives him so intensely. He seems to be hiding in Borchert’s debris so that its rubble does not become apparent. In fact, on the exhibition’s text, written by João Barreto, no reference to Pedro Paiva is made. The reflection is purely on Borchert’s work, the play, its characters and context. Clearly, Pedro Paiva finds shelter in Borchert’s ruins. In this staging, the artist focuses his attention on the German writer, using an artifice so detailed that it distracts us from his own condition. We should not forget, however, that this is Pedro Paiva’s first solo exhibition, after nearly two decades working as a duo with João Maria Gusmão.

After a separation, returning is always difficult, since it creates a road now travelled alone, without the other. Leaving and returning to the same places, yet alone, entails tremendous loneliness and melancholy. And we feel that. Em Frente da Porta do Lado de Fora is profound and heavy, restless and existential. It resorts to the outside to look inwards, to review itself, to find and associate. When we intensely feel what a character expresses, this is because we see something similar in them.

The exhibition is on show at Galeria Francisco Fino until April 20, 2024.

[1] Borchert, Wolfgang. (1965). Em Frente da Porta do Lado de Fora. Porto: Portugália Editora. p.157.
[2] Henrich Boll’s words in the preface to the Portuguese translation of The Man Outside.
[3] Borchert, Wolfgang. (1965). Em Frente da Porta do Lado de Fora. Porto: Portugália Editora. p. 199.