Marilá Dardot
Lisbon Blues
21.Nov.2018 - 2.Fev. 2019
Lisbon Blues (2018) is the title of the art installation in the nanogallery, composed of around thirty boxes, which precisely reflects the markings that Lisbon bares in its contemporaneity. These boxes, as a whole, form a near mono-chromatic blueish blotch. Collected by Marilá Dardot (1973, Belo Horizonte) throughout the course of four months, they have not been subjected to any intervention or pictorial process by the artist. The blueish hue they all display is due, in fact, to the solar exposure they were subjected to throughout their existence on the window displays of small Lisbon shops. These boxes that have remained for years on display, and the resulting chromatic changes, are a reflection of the permanence/transience and sustainability/erratic-change contradictions of the socioeconomic and political dynamics, be they at the neighborhood level, be they at city or country level. Just as the monochromatic hue of the boxes reveals an erasing of the colors that made up their identities – the last colors to resist solar exposure throughout time are blue and black – so do the recent and constant changes in the typical neighborhoods of Lisbon eliminate many of their sociocultural anchors and meeting points and spots of community relations, changing their sustainable urban dynamics in a drastic fashion.
Despite the complete absence of the human element in the sculpture-installation, Lisbon Blues recontextualizes and reconfigures the objects, turning them into silent – or silenced – protagonists of nostalgic environments that oscillate, like the places of contemporary Lisbon, between the private and the public spheres, in a contrast between intimate and alienating. Just like the last boxes that remained on the window displays suffering a process of change in their chromatic characteristics, those “last ones standing” who still keep their traditional, typical shops in Lisbon neighborhoods – that were (trans)formed by and grew with them – also find themselves at a point of (trans)formation of the new socioeconomic and cultural dynamics that are leading us to a process of urbanistic (de)configuration never before experienced by the city. What is left to figure out – and determine – is if this process will self-regulate in a close dialogue with the traditional stories and characteristics of the city or if this process will result in a point of no-return of gentrification and disneylandification of the city, where the identity of the city would become not the experience of daily life but rather a simulacrum of that experience through fac simile nostalgic elements, a Lisbon Blues.