ITERATIVE PLACES
BY DUARTE BELO
IN SCOPIO MAGAZINE, ABOVEGROUND: TERRITORY
The photographs of Monte Abraão, a Lisbon suburb, were taken in 1990, in the early stage of an experimental work on photographic surveys of the landscape. The photographs of Gerês,from 2012, are part of that ongoing search for the representation of space through photography, which started in the mid-80s of the twentieth century. The Serra do Gerês, an uninhabited mountain range, raises several questions about the human relationship with space, that is, about the skin of a planet which allowed for the evolution of a species that increasingly created its own places, that creates its own living space by keeping its distance from an often hostile Nature.
These two sets of photographs are sites of wonder and bewilderment in a continuous walk, in a long and ever-changing time, which alters everything along its path. This could be the portrait, the elusive framing of a higher structure, the impossible margin of objectifying a mountain. These are cases when photography wants to be a labyrinth, a virtually real architecture because it represents tangible entities, it recreates reading objects, interpretations, vacant places or imaginary spaces we may find inside a book or in an enormous photo archive, where one can establish an endless and complex network of connections between the realities which are represented. Iterative places are endless comebacks; they are the twists and turns of a human life, the losses, the rediscoveries, the breathing of the earth, when to it we join our own.