The Luzboa 04 festival – Bienal Internacional da Luz in Lisbon – presents itself as a cultural event of urban nature, in a strategy of requalifying Public Spaces and encouraging the cultural offer of contemporary art. The celebration of the Light as a pretext, the cultural revitalization as a context.
Among others, Luzboa invites agents and cultural institutions from the city to idealize projects.
The Extra-Muros Association and the Franco-Portuguese Institute challenged ZDB to design an exhibition that positioned itself on the City and the Light.
The “Illuminated City” exhibition to open at ZDB on June 24th is the result of this context.
At ZDB, interventions/installations by four Portuguese artists will be presented, as well as a specific program that will include conferences and debates.
The premises of this project come from a critical reflection about the city: organic entity, aggregator of people and services, a desired balance between rights and duties for a civic coexistence.
The city of light, the city we have versus the city we desire, the participating city, raises critical questions as wide as the redefinition of the specificities of spatiality, and the notion of politics in contemporary art.
ZDB becomes a public, critical and operational space marked by the interventions of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Sancho Silva, João Tabarra and the collective ZDB.
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, present three projects:
“The Colossus”, a 16mm color film, which starts with the story of the Cardiff giant. In the mid-19th century, the discovery of a buried stone colossus caused a sensation, and later controversy for falsification and public fraud. The two artists recreate in a documentary short the discovery of an artifact submerged in a mud lake.
The (false) idol brings together a golden magic to be deconstructed. The register fluctuates between the true proportion (visual registration of the document) and the false proportion (the collective investment is excessively ingenious and theatrical).
“S / Título”, is an installation that draws a paramnesic space of representation (sensation of dejá-vu) guided by perceptual deviations.
In an obscured 15-meter corridor and due to optical mechanisms in real time, the eye is caught by an image / movement of a flame projected on the back wall.
Second version of a piece presented in the exhibition DeParamnésia part 3, Tercenas / ZDB in December 2002.
“O Homem Magnético”, takes up the paraccientific and historical theme that characterizes much of the work of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. The real imaginable through analogue or the resumption of circus imagery from the end of XIX transposed to the 21st century.
João Tabarra, presents a video projection:
“Apparent Phenomena study 2” proposes an intervention that speaks of the city space, the human organizational space, starting from the fears and constant and repeated ruptures associated with it. In a video installation, the organization of urban territories, their spatial, physical and emotional organization will be taken to their limits and limits.
Sancho Silva, an artist residing in New York invites the architect Pedro Rogado to elaborate the piece/installation “Vertizonte”, and proposes another work, fruits of his residency at the Gallery.
The works “Vertizonte” and “Pixel” are specific architectural interventions and stand out for the element of surprise as well as the mechanisms, always present, of voyeurism and surveillance. The works present at the Gallery question how spaces are defined, how their limits and boundaries are designed, demarcated and transformed.
The ZDB collective resizes the entry and proposes a participatory program.
“Proximity Service” is a convivial proposal, the result of democratic normalization. In the ambit of associative and citizen participation, the ZDB lobby becomes a public space, conducive to the demonstration, civil meeting and discussion of ideas. This intervention proposes a program of conferences and debates during the opening days of the exhibition.
