When I traveled from Porto to Lisbon by motorway, I always observed with curiosity a small patch of the landscape that appeared on my right side, just before arriving in Lisbon, a kind of gorge. For those traveling at 120 km / h, this period of time is exactly 21 seconds. At a certain time of the day and when the sun’s inclination is greater, a huge shadow takes over the place, anticipating twilight, as if the night arrived there first. ’(1)

A space where everything is organized according to its interior plan, especially in accordance with the relationships that take place between men, animals, and the natural environment. The valley results from these temporal modes as the French historian Fernand Braudel defined it: biological time that of the individual, social time that of human cultures, their mental structures, beliefs, habits, and customs.

It is this infrastructure of the place, of its interior and exterior relations, the mental projection of time that history and these places provide us, the vision of a landscape in constant transformation, the silence it brings with it, the object of my project.

The pieces of this puzzle never seem to run out and are themselves capable of forming as many images as we want. To feed any and all stories. This place ambiguously constitutes, before that overwhelming reality of the facts, a set of transformable things and it is this possibility of elaborating controversial games, between the subjective and the objective, between the authenticity and the false, that motivates this work.

(1) Excerpt from the text of play 21s, video, 2010.

– Eduardo Matos