scopionewspaper, Fendas Intemporais by Artur Leão and Jiôn Kiim
#6 May 2021 - Visual Spaces of Change

SCOPIO EDITIONS
Porto, 2021
Visual Spaces of Change
Artur Leão and Jiôn Kiim
ISBN 978-989-53268-3-9
44 pages

The realm of the project “Fendas Intemporais (Timeless Crack) is the territory par excellence of the heterotopias of Foucault and/or the negative spaces of Augé, where the different periods of architectural and urban transformation of the city are present through multiple vestiges and where the places of the rural, suburban and urban are confused, thus demonstrating how the border between these spaces is increasingly tenuous.

In this B&W contemporary photography project of Jiôn Kiim and Artur Leão, which has as artistic object abandoned industrial buildings in the municipality of Matosinhos, located in Greater Porto, we can perceive right at the start of their critical and poetical gaze towards these territories. The image of this site in the 2nd spread shows us a theatre of destruction that the city transformation process in itself entails, and, in the case of these two young artists, this meant visualising the abstractions of capitalism that transformed the city in a way influenced by artists as William Burroughs or Ed Ruscha and especially Robert Smithson.

In the foreground of the image, we see this suburban theatre of war through a mountain made up of a pile of earth, dust and rocks coming from the demolition of those industrial textile buildings, as well as by the immense crater in the middle ground as if a bomb had been dropped. Then, the multifaceted territory of the background, where disparate caterpillars and the different scales of intervention are seen by the considerable skeletons of the industrial ruins and the trivial residential houses on the other side of the road. All this makes us feel the multiple experiences, diverse languages and architectures that intersect in these territories and the several ruins that appear as entropic monuments of contemporary times (Robert Smithson).

Then, both authors evolve in their work focused on exploring the interior spaces of this industrial building, offering us a look both critical and fictional about these non-spaces and, through their visual narrative, make us (re)discover these invisible realities, communicating through the image and in the light of a new poetic perspective, the richness of these abandoned spaces.

Through their series, we can also think about the recovery and valorisation of these non-places, which, although they may not seem to have a great real value, have an enormous potential for transformation, as Sola Morales explains to us in Terrain Vague, because they are spaces that are evocative not only of absence but also of expectation and promise: spaces of the possible in our contemporary cities. This is what we believe, which is that photography can be a form of art and an autonomous critical territory that makes us think differently about the territory, contributing in this way to understanding how cities potentially can be dynamically transformed through subjective personal tactics of appropriation of these lost and neglected urban space because many of these ruins can be the stage for different ways of acting upon the city.