The urban landscape can define the identity of a community.
Fractal Worlds
Discovering fractal worlds through
psychogeographic experience in the community of Mação, Portugal.
Starting from the idea that a community has a fractal identity, I conducted a psychogeographical experiment in Mação. The universe is built on the laws of fractal geometry. Life itself unfolds in similar patterns – we can see these patterns most clearly in Nature. Through psychogeographical explorations, I discovered fractal qualities in the details. Moving from the whole to the detail and from the detail to the whole, I was carried away by the pleasure of discovering the everyday universe by experiencing this mode of perception.
I created four visual narratives to show that community life is fractal: my main argument is that every small detail reflects and contains the spirit of the entire town.
Visual narratives through the psychogeographic experience. Mação was a new environment for me. In 2019, for two months, I carefully explored everything I encountered at every turn. The more I analyzed the details, the clearer the whole picture became. I translated my own experience as a flâneur into visual narratives, aiming to convey my vision of the small fractal universes that comprise parts of the Mação community's identity. These four visual narratives result from a psychogeographical study of the place. They follow a fractal model. The first narrative presents an overview of the city and its communion with nature, while the second and third narratives present life within the city and the action of time upon it, penetrating as deeply as possible into the structure of matter and revealing micro-communities. With the fourth visual narrative, I return to the overview, this time presenting the city in celebration, full of color, with a dynamic that integrates all the fractal components. With this last narrative, I tried to recompose the community's overview in Mação.
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The City and Nature • My first contact with Mação revealed how the city and its community reflect a fractal structure found in Nature, making their connection apparent. By examining these details, I reveal how they repeat themselves at all levels — the central concept underlying this project. Through this process, I discovered a layered world that took shape as I examined the details closely.
I visualized the inhabited community as an anthropomorphic form inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino's work, Invisible Cities (2011). The way he constructs vivid images of his cities opened up this perspective for me to perceive communities and cities in this unique way.
Cobbled streets wind past buildings, their architecture blending with gardens of olive, orange, and lemon trees. Pergolas draped in flowers make it hard to see where the city ends and Nature begins.
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The forms of Time • The expanding Nature, the old walls and the sunlight introduced me to a fascinating world, enticing me to look for smaller and smaller details. The more I analysed the details, the better I outlined the whole thing. I set out in search of Time, capturing its manifestations in fractal images. I searched for Time on the facades of buildings, watching the transformations of matter. I analysed how Nature regains her rights and discovered how the forms of Time can generate imaginary worlds. Even a simple crack in a wall in which a small plant has made its place and expanded to form a small community can have its own story. Perhaps the narrow streets where the walls of the ruins transformed into real art galleries were the ones that signalled this temporal-fractal perception to me. Nowhere else could I have better observed how Time erodes human action, as I had the opportunity to analyse the facades of the houses in Mação their resistance to Time.
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Light, colour and texture • To understand the spirit of a community it is necessary to pay attention to every little thing. For two months, I observed the urban landscape and studied the action of light on the shapes, colours and textures of various architectural elements or natural forms. I watched as their volume was highlighted by the play of light and shadow. Sometimes I resorted to the imagination to enter into a visual dialogue with light. I let myself be guided by it through outdoor or indoor spaces, following the details of places that the light placed before me at the same time with the invitation to discover their stories. Under the action of light, static forms came to life. Exploring the environment I can say that I witnessed a real show in which the buildings, the flowers, the trees full of fruit, and the crumbling walls, became the stars of a certain moment of the day under the action of light. The multitude of shapes, colours and textures that complete the urban landscape of Mação, has been my guide in shaping the image of the community.
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Community and Feast • The fractal structures of Nature, as well as of social life, take place in a cyclical form: the seasons follow the same cyclical form and the days and nights transform the everyday universe into a repetitive sequence of events. Festive moments unite the community every year, and this revival of the same moments is an occasion for celebration. The daily life of Mação itself took place in a fractal form, the quiet days alternated with moments of celebration full of dynamism and colour, where we could notice a communion of all the elements that make up the habitat: Nature, people and their homes. People decorated their homes during the festive moments; I noticed the presence of Nature in the decorations present on the facades of buildings and even on the streets, transforming the cobbled roads into colourful carpets of flowers and beautiful smelling plants. Like the groups of people who wore wonderful colourful clothes, the City puts on its own festive clothes animating the quiet streets.
The visual discourses that accompany my text represent a kaleidoscope of feelings and, at the same time, materialize moments of joy and delight from my psychogeographic experience in Mação, presented in fractal form. Exploring the urban environment of Mação was an intense spiritual experience that reconfigured my perception of the world around me and determined me to create an all-encompassing picture of everyday life in Mação.