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The forest edges by Pedro Vaz and Lorena Solís Bravo

The exhibition Uma pedra, um ser is inspired by the artist Pedro Vaz’s journey into the Amazon forests, especially the gold trail trodden by enslaved people and originally the land of indigenous tribes.

The first work fills the room with an account. Rather than the lavish colours we usually identify with the Amazon, the artist favours shapes through black and white photography, apparently wanting to overcome his infatuation with colour to grasp something more profoundly transformative. However, between the paths travelled, a skeleton outlining a place devoid of human references, and the immensity of space, we are treated to a travel diary: not intimate, but philosophical. The table next to him is filled with materials and textures (leaves, rocks, fruit, flowers), maps and photographs, with a precision instrument for navigation in the background.

Moving on, with overlapping black and white video images (Dead, 2004) in the first room and colour videos in the second – with two projections joining together on one screen (Coaxial Window, 2019) – we are invited to comprehend space as something seemingly static, but which is teeming with life and ever-changing.

Ultimately, dealing with nature not as an entity gifted with life and spirit, but as a place to extract raw materials, was part of the commodification process that colonialism brought about, culminating in slavery and the gold route. An attempt to restore the ill-repute of the notion of exploitation is to renew its significance as one of contemplation rather than destruction.

To achieve this, wandering is made a central feature of artistic creation, in other words, the act of observing itself takes the lead. We distance ourselves from the objects being photographed to prioritise the act of photographing and interacting with the vastness of nature, a place to which we are always welcome but to which we no longer belong.

In Terra Firme, the idea of losing oneself in the territory is stressed, navigating between the sound-filled blurred image and the captured shape of the leaves, taking us out of the overarching context and emphasising the detail. The tree must be mistaken for the forest.

The final piece, the performative journey of a stone from Serra da Arrábida natural park to the exhibition site and its subsequent return, is the object on display without a medium, the opposite of the audiovisual mediation at the centre of the other pieces or the box of mirrors in Space Box.

From these excursions into the territory, we move on to Lorena Solís Bravo’s The guest, the host & the ghost, presented at Project Room • Guest Young Artist, a film also about how humans interact with nature. Although this is an imaginative journey of bodies with the forest, it is primarily a dialogue with something that dwells within us, consisting of noises that we may associate with aliens and sci-fi film scripts.

That viscous Other who speaks in the plural does not commune with the body, but rather appears to possess it. It is not so much a dance routine as a ritual in which consciousness does not partake. Out of this ritual, we absorb new ways of losing ourselves in the setting.

Lorena Solís Bravo’s The guest, the host & the ghost and Pedro Vaz’s exhibition Uma pedra, um ser are at Fundação Leal Rios until July 27.

Inês Almeida (Lisbon, 1993) has a master's degree in Modern History given by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, part of Nova' s University of Lisbon. Inês has recently completed a Post-Graduation in Curatory of Art in NOVA/FCSH, where she was part of the collective of curators responsible for the exhibition "On the edge of the landscape comes the world" and has started collaborating with Umbigo magazine.

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