Updated: Sep 16
My empathy with the Douro Valley is weird. It's an old thing. I remember, when I was a child, some trips with my parents and, even then, I already felt that the land owned me. It was as if each landscape element spoke close to me. On any terrace, any cypress or white cluster, that rises here and there, everything seems so familiar, as if the earth and the voice that I hear inside my head talked the same language.
Updated: Sep 16
About Alexandra Barbosa's art. Since I saw her work for the first time there was an instant connection, which extended to the personal field as we have known better each other. The work of Alexandra revolves around a beloved theme to me - the house - and it's interesting to see how other authors, non architects, think about it. Before any other image of the house, the first that ever visit my head is the 'house' as a space. On the daily exercise of my work, I try to understand how people live or could possible live. My quest is essentially achieve a proposal that fit these specific ways of living and, if it is possible, enhance it, by designing solutions that can generate some other forms of dwelling. The greatest difficulty in this whole process is to find the balance between the materialization of the idea and the freedom that the same idea gives to the audience who will be experiencing it. What do I mean with this? The idea of producing an architecture that overlaps the dwelling, in which space characteristics require users of living this or that way, doesn't please me so much. My everyday question is: How far do I have the right to intervene, while proposing new ways of living? I think this will be forever the question of my life. The boundary between a 'democratic' architecture while creative is very tenuous, History proves it. The most extraordinary works, by the creative point of view, are often examples of a 'dictator' architecture, not to say almost always. Baroque is a good example of that. Producing intentionally, by space design, an idea of illusion on users is, by itself, a form of manipulation, no matter how generous the intentions might be in its genesis. By carefully analyzing Alexandra's work, the question I put myself before arises even more pertinent. For her, the house is primarily a refuge, a place where we can put our emotions at safe and defend our memories. It's a concept of house as an uterus, which protects and nurtures, which cares and welcomes. All her iconography wander around the idea of the house as home, of the house as affection, with all the inherent vicissitudes. Alexandra did not materialize in her prints the image of a perfect home. Sometimes we are faced with a kind of shell-house, protective, sometimes it appears as an eternal maze, by the overlap of shapes that outline spaces and confusing paths, stairways and corridors that seem to lead us nowhere. However, despite the greater or lesser serenity of each picture, to Alexandra's the house is always a refuge place, it is the uterus that we can always return, no matter how wandering the way might be. It is the mother. It is the house that welcomes the faithful and the prodigal son. It is the background of the eternal human imperfection. Above all, it is the house that doesn't dictate rules and understands. These are the houses we want Alexandra.
Updated: Sep 16
I am an absolute beginner, I don't know if it is about the adrenaline of the beginnings, or by the conclusion that, everyday, I discover that I am less sure and there are a lot of new paths to follow. I have written in several blogs, a task that I often abandoned, sometimes for the lack of time and some others by the discouragement of a daily discipline in saying something. Lately, I've been feeling again that will of writing something and today I decided that it was the day! Writing this post, I put myself some questions: why doing this blog? for what and for whom? which objectives, if there are some? Here are the answers:
1. a blog by the need of communication, telling what I think and what I do, although it may not have any direct contact or anyone that might read;
2. for people who somehow identify themselves with what I think and may find reviewed on the published contents;
3. the purpose - mainly, to keep faithful on what I believe and understand where are those, who somehow have something in common. There are no more questions or answers. The thing boils down to this. Thank you.
