Joana Nascimento

SimLugares

“SimLugares” (“yes-places”) is a project concerned with territory and landscape, in the sense of people’s relationship with each other on a (rural) context, and the interaction between people and space (which they use and own).

I am interested in issues related to identity, representation and landscape.On this project this concern turns to both geographical and territorial spaces where transformation of the landscape is apparent through adeactivated construction/infrastructure (deprived of its inaugural function).Escapin Marc Augé’s concept of non-places, I’m interested in the concept of common place, connected with the place’s psycho-geographic recognition.According to Henri Léfebvre (a Marxist thinker),the activation of a place is made through its own dynamics, and the meaning of a certain spaceis less related to its construction than to the uses it allows.

It’s a question of understanding a place through the associated images,memories and uses and, through these elements, exposing the way people relate to the landscape that surrounds them.

Whenever society changes, landscape changes with it. I’m interested in exploring in a plastic way the relationship between diffuse territorial representations and abandoned spaces.

In Nodar, the representation of the place was made using different means,in two separate phases: Firstly, surveying the place by making conceptual and cognitive maps;questionnaires to the population about memories they keep of a certain place; Audio, video and photographic documentation.In the second phase, the purpose was to create a fiction with the gathered and produced elements,considering a methodology based on walking,recognizing a place through the act of walking,which has a some what performative character and seeks to promote a possible dialogue with adormant place and to document it.

The project’s presentation involved the editing of different documents about the place that were previously collected and produced.

My research on the idea of mental landscape doesn’t remove it from its factual component.The conversion of this invisible landscape into a visual document implies a leap from the everyday life, from triviality, to anexceptional situation.

In the city,within the routine, landscape becomes invisible.In the countryside, the everyday relationship with space is different;there isn’t that kind of alienation.Routine here is closely linked to the space.The idea of public space is naturally different. The logic of private property is managed naturally, sometimes over generations, and circumstances may lead to situations of shared spaces;there is agreater fluidity between the private and the public domains. The places are more or less public depending on the people.

Joana Nascimento is a Portuguese visual artist. She holds a BSc in Fine Arts–Sculpture by the Fine Arts Faculty of Oporto, where she is currently developing an investigation called “Territorialization of Spaces, [In] Visibilities–An approach to ‘performative’ Space and Time in Artistic Practices for Public Space”, in 2nd year Master of Art and Design for the Public Space. In 2006/07 she studied Scenography and Intermedia at Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Krakowie, Poland.

She is also a member of the “Inner-city” multidisciplinary working group, whose main concerns are local approaches to public space and she participated in several collective exhibitions in Portugal, Spain and Poland.