Anne Holmes | COLOR ME NIGHT

Color me night, © Anne Holmes

A certain kind of magic happens when the sun goes down. Shadows play tricks on the imagination. Colours take on a new richness and depth. Forms become blurred, abstract, more painterly and mysterious. People simmer down and reveal themselves, angels becoming demons and demons becoming angels. Mythic creatures appear, and the line between what is safe and what you want, between madness and inspiration, becomes as nebulous as some of the resulting images. 

Obscurity lends itself to a kind of reverie. A threshold presents itself, daring you to cross it, to dream and to live as in a dream. This journal by night is an expression of that space where the infinite and the finite seem to mingle with ease - a space I often find myself in, plotting my own destiny. AH

For more information on the work and bio visit:

» Anne's site

» CAT - Paisagem estranha entranha

Brett Van Ort | MINESCAPE

Minescape, © Brett Van Ort

"Minescape explores how nature temporarily reclaims the landscape, and injects fear back into the wilderness in the aftermath of a conflict, when underneath hides a most brutal and random killer: the land mine."
BVO

The work was presented as a multimedia presentation. For more information on his work for the Tavira show and his bio visit:
» Brett's website
» CAT - Paisagem estranha entranha.

Briony Campbell & Duncan Nicol Robertson | NEW WORLD

New World, © Briony Campbell &
Duncan Nicol Robertson 

Over the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we drove from Michigan to Louisiana, following a route determined not by a map but by the suggestions of strangers we met along the way. We asked them about their relationship with their country, the changes in their lives over the last decade, and their hopes and fears for the future. Through these conversations we traveled a new, unfamiliar American landscape: troubled by conflict at home and abroad, politically divided and economically uncertain.
BC & DNR

For more information on the work for the Tavira exhibition and bios visit:

» Briony's website

» Duncan's website

» CAT - Paisagem estranha entranha

Hin Chua | AFTER THE FALL

After the Fall, © Hin Chua

[...] It directs its gaze to the ongoing environmental struggle taking place on these boundaries, where the urban zoning system begins to blur and unravel. The photographs explore the effects of the conflicts and collisions that are gradually and chaotically reshaping the spaces around us, played out in slow motion with unpredictable, often disturbing results. They prefigure or anticipate change, they are pictures in which change is often either visible or completely within the mind.
This silent hand-over, the transformation of one environment into another, may speak to something deeper within our collective memories: the alteration of places we once knew, an inexorable reminder of the inevitability of time… a farewell to personal Edens. HC (excerpt)

For more information on his work and bio visit:
» Hin's site
» CAT - Paisagem estranha entranha

José Manuel Bacelar | MIRROR OF HEAVEN

Mirror of Heaven, © José Bacelar

The sea, the mirror of heaven, is the motto for a trip along the portuguese coast. Portugal´s relation with the sea fascinates me, puzzles me and it is in my soul... JB (excerpt)

For additional information on the work and photographer's bio visit:
» José Manuel's work at Dear Sir

Kim Haughtom | SHADOWLANDS

Shadowlands, © Kim Haughton

Shadowlands is a road-trip across post celtic- tiger Ireland’s graveyards of broken dreams. The photographs are a contemplation on life’s fragile hopes and the ephemeral nature of things. [...]

“And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall. And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away, thy children leave the land.”

[...] The Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote his epic poem “The Deserted Village” in 1770 about an Irish village once teeming with life and the vulnerability of that rural life to power and money. Yet, these words could have been written today. Two hundred and thirty years on, things have changed but they remain the same. KH

For more information on the work and bio visit:

» Kim's site
» CAT - Paisagem estranha entranha

Leonardo Wen | METABRASÍLIA

Metabrasília, © Leonardo Wen

Naked Brasília

Like people, cities only open up for those willing to see them. Leonardo Wen, born in Brasília, subverts the common ideas about the Brazilian capital, its modernist architecture and its urbanism. He shows a city of contradictions, captured by the eye of someone who knows it as few people do.There are signs, shadows, walls and trees. A city without heroes or monuments, living between light and darkness, through which people pass, sometimes without even noticing. A pulsating and alive place, unrecognisable at first glance, since the author avoids the obvious and disguises the well-known landmarks.Generously, Brasília has let itself be photographed and seen as if it was naked. These images reconstruct the atmosphere of the capital, and in doing this, pay the city an homage.

Simonetta Persichetti, Photography Critic

For more information on the work and bio visit:
» Leonardo's site

Tito Mouraz | OPEN SPACE OFFICE

Open Space Office, © Tito Mouraz

The series presented here was taken in Portugal over a 3-year period and represents a transformed landscape that mirrors Man as its constructive, reconstructive and contemplative being. The landscape appears completely and irreversibly transformed and it was this transformation that interested me towards this project, where the landscape and its matter became the points of reference. [...]

TM (excerpts)

For more information on the work and bio visit:

» Tito's site

Zed Nelson | HACKNEY - A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Hackney - A tale of two cities, © Zed Nelson

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens  (1812 - 1870)

[...]The social landscape for an under-privileged teenager growing up in Hackney, one of London’s poorest boroughs, is a million light-years away from the new urban hipsters who frequent the cool bars and expensive cappuccino café’s springing up in the same streets. These worlds co-exist side-by-side but
entirely separate, creating bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness. ZN (excerpts)

paisagem estranha entranha - 2014 | PUBLICATION

Publication: paisagem estranha entranha, Oporto, 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

logo and book design by Patrícia Proença Design

Publication: paisagem estranha entranha, Oporto, 2014