Stay at home - Portuguese in Copenhagen by Marta Dias

STAY AT HOME - PORTUGUESE
IN COPENHAGEN

BY MARTA DIAS

PT | EN

Since March 13th, the Danish government has introduced lockdown measures.

"Stay at home - Portuguese in Copenhagen" is a small view of the Portuguese community in Copenhagen where life outside the home has ceased.

They are Portuguese who live alone or with their family.

They are Portuguese who came (for now) only to study or who have lived for many years and established their roots here.

The brief minutes for the "portrait at the door" tries to contrast with the long weeks of a uncertain time with the "saudade" and the Portuguese's smiles that will always be present.

Bio

Marta Dias was born on September 27, 1988, in Lisbon. Coming from an “albicastrense” family, she soon showed interest in the visual arts, motivated by several uncles and cousins with competence for plastic arts.

She completed the Architecture master degree in Lisbon with the final thesis of the course, Urban and Riverside Landscape - Study of Praça do Comércio through the photographic view where she attended several courses at the Instituto Português de Fotografia; presented in 2014, it was classified by many as “bold”, but managing to combine its knowledge of architecture with the taste for photography.

She did an architecture internship in Utrecht, The Netherlands and participated in several exhibitions including solo exhibitions on his humanitarian trip in 2015.

For the past two years, she has been in Copenhagen, Denmark looking for new opportunities and discoveries.

12:34

12:34

BY ANTTI “VETTIS” VETTENRANTA

When I was 12 years old, my mum wrote me a 12-page letter. In the letter, which she wrote in spite of us living together, she tried to explain why life was sometimes so difficult. How we had been affected by our parents´ divorce when I was two years old. And how the lives of us four siblings were impacted by the illness of our second youngest sister. I was going to respond to mother´s letter, but I never did. 
My first child was born on a Monday, at 12:34. A few years later, I got divorced. We had two children together. 
The youngest of my four children was born when I was 34 years old. We built a house, my 12th apartment so far. We live in four generations and in three different houses on one large plot of land in Helsinki. Now I want to live my life in such a way that divorces are no longer handed down from generation to generation, and so that my phone would ring every day when I am on old man. Maybe this series of photographs is a reply to my mother´s letter. We are bad at talking about things.

BIO
Antti Vettenranta (b. 1976) is a staff photographer for a major magazine publishing company in Finland. In his free time, Vettenranta photographs his own projects, trying to get as close to himself as possible. He believes photography can be universal and therapeutic in the same way as medtitation: it can be exercised anywhere.   

SOCIAL MEDIA/LINKS
http://www.vettis.net/
https://www.instagram.com/vettis_photographer

INTERVIEW WITH WILLI DORNER: BODIES IN URBAN SPACE

INTERVIEW WITH WILLI DORNER: BODIES IN URBAN SPACE

by Pedro Leão and Maria Neto

PL_MN: Tell us about your background, when did you start to contact with photography?

It all started in school, when our teacher for painting and fine arts in Secondary School did some dance classes with us. Very soon after a few classes I found out that dance and movement really usurped me. He also fascinated us for photography and film. I kept following fine arts and got also inspired by film and photography. The antagonism of visual and kinetic perception fascinated me. I used in my stage performances video or worked also on video walks in UK in 2006 and 2008. So a project like „bodies in urban spaces“ is  typical for my artistic work. It is in a way very visual, but at the same time, when you experience it live, It is very hidden and also physically challenging.

PL_MN: You have a special relation with the architecture, the body and the photography. Tell us more about this and how everything has begun.

I am very much influenced by phenomenology and in the first years of choreographing I was focused on perception in human beings:  how perception per se works. After years of experimenting with that I shifted my interest on spatiality ( as phenomenologists would say.) But I realized very soon that I had to leave the black box / the stage in order to go deeper on my research on space and its different aspects, as e.g. the economic, political or social one. I was invited by the Viennese dance summer festival to develop my new idea of the relationship on body and living spaces. The building company supported as well my research on their newly built appartments, generally speaking on living in flats. Also I got interested in a new way of presenting all the diverse outcomes. The different locations allowed me different presentation forms.

For this research period I had invited several artists to join in, film makers, architects, composers and sound engineers. This was more than 10 years ago!  Amongst all the ideas that we were playing around, was the idea for Bodies. It was in the beginning only a photo documentary of a research phase, but as I, and others liked the photos more and more. I continued working on it.

Generally speaking I am still interested in how we can perceive architecture/space through our body or more precisely speaking through all our senses besides the visual one. In these days the visual perception of a building is so much in foreground that it fascinates me to focuse on the senses that are suppporting our perception but not so much in foreground like the vision. We use the informations of these senses (audio,sense of balance, touch)  but we are not so much aware of them.  I was invited to design a tour through the whole aera in order to physically experience the terrain of the Museumsquarter.

PL_MN: Bodies in Urban Space is a work with people and for people. How usually people react?

The reactions are very different. Some people are upset, feel provoked, but in general they like it very much, feel surprised in a good way.

PL_MN: How do you decide which spaces occupy?

I usually ask what are the city`s hot spots and then we go and visit them.

Neighbourhoods that are architectonically interesting or that get new built or that start decaying, that are dangerous. Also I like to walk and approach buidlings from their backsides and use little lanes or short cuts or hidden or secret paths that are not so known. I want the residents to discover their own city again.

PL_MN: Do you think your work has a pedagogical message about people and the public space?

I want to take the residents on a walk in their own city. Discover the changes that are always happening in a city. And want to initiate a thinking-process on city`s architecture. The living in urban spaces is our future. Our cities will get crowded in the next decades and we urgently need to discuss how we can live together, how we can design our life in cities worth living, as we will spent most of our life time in big cities. This is a very important topic in these days. 

PL_MN: We think that documentary and artistic photography are key elements for dissemination and recording of your work. How do you think the internet and everything that is connected is contributing for the development of your work?

Yes, indeed internet helped a lot to spread the informations on this particular project. Myself I feel very ambigue on all the photos of bodies. You have to understand, once I imagined this project as very hidden. I was not going for an audience at all.

I used little nooks and crannies, spots that you never look at and spots where you do not expect human bodies. The photos were just a help, a documentary for myself. But so many people liked them and enjoyed them that we decided to publish them. We publish still photos and I still give interviews world wide. The journey of bodies is not finished yet. This year we go also the first time to China.I just wrote an interview for a magazine in India. They were asking, if I can imagine to do the work in India? I guess that is quite a challenge.

PL_MN: Tell us about your main interests and what are you working on now? Any ideas for the future?

This year is an intense year again. I work on several projects at the same time. 

I was commissioned a work in Liverpool that will be shown in the framework of “Big Dance” and Biennale Liverpool. I create a parade in a very specific district in Liverpool. It is in the outskirts of Liverpool next to the stadion of the big football club F.C. Liverpool. I design a choreographed parade through these streets presenting people of Liverpool that provide services and do activities which we take for granted.  

It is a parade of chambermaids, the street cleaners, urban farmers, people of the fire brigade, of the ambulance,.......I want to present faces to all these services. It will be a parade of about 400 participants. The backdrop of this march is a district in Liverpool that is quite rundown and decaying. For me the spatial context corresponds head-on with this idea. The participants walk in a long marching parade underneath a hovering sound cloud.

In the moment I develop further an idea that I subsume under the title “living room”

Two topics interest me here: one is order, meaning the underlying order that we can find in the design of buildings and of appartments and the order that people produce in their homes with their furniture and objects. I am interested how people put themselves into these arrays.

Two is table. I want to focus on table, table as a meeting point in a house. It is for me a quite central point in a house. I found out that lower social class houses in UK miss a common table, they miss a meeting point, a point of exchange and communication. 

I was also invited to create an audio guide through the Museumsquarter in Vienna. It should be a walk that allows to experience the spaces in the Museumsquarter in a kinetic - physical way. It is a commission for 2015.

All photos Lisa Rastl

STRATIFICATIONS

STRATIFICATIONS

BY CRISTINA CORAL

My father was a composer, music has always been a very important part of my life. After graduation and several and different work experience I have chosen the camera as my main artistic expression.My approach to photography and its development was almost entirely self-taught. After having attended a workshop I immediately understood what the camera could have given me in terms of experimentation and discovery of the world around me and more over of myself. Photographing has become an imperative language.
Amongst my recognitions are: Two gold medals in the category Portraiture and other at the PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris 2014; Honorable Mention at IPA International Photography Award 2014 in the category Fine Art Portraiture;Honorable Mention at PX3 Paris 2015.
My work has been exhibited for some events of Vogue Italia, at Convivio, at Circus Gallery at Carla Sozzani Gallery.
Many of my pictures have been featured as ''photo of the day ''on Vogue.it. and published in many magazines on line as The Huffington Post De., Pizza digitale,Phinest, Art and Fact, Vectro Ave N.Y, Lenscratch, Posi+tive, Artwort, Jungle Magazine U.K, Forth Magazine L.A, Anormalmag Spain, Ignant De., Juliet Art Magazine, Uploadyourtalent,LÓeil, Worbz,Rai News Blog, SFMoMa Blog,NikonSguardi ,Seeance Magazine Berlin...
My project ''This living hand'' , ''Hidden beauty'' and ''Do not disturb'' have been published on Lens Culture and Some of my photos are represented by the agency Art and Commerce of New York.

synopsis
Time has its forms of beauty, but as in nature also in the men stratified sediments of emotions and thoughts.
Seaweed, sand, wood sprigs,blades of grass like layers of states of mind.

 
editor's note
The presented project was selected from a spontaneous submission made by Cristina Coral.

PROMISED LAND

PROMISED LAND

BY MICHAŁ KONRAD

Michał Konrad (birth name Michał Smuda) Polish photographer born in 1983, living in Wodzisław Slaski. From an early age, interested in visual art.

The main subject of his photography is man. In his work he concentrates primarily on the psychological sphere. It shows how a person perceives the environment in the modern world and how the environment affects him. His visions often have a surreal character, balancing on the border of dream and imagination. His photographs are self-portraits.

He is the author of several photographic cycles.

His works include: Transition, september 2016.; Promised land, january 2017; Amnesia, february 2017.; Butterfly, march 2017; Insomnia, july 2017.

His photographs were presented at individual and collective exhibitions. They have been published in Polish and foreign magazines, the most important of which are: „Pokochajfotografie”, „Kwartalnik literacki Szafa”, „Seventres”, „Dodho”, „Scopio Network”, „DpiMag”, „Visionary”, „F-stop”, „Monovision”,”Black”, "LoosenArt".In 2017 he was selected as one of the twenty most talented Polish photographers, DEBUTS project.

URL:  http://michalkonrad.allyou.net


Synopsis

I run in my thoughts, in my head.
Forest silence, then scream.
The influx of false thoughts.
I am looking for one true thought.
Which will let me fall asleep on time.

The title "Insomnia" shows the anxiety in the modern world, caused by lies. The era in which we live is called energy. As far as man is concerned, it means his constant excitement.
Lots of information that constantly stimulate my brain. Ask yourself the question that is true and which is false? Where is the boundary between fiction and reality? Maybe I'm not real either? Maybe I'm not here? Maybe I just think I'm!
Insomnia is an attempt to show man in the world of manipulation. Lost among pervasive falsehood.

Insomnia is my fifth cycle, its ending is equal to one year from the start of my work with self-portrait. Soon I will start working on a project that will include all my cycles. The theme of the project will be "Identity", which I would like to finish with the release of the book version of the album.

April - July 2017

PHILOSOPHERS

PHILOSOPHERS

BY CATRINE VAL

Catrine Val was born in Cologne (Germany), and started out her career in Vienna (Austria) working in the field of advertising, as a commercial artist. She finished her BA at the Art Academy in Kassel (Germany). She also attended a post-graduate studies at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, in Cologne. She worked for 6 years as an assistant lecturer to Bjørn Melhus at the Art Academy in Kassel, in the field of virtual reality, where she further developed her artistic position.

"Philosophers,

Our times are afflicted by a flood of narcissism, and an obsessive cult of self-expression. Visually building upon “Philosophers”, I examine the loss of connection to nature in our modern, technically driven world, in which nature has become a strange terrain. The longing for nature as a fixed reference point and the wishful thinking of an intact romantic worldview in which man and nature are in harmony, is facing an accelerating clock in our fully mechanized age. Art’s task changes in a world suffused with generated images. It is imperative to reflect on what are often highly sensitively charged worlds of images, the ways they are represented. In our constant rapid time modern life has become far-removed from anything resembling authenticity or truth. The relationships between nature and technology, language and body, body and space, have changed rapidly. The order of the day is to understand the world from the vantage point of abstraction and not to abstract from the world. In our post internet society ,they have altered the way we regard communication and identity, character and  our own selves and femininity . Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. The entire way, we approach the world has changed. In historical sense Philosophy claimed to provide a rigorous method to search for the meaning of life, and it was a precious substitute for dogmatic religion. But in modern times, religion among the educated classes in Europe and North America has lost ground, and intellectuals are neglecting the basic human need to find answers. Philosophy has shrunk in reputation and stature. “Philosophers” as one oeuvre is itself an open system: it employs transformations, mirror images, doublings and replications to develop realist fictions that amaze and surprise the beholder and raise questions concerning functional contexts as well as ideas of value.

In this  modern western society women are rarely find in inhabiting a highly austere, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Slowly but still not globally, the opportunities are changing for better. Women have at last gained access to higher education, what they can achieve in the fields where men have distinguished themselves, above all in philosophy is still vulnerable, reacting at the margin areas of contemporary philosophy  and speculative thoughts.

The genre of philosophy flourishing literately arises within the framework of a new need and frankness on the quest for the meaning of life. This is the highly influential age of the Internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundamentally altering young people's brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.

By referring to the external visual similarities of historical and current philosophers and the characteristics of their work, a reference to the historical philosopher, which incorporates his life and work, is made. As a contemporary interpretation of traditional philosophic thinking, “Philosophers” takes advantage of the iconographic approach of current media discourse. “Philosophers” as one oeuvre is itself an open system: it employs transformations, mirror images, doublings and replications to develop realist fictions that amaze and surprise the beholder and raise questions concerning functional contexts as well as ideas of value. It exposes the effects of individualism and technicality on modern man's position within his natural environment. “Philosophers” brings together different approaches in ideas and longings, which in their own way all aim to go beyond modern and postmodern thinking. The concept of "philosophers" quest for a new terminology and a new grammar of thinking about contemporary art and focus on new meaning of vision and gender."

INSOMNIA

INSOMNIA

BY MICHAŁ KONRAD

Michał Konrad (birth name Michał Smuda) Polish photographer born in 1983, living in Wodzisław Slaski. From an early age, interested in visual art.

The main subject of his photography is man. In his work he concentrates primarily on the psychological sphere. It shows how a person perceives the environment in the modern world and how the environment affects him. His visions often have a surreal character, balancing on the border of dream and imagination. His photographs are self-portraits.

He is the author of several photographic cycles.

His works include: Transition, september 2016.; Promised land, january 2017; Amnesia, february 2017.; Butterfly, march 2017; Insomnia, july 2017.

His photographs were presented at individual and collective exhibitions. They have been published in Polish and foreign magazines, the most important of which are: „Pokochajfotografie”, „Kwartalnik literacki Szafa”, „Seventres”, „Dodho”, „Scopio Network”, „DpiMag”, „Visionary”, „F-stop”, „Monovision”,”Black”, "LoosenArt".In 2017 he was selected as one of the twenty most talented Polish photographers, DEBUTS project.

URL:  http://michalkonrad.allyou.net


Synopsis
I run in my thoughts, in my head.
Forest silence, then scream.
The influx of false thoughts.
I am looking for one true thought.
Which will let me fall asleep on time.

The title "Insomnia" shows the anxiety in the modern world, caused by lies. The era in which we live is called energy. As far as man is concerned, it means his constant excitement.
Lots of information that constantly stimulate my brain. Ask yourself the question that is true and which is false? Where is the boundary between fiction and reality? Maybe I'm not real either? Maybe I'm not here? Maybe I just think I'm!
Insomnia is an attempt to show man in the world of manipulation. Lost among pervasive falsehood.

Insomnia is my fifth cycle, its ending is equal to one year from the start of my work with self-portrait. Soon I will start working on a project that will include all my cycles. The theme of the project will be "Identity", which I would like to finish with the release of the book version of the album.

April - July 2017

THE ONES WE LOVE

THE ONES WE LOVE

BY ELISE BOULARAN

“I’m one of those people who, no doubt out of modesty, don’t externalize their feelings publicly. Especially when it’s about my roots, the important people of my life. Except maybe through pictures. I can tell you that they teach me what love really is.”

Work In Progress

CRYSTAL IDENTITY

CRYSTAL IDENTITY

BY AGNIESZKA GOTOWALA

"Crystal Identity” is long-term ongoing project. I started the researches and basic realizations in 2017. I decided to work on it when I realized that for a long time I was feeling that I existed only in the face of nature. Towards nature, I’ve felt like I was making revisits. Photography has become part of the act of action. And the landscapes and their character have become the witnesses of what happens in the space. I started to look for the "in situ” places, where there appear sublte union, indirectly related to refuge. Allegedly nature was supposed to release alienation.

It’s a tractate on apperception and becoming the part of. I’m inclined to reach out to the invisible and undermine that what is invisible does not exist. I nurture the fragments of nature, traces it contains as the carriers of memory, archetypes. I penetrate those unobvious resources of nature, that are never deprived of its identity. I explore dependences between subconsciousness and memory, traces recalling the past events, which are a memorial as proof of what is hidden. I take the journey to search for identity, balance, roots embedded without the context of time and space.

ABOUT THE AUTOR: 

I’m multidisciplinary artist from Poland, I work within the visual and performance arts. I focus on the processes of the research, exploration and transformation in the fields of human states and nature, and the memory and identity they contain. My artworks have been presented and published in Poland and abroad. I graduated from Photography at the department of Multimedia at the University of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland, and earlier, also from Technical Physics at the University of Technology in Wroclaw, Poland. I practice Butoh.  

Website: www.agnieszkagotowala.com