This exhibition brings together the work of two photographers and an architect around Vila Nova de Santo André, drawing distinct languages and practices into a shared reflection. Between designed projects, urban landscapes and fragments of memory, a sensitive field of relations between image, space and materiality begins to emerge.
Vila Nova de Santo André was a new town built to support the Sines industrial complex. Designed to accommodate 100,000 inhabitants, it is now home to only 10,000, bearing the stigma of failure or of a lost opportunity. The photographs by Paulo Catrica and Sebastiano Raimondo explore the potential of the “unfinished” and invoke Walter Benjamin’s idea of “revolutionary pessimism” in order to challenge preconceived readings and reveal the critical significance of this territory. Rui Mendes’s drawings make visible the projective thinking behind a new town, unfolding through the stories inscribed in these inhabited landscapes.