Um Furacao Avança Alegremente / A Hurricane Advances Happily

During a heavy storm, a tree fell and crushed me. I was in Yanomami land, in the Amazon Rainforest. I had a polytraumatism, but I survived thanks to a series of magical events. After several surgeries, I returned home to Lisbon, where I had to do my daily rehabilitation for a year in Olaias, an architectural complex built in the 80’s on the outskirts of the city. Fascinated with its shapes, colors, and its artificial attempt to transmit happiness, I photographed the neighborhood every day during that time. The result was the project «Under The Rainbow», where I reflected on the impact that this type of urbanism had on its inhabitants. This work received a special mention in Urbanautica’s open call «What’s The Urgency?», and was selected in the group exhibition «The Urban between Reality and Utopia» at Rotterdam Photo and in Descubrimientos PhotoEspaña program. At that point, my approach had an outside observer’s point of view. But the fact that my rehabilitation forced me to inhabit the neighborhood on a daily basis meant that I was also part of it. I was not only observing the landscape, I had become a landscape. Paradoxically, by relating to a public space I was relating intimately to myself. I found that the photographs I had taken in the Olaias evoked my state of mind and many of them were a visual analogy of my own story. The images reflect a kind of existential limbo, the one I was living at that time, in between memories of my experiences in the rainforest and the reality of my daily rehabilitation in Olaias. It was then that I began to think of landscape as subjectivity, as a poetics of life. A metaphorical territory. And that is how this project was born, a reinterpretation of the previous one from this new perspective. As if in front of a mirror, the photographed landscape gives you back an image of yourself, you merge with it. Because every place is a lived place, it exists both in the subjectivity of its inhabitants as well as in their memories and dreams.