edge, 2021
 

In the images of Edge we can see people on the limit of a cliff, on recreational activities, contemplating the extensive view towards the sea. The photographs are taken over a long distance, from Maria Inês Martins’s house, making the characters present in this work, not aware that they are, in fact, accidental performers in this project.    

The gestures of this figures are diverse, but together produce a sense of suspension in time and limit of a geography. We don’t know where this cliff is, but that doesn’t matter. What it matters is to think about the emancipation of the geology that is presented to us. The movement of traveling to this site generated by the force of attraction to this wide and playful space, contains in itself this opposition of physical discontinuity that forces a halt.

The layers of the cliff point to a long geologic time, a time of creation of its substrates, but also the time of its subsequent erosion and consequent revelation. Here the telluric elements become the context to the inescapable reality of the fact that we, together, are in the threshold of a new era. These images become a metaphor for the human condition in contemporary times. This stop at the edge points to the existential jump that humankind will have to perform in the present, and seems hesitant to do. 

 

Lisbon, March 2021, Bruno Pelletier Sequeira