What should be done with the stones extracted from quarries? They can be used to erect massive monuments to power and glory, like the one Salazar erected along the Tagus River to celebrate the conquerors of the Portuguese Empire. Or they can be arranged horizontally in small black and white fragments to draw all kinds of shapes and figures. Ellie Ga puts this opposition at the heart of her film, and she clearly chooses her side: that of the pavement workers in Lisbon and their disappearing craft. Pedreiras/Quarries forms a diptych with Gyres (shown in ZDB in 2021), it uses the same method: the screen is like a three-part light table, the artist’s hands and voice are her tools for a performance of choreographed thought. The movement of images that come, go, slide, are juxtaposed or superimposed, matches the pace of her speech. Everything is flattened, entrusted to the navigation of thought, or to a simple statement of facts expressed in a monotone voice – just like the hands calmly deal out the images, or Jorge, the pavement craftsman, organises black and white paving stones. While Gyres sailed on high seas, carried by ocean currents, Pedreiras/Quarries focuses on people’s hands and people’s use of stones across the ages. Her work links impersonal scientific research and personal drama as her relationship with her paralyzed brother is turned into the chorus of the film, like a starting point the story keeps coming back to. Homo sapiens hand sculpted by the tools, her brother’s disabled hand, the fork that falls from the calceteiro’s worn-out hands. What is Ellie Ga doing? She is creating a counter-History: the spirit of resistance to the glory of power, force and conquest is expressed in her care and tenderness for weakness, mistake and oversight.
Based on a text by Cyril Neyrat
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Ellie about Karin
When I first arrived in Lisbon for a residency 2019, I had already spent several years gathering material about the hand’s relationship to stone. I was slightly embarrassed to tell Lisboners my growing obsession with calçada. What a tourist! But the more I learned about the history of the calçada, the more I looked and understood calçada as a type of philospher’s stone, where we can trace multiple narratives leading to forced labor, colonization, knowledge on the verge of obsolesce and the humble gesture of leaving a mark in the face of anonymity.
I was carrying around an out of print, enormous book, really much too heavy to be used as a field guide and yet offering up detailed itineraries of 1983 Lisbon (Empedrados artísticos de Lisboa). I wondered about photographer Karin Monteiro, who was she, what had she been thinking about, head down photographing the ground making her way through the city. Through an extraordinary series of coincidences, I befriended Karin Monteiro. We started a correspondence which became one of the stories woven through my film Quarries. Through our correspondences, I learned about her photography work in Mozambique and Portugal which spanned several decades. When I finally had a chance to visit her (she was based in Sintra at the time), I was overjoyed to see shelves in her office filled with canisters of negatives, including the negatives for the Empedrados book. One conversation lead to another and in December 2024, Karin donated much of her ‘espolio’ to the Arquivo Municipal. This is the first exhibition in Lisbon based on this work. Karin, who currently lives in Maputo, wrote to me last week to say that she wanted people to know that the photos Natxo and I selected for this exhibition, was to her a metaphor of the crumbling of the empire.
