ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins. Lesson #3
July
2021
Mon
5
ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #3
Pedra no Rim. Fabrizio Matos, Israel Pimenta and João Araújo, Map of Spoils
Today’s class turned our eyes to the ground. The ceramics workshop Pedra no Rim maps the borough of Bonfim by covering its streets paying attention to its ugliest, crawling side, the aspect of the city we tend to ignore, we’d rather not see, even knowing it is there, part of our daily lives and of the landscape, and defines the boundaries of the territory we inhabit, in a fallible invisibility. The name of the collective (“kidney stone”) points straight away to the discomfort of its agenda: to revive the spoils one wishes to conceal from sight and that the very sight almost instinctively dismisses, given their repulsive and repellent nature.
But this map is not limited to a sort of urban archaeology as it gathers the material traces of human presence. Fabrizio Matos, Israel Pimenta and João Araújo photograph (and occasionally collect and carry to the workshop) grotesque objects found on the ground (from trainers and hairpieces to frogs squashed by cars and pigeons attacked by seagulls) to turn them into beautiful objects in a ceramics tradition to which the borough of Bonfim is also closely linked. In this case, however, there is criticism of industrial ceramics and touristic souvenir—Pedra no Rim has been learning by itself for the last three and a half years, and as it is lead by visual artists who decided to look at the ground, it faces yet another “sad sight”.
The idea here is not to embellish ugliness, to launder or to lightly or comically reproduce disgusting objects, but essentially to make political satire and to cast a critical eye on the city and specifically on the borough of Bonfim. In the class-lecture by Pedra no Rim, before touring the borough to get to the site of the workshop, we learned to mould a run-over frog, which is a serial reference to the far-right presence in the borough, to also keep in mind that there will soon be elections.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #3
Pedra no Rim. Fabrizio Matos, Israel Pimenta and João Araújo, Map of Spoils
By Gisela Leal
Today’s class turned our eyes to the ground. The ceramics workshop Pedra no Rim maps the borough of Bonfim by covering its streets paying attention to its ugliest, crawling side, the aspect of the city we tend to ignore, we’d rather not see, even knowing it is there, part of our daily lives and of the landscape, and defines the boundaries of the territory we inhabit, in a fallible invisibility. The name of the collective (“kidney stone”) points straight away to the discomfort of its agenda: to revive the spoils one wishes to conceal from sight and that the very sight almost instinctively dismisses, given their repulsive and repellent nature.
But this map is not limited to a sort of urban archaeology as it gathers the material traces of human presence. Fabrizio Matos, Israel Pimenta and João Araújo photograph (and occasionally collect and carry to the workshop) grotesque objects found on the ground (from trainers and hairpieces to frogs squashed by cars and pigeons attacked by seagulls) to turn them into beautiful objects in a ceramics tradition to which the borough of Bonfim is also closely linked. In this case, however, there is criticism of industrial ceramics and touristic souvenir—Pedra no Rim has been learning by itself for the last three and a half years, and as it is lead by visual artists who decided to look at the ground, it faces yet another “sad sight”.
The idea here is not to embellish ugliness, to launder or to lightly or comically reproduce disgusting objects, but essentially to make political satire and to cast a critical eye on the city and specifically on the borough of Bonfim. In the class-lecture by Pedra no Rim, before touring the borough to get to the site of the workshop, we learned to mould a run-over frog, which is a serial reference to the far-right presence in the borough, to also keep in mind that there will soon be elections.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
© José Caldeira / TMP
© José Caldeira / TMP
© José Caldeira / TMP
