SPACE ANATOMY

Space Anatomy consists of a row of 4 exhibition, designed especially for the FLAUSINA space. MATILDE CORREA MENDES, DAVID MARANHA, RUI MARTINS and NUNO SOUSA VIEIRA respond to the proposal of working with the existing space, while transforming its expressivity in architectural terms. Matilde Correa Mendes, David Maranha, Rui Martins and Nuno Sousa Vieira work with minimal means, but every time different medial tools in finding layered identities of the space they are working with. The project is concerned with the creation of situations, in which artificial structures can dig with minimal, but every time different medial tools, for finding the identity that a certain space might have developped in its history.

MATILDE CORRÊA MENDES  uses simple techniques that remind of Dada and Bauhaus photographic collage, but infuses them with movement. These fluid architectures of purified forms correspond to an ambiguous functionality: the crane which infinitely repeats movement in <Sisyphus>, the photographs of aqueducts by Domingos Alvão, collected by her grandfather in <Unplaced> and the fundaments of a future highway in <Quadro>, suggest a dimension of architecture which is not always material, but which conditions the human. This both static and transformative skeletons – immemorial prototypes of the built form – are making visible formations impregnated by the use that accumulates in constructions from past and future. The videos exhibit the meditative temporality of a single frame combined with imagistic allusions to visual traditions in historic display and design and to the fixation of cultural models. The architectural forms become evidences, while gaining the preciosity of a ‘chosen’ piece that already is beyond the cycle of (self)consume. This estrangement effect, which also dictates patterns of behavior to the individual, abstracts, but at the same time confers a subtle melancholia to the scenographic landscapes, which seem conceptual nature mortes.

In his installative works, DAVID MARANHA, architect and musician, works with a rigorously multilayered substance of concrete and tactile textures, sensory feed and organic modes of “image” creation. Some of these processes are like analytical engravings: the impression of sound on a certain materiality produces movement, time mediated by a theremin releases sound, or a 45 min burning process is cast as drawing into wood.

This present piece constructs a secluded temporality with minimal and essential devices of formgiving: an immersive environment that explores a space of the interior. Working with plural impulses, this small construction stages a performance, that had consumed in a different temporality. The visitor is invited to experience it in a condensed form, by its traces ~ information that is archived in sensory codes.

After the literal collapse of Flausina, SPACE ANATOMY has migrated to a new location: Sala do Risco. The sudden fall of the ceiling in Flausina is symptomatic for the state of historic architecture and became a constituent and relevant factor in this cycle of exhibitions. As the works are site-specific, we decided to integrate the former space and this happening into the next exhibitions. Its presence is marked by a map in the new space. After the poetic and at the same constructivist approach of Matilde Correa Mendes and the introspective cell of David Maranha, this present exhibition of Rui Martins extrapolates the morphology of the space itself. RUI MARTINS's work is concerned with industrial fragments that he reduces back to their originar materiality: stone, iron, graphite. In his minimal approach devoid of artifice, the objects become condensed presences that carry specific forces, connected to their physical identity. They also make a concerning statement as vestiges of our material culture. At their extreme point uncontrollable, their energies are under investigation also in his present installation. Heavy pieces of iron, part of highway constructions, are installed in this Pombaline vaulted architecture and create a new structure of forces and axes of resistance leading to an aesthetic that expands the morphology of the space reloading the angles of its original curvatures. His works alludes to the 1970's conceptual minimalism, but integrates into architecture fluctuation, instability, transformation.

NUNO SOUSA VIEIRA is working, in the last exhibition of the series SPACE ANATOMY, with the revelatory potential of the edge in between two physical states or situations. Translated in optical terms, its unpredictability can conduct to exceptional visual phenomena, which border to the miraculous or produce unexplainable epiphanies, which the eye can hardly grasp. The sculpture <Espectro> accompanies a conjoint of three videos, <Coming Out Next # 1.-3.>, filmed in Nuno Sousa Vieira's factory-atelier – in itself an inexhaustible domain, for him both the object of an intensive fieldwork and source of material. The image and text shown on the neon lamp previously functioning in his factory, are taken from "The New Astronomy", a book written in 1896 by Samuel Pierpont Langley, an American physicist, astronomer and aviator, who built and piloted his self designed airplanes. During his travels, Pierpont experienced the phenomenon of “Broken Spectre”: when his shadow was projected magnified and with a huge luminescent aura to the cloudy landscape around. Nuno Sousa Vieira “opens” a specific tension associated to the ambiguity of the domain of the unknown and its bordering of the sublime – reinforcing it with a naval flag-sign vocabulary: YOU ARE IN A DANGEROUS POSITION