To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin – the ruin of my happiness. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
The Mysteries of the Ruins
A Study of Experiential Archeology of a Poem by Fernando Pessoa
"I am made from the ruins of the unfinished, and it is a landscape of renunciation that would define my being."
(Fernando Pessoa, 1888-1935)
The experiential archaeology project presented was carried out in three cities in Portugal, Mação, Tomar and Lisbon and analyses, from a poetic perspective, the effects of Time on the matter. In front of the force of Nature that transforms matter as if trying to continue human creation, during psychogeographic pilgrimages, I am sometimes carried away by imagination interpreting the details captured in photographs as discreet or obvious signs on the walls of ruins that invite me to listen to the stories of their past.
I imagined the city as an archaeological site, so I used visual metaphors made by condensing personal photographs, to present a research of experiential archaeology of imaginary ruins, inspired by verses of Fernando Pessoa from the poem No lugar dos palácios desertos e em ruínas | In place of deserted and ruined Palaces. The poem was published under the name Álvaro de Campos (one of the various heteronyms of the poet Fernando Pessoa).
Reading these verses, I entered the realm of imagination. Here is my interpretation of this poem. The verses describe places where deserted and ruined palaces touch the sea, places where those who know how to love can make their own shadow from the light because they know how to read the mysteries of the fates and conquer the heights.
Keeping the essence of the lyrics, I generated four different perspectives of the poem. These four perspectives are developed accordingly with four distinct visual narratives that present stories about ruins; however, the visualizations of the same verses aim to appear as if dividing, but also telling a single story at the same time. The project The Mysteries of the Ruins contains four visual narratives recreated from the verses of No lugar dos palácios desertos e em ruínas poem. For each of the four images, I created a new title.
The visual narratives were included in the article A Study of Experiential Archaeology of a Poem by Fernando published in Design | Arts | Culture / Vol.2, December 2021.
Deep Walls
Waves of Thoughts
The Path that Floods the Blue
