Photographic Mapping of the Territory

The oldest photographs here were taken in the city of Évora in 1988. The most recent ones are from the present year, done in September. This photographic mapping of Portugal has been ongoing for almost four decades and comprises over 2,400,000 photographs. When we travel extensively across the country and walk through densely populated cities and pristine natural areas, we cannot help but free ourselves from the materiality of images in an attempt to understand an increasingly complex reality.

The photographic mapping of the territory is a reading of space and time; it is the creation of a ground where everything is evolutionary and evolving; it is the approximation between art and science, in the establishment of networks and connections; it is the interpretation of human knowledge; it is not fearing to approach any subject, however unlimited and labyrinthine it may be; it is the realisation that there is a common origin to all living things; it is seeking the meaning of architecture as a unique biological invention; it is glimpsing tomorrow in the inhabited present.

In this case, the act of collecting photographs is a performative movement on the land. The mark it leaves behind is a collection of images. It is an intense experience of life, of concentration and full focus. At the same time, functional daily life, and its multiple responses to concrete requests, are absent. This work is disruptive, contaminated by scattered thoughts concerning the past, the present and the near future. Each trip, each walk, is different from all the others. Successive layers of memory and dialogue with each other.

Thought is freed from images. Words, phrases and short texts come together to form a diagram summarising the entire work. Through documentary, observational photography, we also seek to expand the scope of creativity and redefine architecture beyond the materiality we associate with it. Ideas question the entire evolutionary, organic process to reflect on the present time, when ecological balances are being broken.