Director: Pola Sieverding

Producer: Maumaus Artists-in-Residence Programme/Lumiar Cité

Year: 2011

Runtime: 15’

Colour



Funded by: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura/Direcção Geral das Artes

The exhibition CLOSE TO CONCRETE, by Pola Sieverding, arised from the artistʼs residency in Lisbon over the summer of 2011, during which she filmed and photographed the Alta de Lisboa neighbourhood where the Lumiar Cité gallery is situated. The exhibition included a photography and video installation in which the artist moved her gaze from people, her focus in previous work, to the glass and concrete walls that form the urban fabric of Alta de Lisboa.

The video that the artist created can be seen as a wandering gaze upon formalism, touching on concrete manifestations of utopia and questioning the meaning of the abstract representation of space as a living space. Utopia appears as a non-place that can be viewed as a sculptural structure without a connection to a particular place, producing, nevertheless, a space that becomes social and mental. The video sound track is a variation of the opening sequence from Sergio Leoneʼs film “Cʼera una volta il West”. In that film, the landscape and its sounds emphasise the inner tension of the characters and a sound-scape is added to the visual space. Based on this method, and also alluding to Michelangelo Antonioniʼs film “Lʼeclisse”, Sieverding regards architecture as a visual correspondent, a character in its own right, to refer to a potential human space.

A visual sense of the landscape that in most of the images denotes a lack of a clear trajectory, as well as a sonic space semi out of sync with the visual space, suggest a narrative for the existing form, not only in the representation of its surface but also in the absence of what it contains.