LANDRA

TRANSLUCIDITY


Hyperlocal
Ecological Urban Park
Outober-November 2023
Viana do Castelo, Portugal

Solo show curated by Miguel Teodoro

How far are we from merging once again with what surrounds us? What kind of hunger lacks in us, so that an apple tree is just viewed as ornamental landscape? How many acorns will be eaten in this park? How many oaks will germinate from the beheading by the blades of a grass cutter? Reading the land is necessary. To live with it is necessary. Like animals, our life would depend on such literacy; a sort of well-informed conviviality.

Today, if our survival no longer strictly depends on this relationship but, at the end of the day, we find ourselves alive still, what keeps us here? Which mechanisms and processes intertwine for the sake of continuing our lives? Whichever they are, we should certainly know them well.

Here, we are surrounded by modernity’s devices: a microscope, digital screens, a transistor amplifier, speaker cones, borosilicate glassware, acrylic volumes; a pavilion built out of galvanised steel, transparent plastic and conglomerates. 
To be in the middle of such a specific collection of industrially produced materials serves us no good if the idea is to progressively go ahead. What they do well is to allow us to question such ideas of progress. They actually give us a hand with the decision to deliberately go back. We use the mechanisms of modernity in order to gain some degree of lucidity; so that we may come back to being animals, confident as they are in their position in the web of life.

​At the exhibition opening, we guided the audience through a walk in park, showing them where the soils and samples of each biome present in the show had been taken from. Observing the beginning of life in the estuary all the way up to the forest, it became clearer how the micro world relates to the macro, and what each successional stage allows us to live in companion with. Together we ate algae and acorn bread. Rotten apples gave way to the best of cider. Strength came with the forest air. We learned with the senses, so our bodies better apprehend the world, and hence it may feel to us better. 











Cabeceiras de Basto
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