CASA — POSSE — LAR is our response to the challenge launched by the Câmara Municipal de Miranda do Corvo for the inauguration exhibition of the Casa Das Artes. In our capacity as architects-builders of houses, inhabitants of this municipality and, at the same time, directors of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, what we propose to you is an exhibition that combines works from our private collection with works from the collection of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. It is a group of five works that have in common the concern to reflect on the three words that give the title to this exhibition CASA — POSSE — LAR. A house only truly becomes a home when we take possession of it, when it belongs to us physically and emotionally, when it amplifies the space of our intimacy.

Pavilhão de Jardim its Atelier do Corvo's proposal that underlines the possibility of finding a place of extended intimacy in the enclosure of a garden.
 

The two mannequins, S/título by Ana Rito reminds us of the feminine condition of the home in the enigmatic presence of two bodies of women without recognizable faces.

NON DOMINIS, by Pedro Valdez Cardoso reflects on the vandalization of common heritage, when we think it does not belong to us and seek to appropriate it in an abusive way.

Lar by Pedro Medeiros is a work about the minimum existence of the homeless — or homeless in a direct translation from English — reduced here to a supermarket shopping car, where we can read a fierce criticism of consumer society and of neo-liberal capitalism without rules.

Finally, the couch, S/título, by Pedro Campos Rosado reminds us, in this context, of the ability of individual ownership of the house by the user that the furniture or equipment represents, as significant or more significant than the architecture that defines it.

What house is this that opens here today?

A strong building from an architectural point of view, which reinforces its character as an exceptional equipment, which knew how to resist the easy taste of the falsely regionalist, who marks a territory, clarifying the boundary between urban and rural.

This house will be bigger and more inclusive, the more we feel like common property, as a gateway to the knowledge that only art makes possible. For this reason, there should be no illusion, access to cultural assets requires the recipient to make an effort of progressive curiosity, of willingness to learn.

Carlos Antunes and Désirée Pedro
Miranda do Corvo, August 2013