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

 

EVENTO

 

EVENTO

BY FRANCESCO TAURISANO


Francesco’s work contributes to the critical reframing of landscape representation in contemporary photography. It offers the viewer a multi sensorial reflection on our appreciation of the landscape, in which imagination, memory and nostalgia for the past provide the opportunity to explore cultural representation of place. This strategy reconnects the viewer with the classical aesthetic representation of landscape, taking them on a journey that privileges the everyday and the rediscovery of the non-places that have become unfamiliar in modern society. This approach to landscape is inclined to study how the land and its inhabitant are changing, and how they have transitioned from agricultural to a post-industrial economy.


Synopsis

Finding an appropriate way to represent human intervention in the landscape is difficult. The topic is often represented through an array of clichés, offering an incomplete view of the surrounding environment that we live in and how it has changed over time. As theorists and image makers have reformulated our notion of the landscape, a new generation of photographers has emerged who engage with the subject democratically.

Collaborative projects such as New Topographics (1975) in the US, Mission Photographique de la DATAR (1983) in France and Viaggio in Italia (1984) in Italy, have set new standards in the representation of landscape, generating critical debate on the necessity to produce a view of the landscape that encompasses the drastic changes of a postindustrial society.

It occurred to me while I was photographing for this project that we have inherited from Luigi Ghirri (amongst many others photographers who work within similar parameters) the idea of uncovering new methods of representing marginal landscapes as away to reconnect with our past and the concept of modernity and the everyday. This develops as an attempt to escape from imagery offering a narrow, glorified conception of the landscape.

In Ghirri’s images, we encounter the peripheral and regional, decentering the hierarchy of vision that permeates our imagination of space. His contribution is an important influence in the debate over the past few years on the cultural changes that occurred during the Celtic Tiger era. Ghirri’s approach offers us a way of circumventing the overtly political, choosing instead to reposition our vantage point on the forces that shape a society and its interaction with the environment.

My project is aimed to explore the places that shifted radically during the boom, representing the “new landscape” that Maria Antonella Pelizzari described as “apparently removed and forgotten” (Pelizzari, 2013: 11). As Arturo Carlo Quintavalle suggested in the preface wrote for Viaggio in Italia (1984), a number of authors and analyst as well as photographers and writers began to question if the countryside still exist but also how ambiguous its representation has become (Quintavalle, 1983: 14). It’s a matter of brining the everyday and banal to our attention, of refocusing our gaze on the non-places that we overlook. These liminal places have been gradually excluded and ignored from our daily life and disassociated from our existence in highly urbanized cities.

In a place that still relatively new to me, I am trying to produce a series of images accessible to the viewers and the masses. The significance of a journey through the landscape became more central to my work as my attention to the vernacular and meditative approach to photographing changed.

However, as with Ghirri’s photographs, the key feature of this project lays in the collaboration with another practitioners and disciplines, especially through the creation of visual and audio experiences that enable the viewer to have a better understanding of the rendition of liminal spaces, blending different strands of photographic traditions.

Therefore, my intent is to explore how the territory around us has changed, moving away from a cliché mode of representation and towards a democratic photography.

The ambitions of these photographs lay on their evocation of a journey through this land and how it echoes with the nostalgia for the past in our modern society.

As Luigi Ghirri argues in the preface of Kodachrome:
Thus photography, with its indeterminacy, becomes a privileged subject; it allows us to move away from the symbolic nature define representation, and we can attribute to it a value of truth. The possibility of analysis in time and space of the sign that form reality (the entire of which has always been elusive) thus allows photography, with its fragmentary nature, to be closer to what cannot be delimited: physical existence (Ghirri, 1978: 111).

 

DO MITO AO NADA

 

DO MITO AO NADA

BY CHAN HONG YUI CLEMENT


Born in Hong Kong in 1992, Chan Hong Yui Clement is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design. Chan connects photography to the larger field of art. He believes that a photograph is not a duplication of reality, but a subjective interpretation of it. In 2014, Chan was selected as the winning candidate of New Light V - an annual program that is organized by Lumenvisum and sponsored by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to support talented young artists and provide them with an opportunity for a solo exhibition.

synopsis

Hong Kong is situated on a hilly and mountainous terrain. Because of the lack of natural flat land, Hong Kong simply does not have the prerequisite to be designed into a grid system - a town planning method that is found in many other world cities such as New York. According to the Hong Kong Planning Department, about 47% of the land in Hong Kong lies above 100 mPD. Almost half of Hong Kong therefore has to be built on uplands, resulting in what is commonly known as a multi-level urban design.

Z-Axis aims at documenting the type of multi-level urban design that is shaped by the hilly and mountainous terrain in Hong Kong. Z-Axis, in mathematical terms, refers to the depth of an object in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Looking into the Hong Kong urban landscape along the Z-Axis, one can gain more understanding of (i) how the topographical factor impacts Hong Kong people’s habitation and (ii) to what extent the land has been altered in an attempt to adapt to the natural environment.

Through observing the Z-Axis the interrelationship between factor (i) and (ii) can be visualized and understood.

editor's note

Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

 

DISAPPEARING INTO NIGHT

 

DISAPPEARING INTO NIGHT

BY DAVID KENDALL

David Kendall was one of the honourable mentions of the fifth edition of SCOPIO International Contest, titled 'Crossing Borders Shifting Boundaries: City', which was focused on diverse countries and on how the migratory movements have influenced the places and people (identities) of those territories. The primarily focus of this fifth edition was on the subject of residential spaces, public spaces, urban scattered communities and city life in general. We were interested in showing works that characterise the rich multifaceted world of contemporary cities and / or non-traditional urban communities regarding immigrants or minorities' different types of blocks, neighbourhoods, cultural diversity and values expressed in various types of residential and public spaces.

'Disappearing into Night', by David Kendall
"In Gulf cities the rapid development of urban infrastructures transforms the built environment. In these settings electrical light sculpts new architectural landscapes, reorganizes boundaries and visually erodes soon-to-be forgotten neighbourhoods erased by structural change. At night in Doha, Qatar, artificial light and built environment fuse together to form fresh visual landscapes. The afterglow of overhanging floodlights merges with fluctuating climatic conditions to guide the focal direction. Therefore, revealing or hiding the 'seen or unseen' in architectural sites occupied by an unsettled expatiate workforce rebuilding cityscapes. Crumbling sites become saturated and cloaked by the diffused electric light generated by 24-hour construction sites. In addition, temporality is an important structural component; the luminosity of building sites extends beyond the foreground, projected on existing facades, walls, buildings and streets. Sensory experiences of photography juxtapose with perceptual manifestations of resettlement whilst roaming at night. Overtime construction fences and hoardings are put up and buildings taken down changing the over-illuminated landscape. In residential streets atmospheres emerging that appears to be silent yet in reality never sleep in the sky glow enveloping the biosphere. Consequently, the camera exposes traces of human occupation and precarious social infrastructures. Spaces where people rest, worship and trade in the glare of construction, thus, activating new discourse about planning processes, heritage and environmental impacts of migration, construction and infrastructure development along the Arabian Peninsula."

David Kendall

 

DISAPPEARED

 

DISAPPEARED

BY LUCA PRESTIA


Luca Prestia was born in Turin in 1971. He graduated in Modern History at the University of Turin, where he also earned his PhD in the same discipline. He started his experience as freelance photographer in the 90’s and he has been registered in the Association of Journalists of Piedmont since 2000. Prestia collaborated (as scenery and backstage photographer) on the production of documentaries about the social environment; his pictures have been published on several Italian and foreigner magazines as well as on printed and online newspapers or used as book covers. Since several years, his interest is mainly focused on landscape and documentary photography (both analogue and digital). His latest work, completed in the summer of 2014, is S[s]tate Border, which has just been published in a photographic book.


synopsis

For centuries – and until not long ago – the Alps represented an ‘unknown land’ for man, a true literary myth, full of references and suggestions linked to the most diverse legends, which in many cases, were frightening and however the result of fantasies that occur almost identically in folk tales of not even geographically contiguous places.
This stereotype, which survived until the end of the XVIII century, showed a solidity that was difficult to wear away, thus ending by deeply moulding the cultural horizon of generations of men and women: not only of those who actually lived in the mountains, but also of those who observed the mountains from a distance, from town centres on the plain for example, considered by common opinion to be real ‘strongholds’ of civilization, placed to defend them from nature, alpine nature, considered irremediably wild and ruthless. The mountains, their precipitous caves, gorges and the dense forests situated on their steep slopes represented a universe apart in this prospective, inhabited by diabolical figures, by men that had been made wild by a hostile environment, by ‘other’ beings, compared to the world that was considered ‘civilized’.

With the arrival of the XIX century – and after the cultural and anthropological crucible, being the French Revolution – the mountain and everything that had defined it until that moment, entered into a new phase. The nineteenth century was in fact the era of its ‘rediscovery’. Everything that had been judged as a negative factor until that point, changed completely, assuming a positive value that the Romantic movement would embrace within itself, recognising in the wild nature, unspoilt by the heights, a virtuous element to be ‘read’ in contrast to the ever more chaotic life on the plain: from that moment onwards, the Alps fully entered into the development process of the modern idea of «landscape», which survived in many ways, until recent times.

What remains today of the undoubted fascination that the Alps had for centuries on man? What significance do the peaks that surround almost all of the north of the peninsula have, for us contemporaries? Disappeared aims to be a sort of photographic ‘catalogue’ of mountains mainly situated in the Ligurian-Piedmontese areas. Peaks and valleys, woods and rock walls taken in different seasons of the year and in different times of the day: during realisation, I purposely ‘isolated’ the natural element to make it the main subject of the images, so that no human figures appeared in them. This has not however meant excluding from the pictures, what could be defined as ‘traces’ left by man in this high land. Faint traces, but unmistakable in any case, of passages or actions carried out (in many cases with extreme violence) on those territories, especially in recent decades. Traces that if on one hand, evidence how the Alps today, no longer represent that ‘unknown land’ to fear and to keep at a safe distance, on the other, because of their faintness, give the viewer the opportunity to immerse oneself into a ‘visual silence’, made up of spaces within which to feel the sensation of being at one with what is before them; to ‘disappear’ into a natural environment that continues, despite everything, to exert an ancient and irrational fascination on contemporary man.

 

(DE) CONSTRUCTIONS OF AN UNDETERMINED NATURE

 

(DE) CONSTRUCTIONS OF AN UNDETERMINED NATURE

BY JORGE MARUM

Jorge Marum, born in Portugal, is currently Senior Lecturer and Head of the course Design III in the School of Architecture - University of Beira Interior. He has been a speaker at several conferences, both national and international, and has several awards and published papers. He balances his academic work with the practice of Architecture and Photography since 2004. Marum has a special interest in the analog process of Photography, exploring architectural photography with medium and large formats. 

This project received an Honorable Mention in the Photo Contest - Under Construction 2014 - Barcelona.

synopsis

This photographic series explores the artificial landscape of an imaginary architectural territory under (de)construction. The word landscape regards to the meaning of Georg Simmel, as "a piece of nature”. In this sense, it is a contradiction of its meaning, since nature is not divisible, but, "a whole unit”. In this undivided sense, the landscapes depicted here are presented as fragments that are worth by themselves and who live for themselves, independently of a whole. This is a photographic analogy that explores the similarities of an artificial territory, with ordinary constantly changing architectural spaces. 

Through additive and subtractive movements, container terminals are analogies of ephemeral urban landscapes fragments, shaped by streets, corners, squares, blocks and towers under (de)construction, devoided from any formal or symbolic reference that relate to specific places. It represents undetermined locations, (de)constructed as side effects of globalization.

 

COURCHEVEL

 

COURCHEVEL

BY FREDERIK VERCRUYSSE


Frederik Vercruysse is an Antwerp based photographer. No matter the subject, Frederik's signature style is very recognizable. He describes his work as still life photography in the broad sense of the word. His aim is to photograph the subject in its purest form, sometimes realistic, often minimalistic. Clean geometric lines and pure shapes more often than not characterize his work. Frederik definitely has an eye for aesthetics and is a true expert in object compositions, as well as architecture, interior and even portrait photography. He approaches the subject with a great deal of detail and honesty. This results in very graphic and sometimes even painting-like photographs.

Former projects include collaborations with magazines such as Wallpaper, The New York Times Style Magazine, Architectural Digest Germany, Document Journal, A Magazine, L'Officiel Hommes and Case Da Abitare.

Some of his clients are Valentino, Tommy Hilfiger, Uniqlo, Airbnb, Muller Van Severen, villa eugénie, Raf Simons and many museums, publishers and architects.


synopsis

The perception of landscape and nature is still committed to the classical image: the relationship between human being and nature.

The depiction of the landscape is regarded by most people as a so-called natural landscape, but it is in fact a cultural landscape that has been modified by humans to serve their purpose and needs.

The only landscapes we have left are culture landscapes. Man has already been practically everywhere.

For me it was interesting to examine, from a spatial point of view, the alpine place where the very small human being, like colored dots, were modifying and using the magnificent landscape.

 

COVA DO VAPOR

 

COVA DO VAPOR BY STEFANO CARNELLI

BY ÁLVARO DOMINGUES

Localizadas no extremo da margem Sul do Tejo, mesmo antes do rio penetrar no grande mar oceano, Trafaria, Torrão, Cova do Vapor, parecem terras indefinidas entre a geografia da realidade e da ficção. Depois de impressionados pela massa cilíndrica dos silos de cereais, altíssimos, excessivos, logo nos perdemos na infinidade das pequenas coisas, barcos e automóveis estacionados lado a lado, gente que deambula, ora simpática, ora furtiva, barulhentos mecânicos de automóveis adaptando as máquinas em prodígios de sons e luzes, crianças ciganas, emigrantes africanos, pescadores, ruínas de fábricas, amontoados de casas apinhadas, precárias ou muito sólidas dentro de muros, materiais diversos, cores, lixo, ruas estreitas de terra e areia, ruas pavimentadas com tudo, papelões, pedaços de tijolos partidos, lajetas de betão. Não se saberia se alguém está a montar ou a desmontar tudo isto.
Convivem lado a lado o cuidado ínfimo com as coisas, as tintas frescas, as paredes imaculadas, os vasos de flores, com a ruína, os barracos e as casas devassadas, os carros velhos e a maior diversidade de sucata.
O mar rói as margens e as praias nesta língua de areia que os humanos, o vento, as ondas e as correntes foram mudando desde que há memória do mundo. O avanço das águas e a erosão constituem hoje uma ameaça constante.  

Sobram histórias trágicas destas terras de flutuante condição. O lazareto que lá foi instalado em 1565 é já um sinal da marginalidade e estigmatização.
Nos idos de 1775, um governante déspota e sem escrúpulos que os historiadores se encarregaram de mitificar, o Marquês do Pombal, mandou incendiar a Trafaria, maltratando e prendendo quem escapava e obrigando os homens a irem para o exército. O Marquês sabia que na Trafaria se escondiam, soldados desertores, ladrões e jovens refratários do serviço militar.
Depois vieram as indústrias de conserva de peixe e até uma fábrica de dinamite. A terra prosperou também com a frequência balnear por parte de alguma burguesia lisboeta e até aconteceu de a rainha vir à Trafaria no início de séc. XX inaugurar a primeira colónia balnear em Portugal. Os palheiros dos pescadores passaram a conviver com outras casas de madeira dos veraneantes sazonais vindos dos bairros populares de Lisboa.
Haveria, escolas, banda, coreto, ginásio, sociedades recreativas, bombeiros,  fortes, quarteis e presídios militares. O trabalho na indústria e na apanha da amêijoa misturava-se com os “banhistas”.

A moda de “ir a banhos à Trafaria” inaugurou a carreira do barco a vapor de onde vieram os topónimos de Cova do Vapor e Lisboa Praia. A Cova do Vapor foi-se enchendo de casas de madeira que o mar frequentemente destruía, sobretudo a partir dos anos de 1930’. Por isso havia que reconstrui-las e mudá-las de lugar. Algumas eram transportadas por juntas de bois que as puxavam.

De 1946 vem este excerto de Etienne de Gröer, polaco-russo, reputado urbanista e professor do Instituto de Urbanismo de Paris, contratado pelo governo do regime salazarista para fazer planos em Portugal:

(…) Mais para o Norte, além da Mata Nacional, encontra-se a “Cova do Vapôr”, um pequeno porto formado por uma enseada entre as dunas, perto da embocadura do Tejo.

Sobre a língua de areia que se formou entre o rio e o mar, ergueram-se minúsculas barracas de madeira, sobre estacaria, construídas nas parcelas das dunas que alugou aos seus proprietários a direcção do Porto de Lisboa. São casas de fim-de-semana ou de “camping”.

Lamento ter de dizer que tudo isto foi construído na maior desordem possível: as casinholas estão demasiado perto umas das outras e apresentam, no seu conjunto, o aspecto de uma aldeia de pretos. Não têm nem água, nem esgotos.

As águas usadas e tudo o resto deita-se na areia, que se torna progressivamente insalubre e de mau cheiro.

Antes desta pérola sobre a “aldeia de pretos”, o mesmo já tinha escrito que

“A praia da Trafaria não é conveniente para os banhos de mar, pois que as correntes do Tejo trazem para cá e acumulam em frente dela todos os despejos dos esgotos de Lisboa. (…) Construiu-se tudo em grande desordem.

Há um número exagerado de ruas, muitas das quais são demasiado estreitas, e todas elas (ou quase) não tem arranjo nenhum, nem são conservadas de qualquer maneira. Reina em muitos sítios um cheiro desagradável por falta de instalações sanitárias nas casas 1.

Há horríveis barracas, feitas com pranchas e com ferro-velho, e um grande número de casebres de todas as espécies que servem como habitação para uma grande parte da população, que por causa disso sofre de todos os danos físicos e morais. A tuberculose reina aí.”

Não vale a pena insistir. Em 2002, no Jornal Púiblico, José António Cerejo muda radicalmente o tom:

"Cuidada e delicada, feita de afectos que não marcam os bairros degradados das periferias, a Cova do Vapor está longe de ser um bairro de lata ou uma aldeia igual às outras. É uma povoação singular, é um lugar onde tudo é diferente, sem escola, centro de saúde ou vestígio de serviço público, um lugar contraditório, uma relíquia de excepção. São construções mais ou menos precárias, encavalitadas umas nas outras, expoentes de engenho e desenrascanço, às vezes sem se perceber onde é que começam umas e acabam as outras. São casas e casinhas, com apenas duas ruas de terra batida, onde estão as poucas lojas da terra, capazes de deixar passar carros; mas o labirinto dos caminhos serpenteia por todo a parte, com largura apenas para os assadores, para os canteiros da salsa e dos coentros, para um tanque de roupa ou um duche apertado. Às vezes ainda há espaço para umas couves, umas flores, umas árvores de fruto, armários, estendais, e inventivas garagens e anexos de casas." 2

Era difícil que houvesse acordo numa terra que nasceu num lugar onde existia uma fábrica de dinamite; onde o mar, o vento e a areia fazem e desfazem praias e dunas; onde a linguagem e os actos do poder oscilam entre a violência, o pitoresco e a condescendência. É quase um fado, uma maldição que só desaparece com magias e encantamentos que povoem novamente os lugares e o seu imaginário.

Com a expressão francesa Terrain Vague, Ignasi de Solà-Morales3 pretendeu capturar está espécie de luz negra que nos fascina e nos atrai para lugares que estão do lado de fora da racionalidade normativa corrente. A escolha do francês tinha uma intenção dupla: terrain, remete claramente  para  terreno edificado, para um lugar urbano, e vague, possui um duplo sentido de vazio de coisas, vazio de função e, sobretudo, vazio de sentido. Lugares incertos.

 

La imaginacion romântica que pervive en nuestra sensibilidade contemporânea se nutre de recuerdos y de expectativas. Extranjeros en nuestra própria pátria, extranjeros en nuestra ciudad, el habitante de la metrópoli siente los espácios no dominados por la arquitectura como reflejo de su misma inseguridad, de su vago deambular por espácios sin limites que, en su posición externa al sistema urbano de poder, de actividade, constituyen a la vez una expresion física de su temor e inseguridad, pero también una expectativa de lo outro, lo alternativo, lo utópico, lo porvenir, etc.

 

A ausência de uso, ou a sua indefinição,o estranhamento, a instabilidade ou baixa intensidade, e o próprio sentido ambivalente da precariedade, da ausência e da ruína – sinal de resistência, apesar de tudo, ou sinal de decrepitude progressiva – seriam ingredientes quase romântico para a construção de uma estética da liberdade, daquilo que pelo seu pouco préstimo está pronto para ser re-imaginado num campo infinito de possibilidades.
Estariamos longe da obsolescência acelerada e dos seus significados desencantados, apesar dos muitos sinais de abandono que na Cova do Vapor convivem com extremos de minúcia e dedicação nos afectos que as paredes expõem: desenhos com seixos e conchas, mosaicos coloridos, pinturas de barcos e arco-íris, nomes escritos e palavras que designam tempos felizes e mundos perfeitos.

A foto-grafia de Stefano Carnelli surpreende e dá a ver esta ambiência por múltiplos e dissonantes caminhos: sobre erva seca e terra pisada, flutuam cordas com roupa a secar; perto, uma casa simples e bastante degradada, não se sabe se usada ou abandonada; para lá de um renque de pinheiros, a escala desmesurada de um silo composto por um feixe de cilindros como tubos de um órgão gigantesco. As faixas coloridas que percorrem o silo em diagonal, ecoam o azul e branco do céu e das nuvens. Estamos pouco prevenidos para tamanhas dissonâncias.

Sobre este material instável, a fotografia, ao estabelecer um fio condutor entre significados e significantes fotográficos, constrói uma atmosfera própria que permitirá aceder a outras dobras mais escondidas; para uns, românticos, a alma desencantada das coisas, um lamento deslassado, distribuído por indícios, marcas, coisas ausentes ou fora do lugar. Para outros, é exactamente a energia da dissonância, reunindo no mesmo lugar presenças muito afastadas, aproximando-as, que é capaz de expandir os sentidos em direcção à invenção poética da realidade ou à sua expansão.

Por isso, o simples registo das coisas documentadas não é o que mais claramente se revela. O que se desprende são sobretudo sinais, marcadores, caminhos que conduzem a universos maiores e que aqui apenas se insinuam por presenças que por vezes são minúsculos resíduos ou simplificações. É isso que fica liberto para o jogo das emoções.

Depois há os rostos, as pequenas coisas dos humanos, as suas casas e os seus sonhos. Tudo parece ao mesmo tempo pobre e rico, simples e complexo, banal e extraordinário, descuidado ou meticulosamente preenchido para que nada escape à intensidade de quem aqui vive e como vive.

São lugares estranhos que parecem fora dos circuitos habituais; aparentemente esquecidos ou residuais, imprecisos, flutuantes ou vagabundos.
Poder-se-ia pensar que são coisas à margem (talvez marginais, também), inseguros por causa dos ataques do mar ou da sensação que ali se acolhem outras ameaças…, mas logo que nos deixamos conduzir pelos rostos das pessoas - esperançosos, alegres ou alheados, como nós -, pela minúcia dos espaços e das coisas domésticas, pela densidade de marcas pessoais, de memórias, de contínuo cuidado pela fragilidade de tudo, paredes, tectos, fios, electrodomésticos…, disso tudo só nos fica a sensação da falta de bens materiais preenchida por tudo aquilo que possa ocupar algum vazio por onde haja o risco de qualquer coisa se desmoronar e, num vórtice, tragar tudo.

Por isso há pedregulhos a defender as ruas de terra batida, tal como há vasos de plantas, bonecos, cores, quadros, recordações, objectos, azulejos…, toda uma saturação de coisas, acontecimentos, memórias, presenças que tenham o poder de afastar esse horror ao desaparecimento.

 

1 Etienne Gröer (1946), Plano de Urbanização do Concelho de Almada: análise e programa. Relatório., 1946 In Anais de Almada, 7-8 (2004-2005), pp. 151-236.

2 José António Cerejo (2002), Uma Relíquia Chamada Cova do Vapor, PÚBLICO, 28/04/2002.

3 Ignaci Solà-Morales (1995), “Terrain Vagues”, in Anyplace, Anyone Corporation, The MIT Press, N York, pp.118-123. Disponível em https://paisarquia.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/solc3a1-morales_i_terrain-vague.pdf.

 

CONTROL

 

CONTROL

BY DANIEL BUSHAWAY

 

Daniel John Bushaway graduated from Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts in London and is a documentary photographer living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Daniel shoots exclusively on large fomat film cameras to observe and document the way we cultivate our environments. His practice explores a variety of infrastructures, systems and processes that support the spectrum of industry.

 

Artist Statement

Control is an ongoing series observing the infrastructure used to extract, conserve, and ultimately control water. It is preoccupied with vast landscapes manipulated to facilitate mass consumption of water at the turn of a tap.

The series was shot on a 4x5 large-format camera during summer of 2012-13 in the Andalucían Basin in regional Spain and regional Tasmania, Australia. These locations were chosen for waterways that have been diverted on an awe-inspiring scale, to majestic yet unsettling effect. The colour photographs are rendered with striking clarity of detail.

 

See more about this photographer here

 

BINOMIA

 

BINOMIA

BY MARTA MACHADO


Marta Machado trabalha no M-AO onde é responsável pelo desenvolvimento e coordenação de projetos de pequena e grande escala.
 Licenciou-se em Arquitectura pela Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Minho. 
Publicou ensaios científicos sobre pensamento da arquitetura e medeia na Escola de Arquitetura a introdução de práticas internacionais no perfil académico.
 Praticou em Ren Pepe, um escritório japonês no Porto, onde teve a oportunidade de trabalhar com Ren Ito na coordenação de projecto. Teve também algumas colaborações com ateliers como Pezo vonEllrichausen e TAAT.
 Marta tem um interesse especial na fotografia que reflete sobre a arquitetura através da representação gráfica e da imagem.
 Ingressou no M-AO em 2015 e desde então tem sido verdadeiramente comprometida na concepção e implementação de alguns projetos do atelier.

Sinopse

A paisagem é uma construção comum e inacabada - um palimpsesto.
 A paisagem é um registo da mudança de uma sociedade, e, quando a mudança é acelerada, o tempo escasseia para se possam compreender as marcas, permanecendo as reliquias e as memórias. Retrata-se uma paisagem entre rural e urbano, o momento entre a desruralidade e da urbanização, uma paisagem recombinada, curiosamente o centro geográfico do concelho de Guimarães.

 

BELLINVERNO

 

BELLINVERNO

BY LUDOVICO POGGIOLI

 

Ludovico Poggioli, was born 41 years ago in Umbria, where he still live and work. He choose analog photography because it leaves him free to forget why is he shooting a shoot, because in every roll developed he finds a shot that surprise him, because he says, printing your own photos in the darkroom is exciting and every print is unique.

 

synopsis

Bellinverno project … Si, si d´inverno è meglio dopo è più facile dormire e andare oltre i pensieri con un libro di Lucrezio aperto tra le dita … Long coats and boots, roads shiny from the rain and wood fires, faces hidden under umbrellas, the horizon line blurred in the mist, the snow and its silence, the sleepy cities, the cold wind on my face, the caress of a cruel lover, a cigarette that shines at dusk, and the carpets of leaves, the liberated beaches, the awakenings under the bed-covers, solitude. In the north wind that pushes pedestrians towards their homes, in the lights of a still open café, I like to walk, breathe, look. In winter’s arms I feel at home, I'm stronger, there’s more space for the soul and thought, there I find suggestions and wonderful stories, encounters are more rare and valuable, and the lover’s embrace is warmth and comfort, then the fog envelops me, altering the aspect of places too well known and carrying me to where it is easier to be, away, unknown. Finally, after putting away my camera, I come back home, among my loves, happy. Welcome Bellinverno *Paolo Conte – La donna d’inverno.

 

Editor´s note

The presented project was selected from a spontaneous submission made by Ludovico Poggioli. Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

 

A PLACE TO DISAPPEAR

 

A PLACE TO DISAPPEAR

BY PABLO LERMA

 

A Place to Disappear is a visual research-based project that explores man’s absence from the primitive landscape in the Earth. Imagining a near future, where the humans will disappear from this planet but comeback to Earth centuries later.

The project focuses on the traces of utopian landscapes in transformation and extinction, and combines them with vernacular photographs from expeditions in the 19th century that documented the same locations. The physical, conceptual, and emotional junctions between these two groups of images serve to create a new narrative.

Consequently, the sequence collapses space and time in a way that reflects the relationship between the archive and human memory. By capsizing the viewer’s expectations of a continuous story with a clear protagonist, the work’s open visual narrative also reveals the impossibility of a fixed landscape and taps into the viewers’ imaginations.

The unfixed environmental fragments in this project are conspicuously absence of humans, alluding to man’s disappearance from the primate landscape and echoing a longing to return to the physical world akin to that of nineteenth-century Romantics.

However, the limitless and expansive quality of the work proposes that the artist and viewer may create a new experiential universe together. Ultimately, A Place to Disappear suggests humans may transform their vanishing Earth into an open-ended Utopian macrocosm to which they may return.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Pablo Lerma is an image-based artist and researcher living in New York. His artistic practice involves researching and collecting photographs, maps, drawings, illustrations, and geological material addressing concepts such as time, change, erosion, and extinction. His work takes various forms from photographic installation to publications.  

He holds a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Barcelona, a Diploma in General Studies of Photography from the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, Spain, and an MFA in Image & Text from Ithaca College in New York.

His work has been exhibited at Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His books are in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US).  

He has been awarded by Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES) and nominated for the First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30´s (US). His work has been featured at the British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain´t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CH).

He is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography in New York and a professor in photography at Kean University in New Jersey.

 

AN EMPTY VALLEY

 

AN EMPTY VALLEY

BY ETTORE MONI


Ettore Moni was born in Parma in 1967, where he attended the Institute D'Arte. Self-taught photographer, begins with a photograph of the scene in theater and then get to important collaborations, including Republic and Anna. At the beginning of the new millennium moves in to New York and worked as a fashion photographer.
After that, he returns to Italy, where he devoted himself to a 4 × 5, beginning a personal journey through photography documentation and landscape. Since 2014, he collaborates with IO Donna, Rum Magazine and many other international newspapers.
He published also on: c41 Magazine, Artwort Magazine, Fotografia Magazine, Domus, Intern Magazine, LensCratch, GBlog Gessato, Darwin Magazine, Formagramma Visual Arts WebZine, GUP Magazine, Pool Resources, Dodho Magazine, etc.
His last performance with the project “An Empty Valley” was hosted on the Festival of Photography in Reggio Emilia, in Castelnuovo Photography, and in galleries in Crema, Massa, Parma, etc.


synopsis

The rays of sunshine barely reach out to here, let alone the first pages of magazines and the flashes of photographers.
Forno is no place you would get to by chance. Better, you may get here by chance, but it's not by chance that you'd come back.
Here, all voids are filled. Filled with stories about courage – that of an abandoned valley and of those who still live here, among all its wounds, contradictions and natural limits.
On one side its tough nature hardly allows space for man-made constructions, yet on the other side it lets quarriers reach its very heart with their apparently unnatural lengthwise cuts, which in fact follow the geological patterns of marble layers.
The antagonist here, if there is one, is history, which is always so severe as a teacher: e.g. with an industrial revolution, whose – mainly negative – effects have affected the valley, and the massacre of about a hundred people.
This is why it is of little importance if Forno is barely reached by the rays of sunshine, because here I could actually arrive. And I came back.
After all, in Forno one could well imagine to be able to look at the sea from the 'Dolomites' or to walk on the austere lunar soil. One may also find a shepherd writing poetry, a quarrier with a university degree, or a sculptor considering his solitude an opportunity; and even meet a hunter who prefers using his legs for trekking to using his rifle for killing.

editor's note

Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers

 

ANONYMIZATION

 

ANONYMIZATION

BY ROBERT HARDING PITTMAN

All across the world a uniform, homogeneous model of development, inspired by Los Angeles style urban sprawl – consisting of massive freeways, parking lots, shopping malls and large¬¬-scale masterplanned communities with golf courses – is being stamped onto the earth’s topography. With this anonymous type of development come the destruction of the environment, and also a loss of culture and roots, as well as alienation. This globalized model of architecture does not respect or adapt itself to the natural or cultural environment onto which it is implanted. As we have seen in recent history, fervent overdevelopment has led to crises, not only financial, but also environmental and social, and some even say psychological. Robert Harding Pittman began working on ANONYMIZATION in L.A. well in the late 1990’s. Since then he has been traveling around the world photographing the spread of “L.A. style development” in Las Vegas, Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Dubai and South Korea. The world was in the midst of a construction boom when the project began and a decade later most cranes around the world had come to a screeching halt. The next booms and busts are once again underway and continue to be the subject of Pittman’s work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Harding Pittman grew up in Boston and Hamburg, the son of a German mother and American father. After taking his undergraduate and graduate degrees in environmental engineering (U.C. Berkeley), an area of concern that continues to inform his work, he received an M.F.A. in Photography and Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). His main interest is how different cultures interact with the environment and how they manage “development”.  

Pittman’s traveling exhibition and photography book ANONYMIZATION (Kehrer Verlag) was nominated for the Prix Pictet and the German PhotoBook Award and has received wide media attention (Wall Street Journal, CNN, WIRED, Newsweek Japan, The Daily Beast, El País, ZDF, European Photography, Aesthetica Magazine, Domus, Eikon, LensCulture, etc.). The project has been exhibited internationally at festivals, galleries and other venues, including La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Houston FotoFest and continues to travel. His current photographic work in progress, The Bubble, is the sequel to ANONYMIZATION.  


His award winning documentaries address many of the same issues treated in his photographic work. The films show the environmental, human and cultural costs of the development of our lands and the extraction of energy resources.  

Pittman’s photographs and films are in public and private collections.

Website: https://www.roberthardingpittman.com

 

ANTROPIZACIÓN

 

ANTROPIZACIÓN

BY YLENIA ARCA


Ylenia Arca was born in Verona, Italy and after studying architecture in Venice and living for some time in Spain is now based in Oslo, Norway working as landscape architect.
Her photography work, as her profession, focuses mainly on architecture, urban spaces, natural and anthropized landscapes.
She has been published in several magazines and websites and exposed in collective exhibitions.


synopsis

This series wants to investigate the duality of Tenerife's landscape, the relationship between the natural landscape and what has slowly been anthropized.
The original landscape of the island, wild and unpolluted, has been increasingly subjected to human action, that has characterized, modified, torn it.
As a metastasis, the appropriation of land by humans has defaced the island from its extremities towards the inland.
The heart of the island keeps intact and untouched its nature and its landscape, which only the power of the volcano could change. By contrast, the perimeter, the edge with the ocean, is a built and cemented border.
The man has made new, dual and ambiguous landscapes: buildings emerging vertically above the sea emulating the cliffs, concrete pools like small pieces of sky and ocean ... anthropic landscape is the doubling of natural landscape.

The series has been displayed at the International Biennial of Photography of Tenerife, Fotonoviembre 2011.

 

1,864 KM

 

1,864 KM

BY JAMIE HLADKY


Originally from Manchester, UK, I've lived and worked in London and Singapore, and been lucky enough to travel fairly widely over time. Living and travelling away from home for so long means developing a new set of visual understandings, and I've tried to do this through exploration and photography.
I prefer to experience travel at a human pace, and so I walk and drive a lot. Once, I rode the international rail network for 20,000 km, all the way from Singapore to Manchester, to make the journey without flying, and to see what's in between these two sometime homes.
I'm now based in Canberra, Australia, spending my time trying to see as much of this huge strange country as possible.


synopsis

These photos were taken during road trips and walks through many of the small towns located between Canberra and the Orana and Riverina regions of New South Wales, throughout September 2013.
These towns are dusty, hot, and so quiet as to be almost silent. In many places, the streets are deserted and buildings abandoned. After living in large cities all of my life it always amazes me that you can wander in and out of an entire town without encountering another soul.
1,864 km was the distance covered by my trusty Mitsubishi Magna that month.

 

WAITING FOR THE RETURN OF THE GIANTS

 

WAITING FOR THE RETURN OF THE GIANTS

BY MARTIN COLE


This work is the practice-based outcome of my ongoing PhD research. It consists of a series of photographs taken in the Historic City centre of Palermo between the years 2014- 2018.  I was interested in investigating through my photographic practice, the influence of a Baroque mode of thought expressed through architecture, and extended throughout an urban space. In particular, I was interested in the possibility that a “Baroque environment” in this specific location- now at the Edge of “fortress Europe” but once at the centre of a different world order that stretched into the Orient as much as the Occident, could contribute to different readings, or manifestations, of Modernity. I have been visiting Palermo since 1994, and one of the things that has consistently struck me about this ancient, beautiful, and troubled city, is its markedly different relationship to time compared to most other European cities. This relationship with time is reflected day to day, but also across historical time. It is not a linear teleological version of time, measuring out the steady and ineluctable advance of progress, but circular. It is full of strange reruns and co-existences where past and present mingle in the same space. It is a place dominated both by the figure of the ruin, central to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the Baroque, and of the labyrinth, a trope of 17century Baroque thinking indicating cultural anxiety, and uncertainty about the outcomes of human endeavour (analogous to the postmodernism of our own time). With this series of photographs, I have attempted to engage with these ideas. I have used something of the visual rhetoric of the Baroque through the use of Chiaroscuro, which is both a cultural construct and the result of a collision between nature and culture in this environment. the idea of the shadow and what lies behind it (dietrologlia) is a part of the Palermitan psyche; The writer David Williams in his essay on Palermo in the book Performing Cities, puts it this way- “a melancholic obsession with “what lies behind” (dietro); behind surface appearances, received “truths”, language, silence, history; behind cover-ups and walls of all kinds.” I have also used the juxtaposition of the interior/exterior the one folding into the other. The Baroque church interiors giving way to the street which is itself a type of interior.

More images of the project  click

About the author
Martin Cole studied theology at Exeter university, Documentary Photography at Newport school of Art and Design, BA in Photography at the West Surrey college of Art and Design and is presently finishing a PhD in Photography at Plymouth University under the supervision of professors Jem Southam and David Chandler.  His exhibitions include New contemporaries 96 at the Tate Liverpool.  Evident, New landscape Photography at the Photographers Gallery 1997 with Axel Hutte, James Welling, and Catherine Opie.  New British Photography Stadthaus Ulm Germany 1998.  Mediterranean, between utopia and Reality Photographers gallery 2004. Floral Portraits Print Room Photographers Gallery 2009. Offsite projects for the Photographers gallery at Liberty in Regent st and Coutts bank in the strand London 2009/2010. Publications include Wine Dark Sea, Photo works monograph 2003. His Work is held in the permanent collection of the V+A museum London. His current working in Palermo Sicily and lives in Brighton.

 

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TURIA

 

TURIA

BY JUAN MARGOLLES


Turia (you cannot step into the same river twice)

Changes in the physiognomy of the rivers in Spain have been vertiginous over the last one hundred years, due to new industrial and demographic necessities, and favored by political interests, which have promoted architectural projects as a symbol of power and progress.

In the Turia river, some of these changes have been extraordinary and have converted the river, from its source to its mouth, into a protagonist and witness of the political models, economical changes, and social development, occurred in the contemporary history of the region.

Located in the east of the Iberian Peninsula, the Turia river springs in the mountain ranges and flows across a rural environment throughout towns and villages. Downstream, there are two big reservoirs-fetish construction that characterized Franco’s dictatorship. In the 60’s, the course of the Turia was diverted, leaving Valencia, the Turia’s capital, without its river.

Nowadays, a zoo, football pitches, an opera theater, and the biggest aquarium of Europe, join together without complexes over the former course crossing the city to end in La Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, an architectural complex with futuristic aesthetics and pharaonic dimensions that completes the extraordinary metamorphosis of the landscape.

Because of its features, the Turia river becomes a space of reflection and summarizes, like no other, the idiosyncrasy of the nation, reflecting success, failures, dreams, complexities, miseries and richness. Here, the political power has determined the contemporary concept of progress and the river is presented not only as a metaphor but also as evidence of constant change; a strange condition that invites the people to assume a blurred past, a disconcerting present and an uncertain future.


About the author
Juan Margolles’s work explores cities as a reflection space that refers to the contemporary citizen and their relationship with the environment. His photographic projects analyze the presence of natural elements and the structured landscape around them. Working in series, Margolles explores how contemporary development determines the manner of inhabiting our surroundings, modifies social patterns and determines our relationship with nature.

His work has been exhibited at Museum of Illustration and Modernity MuVIM-Valencia (cat.), Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (cat.) Novi Sad, Serbia (cat.), Museum of Fine Arts Faustino Jorge Bonadeo, Argentina (cat.), La Casa Encendida Madrid (cat.), Space of Creation (ECCO) Cádiz, Luis Adelantado Gallery Valencia, Haskoy Yun Iplik Fabrikasi Istanbul (cat.), Matèria Gallery Roma and Spazio Nea Naples.

His photographic projects have been awarded with the grant VEGAP 16 and Generación 2011-Caja Madrid. Full Contact Prize 16 and Art Photo Bcn 14. Margolles has been nominated for the best Photographic Book of the Year Phoroespaña 15, Plat(t)form 13-Winterthur Fotomuseum and selected for Call Young Artist 14 Luis Adelantado Gallery, for the Sovereign European Art Prize 2011 and the International Art Prize Obra Abierta 2011-Caja Extremadura and the National Youth Art Biennial Rep. Argentina.

He has participated in the International Art Festival Scan 16, Encontros da Imagem 15, Art Photo Bcn 14, Biennial Fotonoviembre 13 and Descubrimientos Photoespaña 12.

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