Porto 2014

Q: “How was it ?”
A: “I don´t know, I haven’t seen the photos yet.”

The “paisagem estranha entranha” ([e]strange[d] interior[ized] landscape) project began taking shape in 2011, with its first public moment as a group exhibition by the same name at Casa das Artes de Tavira in 2012. During that initial public contact the current project´s orientation and goals were set out.
    These initial goals and orientation set out to establish productive terms of reference to work “landscape” without necessarily trying to establish a clear definition of the term itself. We set out to think of landscape as the result of an action, of a staged scene, carried out by those modifying or photographing it.
    To these broad initial terms of reference we associated the idea of “making strange” whereby scenes that can initially be considered familiar cease to be as a result of their photographic transposition. Occurring in many different forms, this transmutation from familiar to strange serves as an initial interpretative support to access additional meanings of the individual works presented.
    The presentation mode chosen – exhibition and multimedia – for the work, also points to a slippage in photography, where digital technology has modified, accelerated and even fragmented our photographic way of thinking.
    The enthusiastic participation of authors of diverse origin and photographic filiation in this second public moment, at the Galeria Geraldes da Silva in Oporto, is in itself evidence of the importance landscape assumes as a means of understanding, of coming to terms with, our world. The approaches used and the landscapes presented point, clearly, to the possibility of various worlds, the possibility of the existence of diverse coordinate systems, to interiorize,  to [e]strange, towards a broader critical sense, of landscape, and of the photographic device itself, and, in a last instance, of our own existence. An existence where the moment of looking (and thinking) is deferred to later…

Armando Ribeiro and Miguel Proença, February 2014.