I have been thinking of maps, of cinema as a cartographic device. From the Latin charta + graphien, cartography describes the process of elaborating maps, graphic expressions that express the world visually. As a ghost lurking around the edges of everything I see, this was the concept that guided my visit to the four temporary exhibitions held at MAC/CCB. Ultimately, distancing oneself from a ghostly presence is quite an intricate process. It is only when we become aware of it that we make it real: as if its existence is only felt when we accept it. After that, it stays with us. And perhaps this is why in all these exhibitions I notice an urge to write, a visceral pull to define and keep a record of space. Writing maps – of spaces we inhabit or of the space within us – is apparently a prerequisite for our world experience. We are cognitively flawed and that is why we write. We compulsively map the things that, apart from the unknowable, are nearest to us: urban space, intimacy and living-in-common.

On floor 0, reserved for the Architecture Centre’s programme, there are two exhibitions: Homo Urbanus. A Citymatographic Odyssey by Bêka & Lemoine and Hestnes Ferreira – Forma | Matéria | Luz.

The first, curated by Justin Jaeckle, presents Homo Urbanus, a project carried out by the creative duo Bêka & Lemoine since 2017. Arranged around the screening of four films – spawned from excerpts of the 13 city prints that have so far made up the project -, the exhibition shows the sounds and images of 13 different cities. From Tokyo to Rabat, from Venice to Bogotá, the films provide a mapping of the urban space and, at the same time, a documentation of the gestures punctuating this built territory. However, it should be noted that these cities are not labelled. This task is left to the audience. In a limbo between randomness and identification, I lingered over a long excerpt from the film shot in Naples.

With outstanding attention to detail, the Naples presented here is not far removed from the Naples I visited one week in August 2022. I see again the distinctive chaos. The azure of the sea pitted against the bare brick of the buildings in the Spanish Quarter. Madonna and Maradona. The roar of motorbikes in the steep, labyrinthine streets. Those recesses where, as W. Benjamin writes, ‘one can hardly perceive what is under construction and what has already decayed’[1]. Then, just off the coast, Vesuvius: silent, impervious, a presence with a subdued crushing force.

But there is more to this impression of Naples than meets the eye. It comes as part of a complex visual and sound fabric. The four video projections, positioned opposite each other, merge together. Likewise, the speakers are laid out in such a way as to juxtapose the soundscapes of the different cities. These exhibition decisions expand the perception field and usher in a comparison between different urban environments. From the children who bring the street into their games, to the masses that inevitably gather, I can identify a radical common to these cities. And, above all, this radical aspect lies in an uninterrupted relationship between body and city. Homo Urbanus will never survive outside the limits of concrete. Its biological pace is already the tempo of the space it inhabits. In a sort of co-definition, man maps the city, and the city – and its cartography – is engraved on his body.

The exhibition Hestnes Ferreira – Forma | Matéria | Luz follows on from this reflection. Held in partnership with Instituto Marques da Silva Foundation, it is dedicated to the work of Portuguese architect Raúl Hestnes Ferreira (1931-2018). It includes thirteen projects, including Bairro Fonsecas e Calçada, Biblioteca de Marvila and Unidade Residencial João Barbeiro, reflecting the fundamental concepts of his practice: form, matter and light. The selected architectural plans, models and photographs do reveal a concern with symmetry, proportion and the arrangement of geometric shapes. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind their affinity with a cartographic approach. Hestnes Ferreira frequently resorted to charcoal drawing. His design choices surface in the heaviest strokes, or, in other words, in the lines he repeatedly traced by hand. In this sense, more than a mapping of urban space, his work is a mapping of gestures, a graphic record of their movement – a decal of his own body in the city.

If the preceding exhibitions focus on the outside urban space, Intimidades em fuga. Em torno de Nan Goldin leads us to multiple intimate places. Curated by Nuria Enguita, the exhibition gathers works by several international artists and is built around Nan Goldin’s photographic series The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency (1973-1986). Throughout an elongated corridor of the gallery, 126 photographs from the Ellipse Collection, housed at the MAC/CCB, are sequentially displayed. They are the fruit of a personal photographic work in which Nan Goldin’s camera – ever invisible – is an extension of her own body. Fiercely vivid, these photographs chart the non-places of New York City: the hotel rooms, the queer clubs, and the inside of the houses where the artist’s group of friends would meet. They record her intimacy and, at the same time, provide an almost anthropological insight into the 70s and 80s, a period of sexual liberation, drug addiction and a worldwide AIDS epidemic.

When brought into dialogue with the remaining pieces in the exhibition, this photographic set leads us towards different interpretations of the notion of intimacy. Nan Goldin proposes that intimacy corresponds to a relationship between bodies: a romantic and sexual bond, but above all one of friendship and companionship. In Relation in Space (1977), Marina Abramović takes intimacy a step closer to an interaction between bodies in space. She shows that coexistence – even if punctuated by silence – can be profoundly intimate. With her experience in Inaugurazzione Alla Tommaseo (1977), Sanja Iveković strives to define intimacy as something close to vulnerability. The artist documents the sound of her heartbeat during the meeting with the gallery’s many visitors. Here, intimacy is an opening to a state of affectation, a permission to let the effect of other bodies spill over into one’s own. There are multiple ways of defining this. Nevertheless, we must stress that intimacy exists only because not all things are intimate. The private sphere anticipates the presence of something outside of it: the public, communal and collective space.

This dialectic between interior and exterior apparently climaxes in Fred Sandback: Alinhavando o Espaço. Curated by Lilian Tone, this exhibition comprehensively spans the American artist’s oeuvre, from 1967 to 2003, and tracks the rise of his sculptural language. Attached to the twentieth century’s second avant-garde movement, the linear constructions on display are sculptures that, as far as possible, were stripped of their weight and mass. With metal rods, elastic cables and acrylic wool threads, the artist delimited their space and volume. The result is nearly empty rooms, with wires that cut through, intersect and organise the space. These are monumental sculptures that can be kept and forgotten in a small pocket. The inside and outside of these pieces come into contact and yet we usually tend to go round them as if they were a solid structure. In this delimiting exercise, Fred Sandback epitomises the core of cartographic practice. After all, mapping is aligning space. It means to define and break down boundaries – whether they be those of a city, a building, the private sphere or a sculpture.

Homo Urbanus. A Citymatographic Odyssey by Bêka & Lemoine is at MAC/CCB until April 20; Hestnes Ferreira – Forma | Matéria | Luz until April 13; Fred Sandback: Alinhavando o Espaço until March 9; and Intimidades em fuga. Em torno de Nan Goldin until August 31.

[1] Walter Benjamin in Napoli Porosa (1924).