EN12

EN12

BY MARTA FERREIRA

Marta Ferreira was born in Muna de Bestereiros, Viseu, 1989, and holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication, by Polytechnic Institute of Porto, ESMAE in Portugal, where in 2012 she concluded the Master Degree in Documental Photography and Cinema.

Many of Marta Ferreira series’ relate strongly with architecture, making more visible how this discipline and practice integrates diverse important dimension of life and how space is lived and appropriated by people. Already with published work, her series “EN12”, is a case in point of the authors path.

In “EN12”, the landscape of Circunvalação Road is portrayed in a photographic series that challenges us to understand this territory through a “different gaze”. What was once commonplace or unknown gains another meaning. Spaces are thus reevaluated in order to find a guideline for what has apparently no meaning or has become confusing. All of this makes us imagine a new Italo Calvino’s invisible city up North.

In fact, Marta Ferreira creates a photographic series exploring a path – the Circunvalação Road –, collecting viewpoints through a imagery that reveals confusing urban spaces and structures, with contradictory codes and a variety of built elements in which we can hardly find a relational sense. We are thus tempted to recall the story of Marco Polo not only about impossible cities and his descriptions of unknown worlds, territories surrounded by contradictions, but also about the conflicting feelings and desires, and the inability to perceive the spaces that separate and unite one territory to another, due to their invisible intervals. Actually, it is also possible to find in the Hélder and Sérgio’s series the spaces of Italo Calvino’s fictional cities and thus reimagine Topographies up North as a territory near Penthesilea.

Pedro Leão and Maria Neto