ARCHITECTURE(S) IN A MOMENT is a show within the partnership between the, from now on, zet gallery and Santa Luzia ArtHotel, two projects united by the territory and the mission to support the original artistic creation. The space’s architecture, located in the heart of Guimarães historic centre, is one of its many points of interest and has become a place of worship for lovers of this artistic expression.
Hotel venues are characterized by the fugacity with which we frequent them. Time and space are their conditions and they determine our experience and our memories. These are moments to which we wanted to add reasons for visiting and contact with Art and all that it brings from the sociocultural context, challenging, precisely, two young architects, graduated by the School of Architecture of the University of Minho, who also develop activity as visual artists, starting from their ways of seeing space and time (through photography and illustration).
André Castanho Correia (1988) and Florisa Novo Rodrigues (1991) are the protagonists of this show, curated by Helena Mendes Pereira, that chooses two generational languages and two ways of looking at the built, diversifying, however, the intellectual and visual reference’s board of each protagonist and their views about the world. André Castanho Correia’s photography is deeply interventional from the point of view of the political message and Florisa Novo Rodrigues belongs to the field of imagination and desires domain, into an historical perspective and back to a time which the author prefers and that makes us return decades to the early days of the emergence of the so-called mass culture.
André Castanho Correia creates, through photography, an international circuit of social neighborhoods mostly in demolition, abandonment and/or re-qualification procedures. Along with the registration of urban and other landscapes in transition states, the author seeks to reflect about the space configuration and the conservation state of different social housing areas and portrays three local contexts (Enguardas, Santa Tecla and Picoto, in Braga), a national one (Barro 6 de Maio, in Amadora) and an international one (Robin Hood Gardens, London) showing, through visual frames, that there are nations without territory.
Architecture is the major source of inspiration for the scenarios created on Florisa Novo Rodrigues’s illustrations, which combines collage (physical and non-digital) and the drawing line, rigorous and delicate at the same time. In the set of artworks that belong to the series “Rehearsal No 1: Stories of cars and satellites”, the artist “starts from the presentation space to its characters, against the backdrop of each spectator’s imaginary. In this way, each artwork will be seized in a unique way, absorbing the individual universe of each one”, using her own words. It is an exploration of drawing as an active tool in the process of creating an imaginary, while constructing a cinematographic imaginary that integrates the dreamed repertoire of each one of us.
Helena Mendes Pereira
zet gallery’s chief curator
