INHABITING GESTURES | 2024
IN SITU, MIXED MEDIA
digital prints on textiles, soundndscapes, postcards, edible cakes
More than any other place, the areas of Anjos, Intendente, and its surroundings embody the conflicted nature of Lisbon’s urban and human imaginaries. A typical day can be both chaotic and diverse. Walking there, you can see different cars strolling around you. All sorts of people pass through: from tourists waiting for tram 28 to locals just hanging out. Migrants from various countries also live there. Most of them run small businesses within and around the commercial centers. These neighborhoods thrive as an effervescent mixture of cultures and identities, localized and globalized at the same time. While they have undergone drastic changes, they have yet managed to retain a distinctive character. One of the consequences of gentrification is that people come and go in an accelerating dynamic. The locals’ imminent fear of being kicked out of their homes for more hotels and modern apartments to be built causes an atmosphere of tension, fear, and distrust. The efforts by the respective governments to place these neighborhoods within global flows of financial investment and tourism have circulated increasingly amid urban change. What we have here is the conflict of two imaginaries; one about social diversity, and another about tourism and investment streams.
In a house in Anjos, we intend to reflect on the coexistence of this densely populated area, showing how the urban and human landscape is progressively being (re)defined by constant gentrification and housing crisis. Reflecting further on the topic mentioned above, the project dwells on the embedded ideas of confrontation and care that arise through encounters with others. By exploring both private and public dimensions, it taps into individualization as an instinct of survival, and conviviality as a confrontation. At the heart of this exploration, lies a fundamental question: What is a house? Is it merely a physical structure, or does it embody something more? Inevitably the home becomes a recurring theme for the artist symbolizing not only a place of shelter but also identity and belonging. It is converted into a site of personal and collective memory. Taking into account the diverse nature of its surroundings the project displays a compendium of works developed inside and outside the house.
Approaching the space the visitors come across large sheets hanging from the balcony tracing the image of a house in Mouraria. This visual installation evokes a sense of nostalgia – what once stood as a home is now converted into a faint memory, a mere imprint on the surrounding walls. While standing outside they hear a bird singing. Climbing the stairs and reaching the third floor, the audio recording of the bird is still apparent. They can hear it, but they can’t see it. The canary serves as a metaphor for displaced residents. Traditionally, the canary’s song was a sign that the air was safe; its silence meant danger, a warning to evacuate. Combined with recordings of construction work and a voyeuristic view of the neighborhood in the backyard, the house becomes a microcosm of a city in flux creating a tension between comfort and discomfort, familiarity and unfamiliarity. From the (interior) balcony, the viewers become silent observers of the city’s transformation. Looking closely at the landscape, they are transported toward a version of the neighborhood that is simultaneously personal and collective. The house turns into an open door to the neighborhood, by creating a safe space for stories to be told and shared.
The theme of hospitality is central to this project. The gesture of offering cakes and initiating conversations `leaves us with a bittersweet feeling in the end. The cake, a symbol of comfort, takes an ironic stance by referencing “especialidade da nossa casa” (the specialty of our house) and gives us a bitter taste, like the stories of displacement that have been written within its wrapping paper. Leaving the house, the visitors can take postcards showing different places in the city. Most of them document locations that have already disappeared due to the ongoing process of urban renewal. The postcards serve as temporary souvenirs of a city in flux, commenting on the massive issue of touristification, the main symptom of gentrification.
As part of an ongoing research, Inhabiting Gestures is an attempt to understand the city’s ever-changing dynamics through poetic and aesthetic registers, while proposing a reflection on how we all see this transformation, and the power held by imagination to construct, de-construct, and re-construct our own (better, or worse) realities.
Text by Alexia Alexandropoulou
A project by Athanasios Kanakis
with contributions from Alexia Alexandropoulou & João Lourenço
part of the Passa Cá Em Casa | Uma Revolução Assim Festival
organised by Culturgest and Goethe Institur Portugal
Images by Beatriz Pequeno