Inside my being.
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
A Palimpsest of the Cityscape
Urban discoveries inspired by the
poems of Fernando Pessoa.
A Palimpsest of the Cityscape presents images with urban fragments captured in a poetic way, a subjective perspective on the urban landscape. In this virtual exhibition, I gathered artworks from the projects City Fragments and Verses, The Mysteries of Ruins and From the Untold Garden presented in the PROJECTS section.
In 2019, I spent four months in Portugal to photograph a different culture and study my perception related to the unfamiliar urban environment. I researched in various urban explorations, how the unknown environment achieves a junction with my perception while walking.
I discovered the charm of the Portuguese City through the work of the great poet Fernando Pessoa. Reading Pessoa's imaginative poems, I noticed the specific melancholy of the Portuguese people. This stimulated me to photograph only those urban details that triggered an emotion. Somehow, I associated everything I discovered while exploring the city with the concept of Saudade (a Portuguese word that describes a deep state of melancholy) and I even tried to intensify this type of melancholy in photographic images.
With the exhibition A Palimpsest of the Cityscape, I set out to present a whole range of emotions. Creating visual narratives, I was inspired to recompose through my eyes the poet's turmoils. Thus, through all the collages, I tried to transmit the emotional states and feelings of both the poet and personal, transferring them to the viewer through the created images. My vision of the poetic image of the cityscape places the urban experience in a paradigm of the imaginary.
In order to highlight my artistic vision, from Pessoa's poems, I selected verses that best summarise the whole poem. At the same time, the visual narratives were overlapped and correlated with the extracted verses, so that the transmitted message could be quickly understood by viewing a single image.
For each artwork, I composed new titles. Only part of the artworks presented in the virtual exhibition retains the original title of Pessoa’s poems and their interpretation in English. I decided to exhibit the series of collages in a virtual exhibition space in which the concept of palimpsest overlaps elements such as urban images that illustrate architectural details or everyday moments, verses from Pessoa’s poetic creation and sounds that complete the visual narratives. This overlap creates a unique experience in the virtual space.
To become a visitor to the exhibition, you must select an avatar to immerse yourself in the virtual space. The Hubs platform is optimised for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but the exhibition can also be accessed from Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Safari or other browsers. Accessed through the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the Hubs platform allows faster navigation through the virtual environment and also easily plays the dynamic images and ambient sound specially created for the exhibition atmosphere, thus completing the exhibited artworks.
The virtual exhibition A Palimpsest of the Cityscape was presented on June 29th 2022 by the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) website and the social networks of ICR Lisbon, on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The series of digital collages creates a unique experience in the virtual space.
Parts of this project were published in O Ideário Patrimonial / Nº 15, from October 2021, a biannual digital publication made by the Center of Archeology of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal and in the international journal Design | Arts | Culture / Vol. 2 of December 2021, published by Design, Interior Architecture and Audiovisual Documentation lab of the Faculty of Applied Arts and Culture of the University of West Attica Greece.
Visual narratives by Mihaela Motaianu; Verses from arquivopessoa.net; Additional sound effects from zapsplat.com.