Pedro Gadanho is the author of the projects shown in the exhibition that he is curating within the scope of the Lisbon Architecture Triennial 2010, under the heading Falemos de Casas [Let’s Talk about Houses]. The photographs and videos on show confront us with the working process of four visual artists, and a photographer who specializes in architecture.
The authors and the projects: Filipa César, with the video Stereo, featuring Galeria Presença, 1998/2002; João Paulo Feliciano, on his apartment in Lisbon, 2001/2010, photographic collage; Daniel Malhão, on the Ellipse Foundation, 2006, photography; Edgar Martins on Casa GMG, 2010, photography; and Fernando Guerra, on Casa Baltasar, 2007, photography.
Interiores should be seen as an author’s conception unfurling from within. Like a spiral that has its epicentre in Pedro Gadanho’s architectural production, and its ramifications in the work of the artists and photographers that form the documented and exhibited corpus. The breadth of this project also includes the publishing of a book with a limited print run. It is important to state that Pedro Gadanho’s activity attempts to speak of an architecture beyond the projects he creates, disseminating through areas such as curating, editing and fictional writing.
Pedro Gadanho’s architecture operates on the idea of difference, intimacy and desire, without losing sight of the connection to the cultural and urban context of the spaces upon which he reflects and works. This practice of architecture, which is more closely dedicated to the entrails and inner life of secluded spaces, has existed alongside the virtuoso practice of interior decoration and the potentialities of interior design, which Gadanho knows but resists. This act of resistance exposes his thinking on the construction and the experience of place, conflating the use of the prop, or of objects created according to functional and aesthetic standards, to the creation of a system of interactions that relates the dynamic use of liveable space and its required utensils to a contamination by references from the external world which ultimately unfold from architecture, art and the everyday objects that surround us. Between a language that is erudite and one that is popular.
The interiors that are shown to us through film, photography or video are independent from the descriptions of each project’s intentions. They should be observed as openings into the process through which the authors have experienced the spaces, beyond the proximity or the truth that we seek in each image.
