SIMALA’s old plastics factory premises were Nuno Sousa Vieira’s shelter and studio for decades. The area was immense, with vast working grounds, never ignoring, retouching or erasing the passage of time and the shutdown of factory activities. Space, past and present, compounded by the built heritage and affective or family memories, was Sousa Vieira’s driving force and field of research from an early stage.

Each work was an extensive industrial archaeological expedition dedicated to the rescue, treatment, recreation, simulation and interpretation of the life that was, is and could be. From this standpoint, we cannot help but perceive in his work a critical view of the project of Modernity and its constructions and productions (in the most brutal and human facet): work, hyper-production, rationality, the idea of progress, scientificity – but also error, deviation, failure have an important role in his work. Finding a sense within the whole legacy of modernity and the post-industrial age seems to be evident in major works throughout his career.

The studio was a catalyst, a magnifying glass and an artistic diary of his world-view. Simultaneously studio and ruin, the former SIMALA was one of those mysterious locations that few had the opportunity and privilege to enter. It was an ambivalent and exciting place, which forced the visitor to confront a temporal and spatial side that does not follow the guidelines of a certain perspective, perhaps bourgeois or acetic, of reality, rejecting the otherness of dangerous edges and vertices, mildew on the walls, broken glass, the lack of electricity, basic sanitation and comfort. In fact, everything there denied and refused convenience or well-being. Everything there seemed to refuse leisure, relaxation. It was a working place, forcing the artist to constantly fine-tune his position, perception and understanding of the world and life.

Inhabitants or imitating the walk is the first exhibition that the artist has conceptualized after leaving the SIMALA building, but it is not a melancholic requiem or a sorrowful and nostalgic exercise. There is more hope than sadness here, more optimism than pessimism, more transformation than crystallization. The artistic act, as the artist has mentioned on other occasions, should not be held hostage to a place: space is a plastic matter, changeable, mutable, capable of embracing multitudes within it – simulations of many other places, scales, dimensions, as 3×4 | Para ver (2023) suggests. Space is a subversive potential, capable of transforming and metamorphosing, in its relational and occupational purpose, the mirror of a life in perpetual movement and vibration.

Everything about Inhabitants or imitating the walk appears to point to this kinetic quality – sometimes elusive and transitory, but nevertheless capable of affecting a chain of events – of life. The works and the construction of space demand of the reader a peripatetic wandering. Fazer da queda uma escada (2023), Pé esquerdo (2010-2023), 3 x 4 | Para ver (2023), Salpico (1, 2, 3, 4 e 5) (2023), Peças de sombra e outros brilhos 2 (2023), and the impressive Em memória da luz extinta (2023) force the body to move, to examine the pieces from multiple angles and points of view, against the backdrop of an ever-changing glow and shadow.

In fact, light and shadow – or brightness, colour and shade – are determining presences in this exhibition. The artist said to a group: “the works carry their own shadow” – as if the objects could gather times, spaces; as if the objects had a chromatic and luminous memory that recorded their passage through the world; as if the objects comprised a surreal – super-real, even surrealistic – understanding of life, capable of deconstructing places, perspectives, perceptions and conventions. The works are a palimpsest of tonalities, timings and touches. Like a body made of blemishes, signs and scars, they keep in themselves the traumas and changes of the ages, the affectation of the different spaces within us.

Between shoe soles, lamps suspended from the ceiling taken from SIMALA; between planes, juxtapositions, intersections and junctions, we also notice that Sousa Vieira’s path has also been, or above all, punctuated by defying norms. Attentive to the gallery floor, among the crowd that attended the inaugural happening, we quickly realize that the rubber soles rescued from SIMALA’s dereliction are all from a left foot. In the text-manifesto that launched the editorial project Esconso, Sousa Vieira emphasizes the need for art to oppose consensus, to be a pebble in the gears of the world – an oblique lens on an orthogonality that ought to be destroyed to sprout new spaces, challenging a single central perspective, a single vanishing point that bends into one place. As the artist says, “For me, this unevenness between a right-handed world and a left-handed ability is the equivalent of the gap between the common vision that we produce in everyday life, which pursues normalized recognition and categorization, and that which results from the artistic glance, which tries to denaturalize what is observed, offering this experience as a questioning.” In other words, the artist must have a “left skill” to time, to society, to contemporaneity… to the world. Between the soles, photographs of blunders in chain production, deviations and failures that resulted from errors of machines and workers. And this failure is the beauty of difference, of what goes out of orbit, piercing and battering a canon to make it even more beautiful, even more human.

Although not a retrospective exhibition, since everything on display is recent, Inhabitants or imitating the walk is an exercise on twenty years of practice, displaying the discipline and the work in close dialogue with a space that is now waiting and definitively deserted. In the new installations in Leiria and Lisbon, at Atelier do Rego, Nuno Sousa Vieira preserves remnants of that space in many pieces, aligned in a new order, in a new dialectic, always transformative and humanized – an evident Heraclitism of this idea of movement, of change, visible throughout the exhibition.

Inhabitants or imitating the walk is at Galeria 3 + 1 Arte Contemporânea until September 9.