Precarious Intervals

 

(2022)

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Precarious Intervals was created during an art residency at PADA studios located in Barreiro, in Lisbon's South Bay. The studio is situated in the old Companhia União Fabril (CUF) industrial park, which formerly employed 10,000 workers, utilizing resources from the Portuguese colonies to produce a diverse range of goods from petrochemicals to carpets.

The artwork comprises photographs silk-screen printed onto fabric sewn into a quilted floor piece as well as live performance. I worked with two damcers whom I photographed and filmed in the abandoned industrial park. We created a choreographic piece inspired by the skeletal ruins of buildings that once housed the body movements associated with manual labour and production. The performance was staged in PADA's gallery space, the movements reflecting the muscle memories of the abandoned site stripped of its original function.

The project challenges the 'image-body' both in a contemporary image culture and in the past industrial era, when the distance between body, image and apparatus was less proximate. The quilt narrates tales of my time in Barreiro from personal viewpoints while exploring the 'phantom limbs' of industrialism and the new era of technology, labor, image, and somatic body. 

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Materials; photographs silkscreen printed fabric, synthetic hair, jute.

Performance: 20min, dancers; Sara Montalvao and Rebecca Mateus

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More about the group exhibition at PADA here: https://www.padastudios.com/exhibitions-2022/033

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This project is funded by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee

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