Walk the Curve, by Ayelen Peressini + Inês Teles
The São Bento Hill is a pre-historical archaeological place in Évora. A massive granite slab has witnessed the civilizational passage from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, the long-lost human fluxes and struggles, the transitional and gregarious communities that have branded their mark there. In front of it, there’s a landscape that unfurls throughout Alentejo and Évora’s morphological softness. It is above it that Ayelen Peressini and Inês Teles have developed their work Walk the Curve, which has won them a nomination in the well-regarded architecture website ArchDaily.
Walk the Curve highlights the place, the region and the city in which it is installed. The gesture is a mirror of the organic curves of the countryside, elevating itself from the ground, encompassing the site, and holding the windmills in its vicinity. Its construction is a contemporary effort between ancient practices – the rammed earth, deeply rooted in the local, vernacular architectural heritage – and present ones, between the plasticity of materials and the perennity of forms, while referencing Richard Serra’s idea of walking as a mediating, meditative and measuring exercise.
This commission is a public installation and can be visited by anyone interested. It serves as a viewpoint for the city of Évora, for the temporal and spatial layers that encircles it and it also serves as an anthropological, archaeological and historical knowledge that is important to remember and unearth.