Installation composed by different elements: photography, video, sculpture, objects and documents » Variable dimensions

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Video stills

In this particular project, Salgueiros – As cidades novas, through a newspaper article I got to know one of those places that grow on the edge the city. It’s a small lake of rain water, a piece of land which has remained abandoned because of some real estate issues.  And even though it is almost invisible in the city, what I saw there was a very unique way to occupy and reivent oneself. I call them “The Intruders”.

This work ( 2005/7) is about that place, about the lake, about the plants that surround it and the people who go there, about their movements and activities, about the objects I have found. It is, in a way, a diary.

In this project, as well as in most of my work, what I am searching for are the elements and the fragments of the civil world: in its codes, in its norms and rules, in the events, in the history; this is the substance which I will later work on in my Studio. They are transformed into images, symbols and fragments that I register in a space, in a composition. I seek to connect them. They are not narratives or descriptions, they are interrupted images that create realities and question the processes of organization, orientation, management, direction and learning, which are inherent to this idea of a modern democratic society.

During the night trucks and cars arrive at the lake to get rid of all sorts of things: garbage, debris, objects, papers, etc… When the morning comes all these things are searched and recovered by others. After a while I also began to dig the ground. I collected things that could fit in my pocket or under my arm, things I have kept in my studio together with my objects. After some time I did not know which were which.

The same news reported also the existence of a lake and an intense flora that had grown spontaneously around this space: shrubs, plants and flowers that formed a sort of barrier to the outside and gave the impression that this is a smallmicro-environment.
I used my video camera to capture images and took pictures, made sketches and notes which I organized as if it were a diary.

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