The story of Santa Clara-a-Velha is the migration of an architectural corpus due to different conditions of existence, different actualities: refuge, house and theater of a world, stable, ruin, image, landscape, monument, archaeological treasure and finally laboratory and museum space where media is published. Santa Clara is in fact a space defined by the plurality and discontinuity of its ends.

The Mosteiro de Santa Clara de Coimbra received its geriatric baptism (the old woman) due to advanced disability; the function was derived from the architectural form in the last quarter of the 17th century. And the liturgy gave way to animal husbandry.

Originally intended for Penelopes from Beirã, to landlords (the female part of the pinnacle of the current social order) who refused an owner and who wanted to decide the economy of their assets, Santa Clara, the coimbrã house of the Poor Ladies, was built as an architectural barrier against forced penetration, against the testamentary brutality of original sin.

In the use of this building as in that of so many other convent spaces, in the regulation of their daily lives inside the walls, the haptic consciousness of the human being, the agony of limits and needs (food, perfumes, smells, sounds, fevers, the discomfort of the changing body, menstruation, fertility, the texture of experience, breviaries, excesses and carnal prohibitions, masses, probity, selfishness, the duty and existence of personal and collective secrets, the countless accounting of income and donations, works, the changed glances, the idleness) and the The renunciation of that same human condition, the search for a more than natural duty, the search for the sacred (the transcendent, the incompleteness of the present, the good that does evil and the evil that does good, the sacrifice, the passion, the fight against repetition) were mutually inclusive.

On the banks of a river that the Romans called Munda, clarity, rose at the end of the XIIIth century was a refuge against the animalistic, nature, the enemy; the enclosure constituted itself as an extension of life, as a bargaining chip required for protection against androcentric intrusion, against coercive marriage. The widow of a sovereign dedicated a new church and a hospital to him. But this river, born of a glacial mountain range, existed in the interstices of the ground, in the underground cavities and, competing for the solidity of the terrain, made the Mosteiro de Santa Clara de Coimbra acquire a lagoon horizon. The cloister, the naves of the temple, were immersed in the floods of the Mondego and the small kingdom of the Poor Ladies was recalcitrated on different floors until its abandonment. The refuge, the aesthetics of the place lived in, the polychromy of the tiles, the stonework deepened by intelligent hands, the columns, the cradle vaults, gave way to ruin, to oblivion, to space alienated by time. The refuge became a picture of uselessness, the representation of something that could no longer be, the emblem of the decay of all human works, even well-intentioned ones. The unproductive, unhealthy, rheumatic ruin became in the XXth century a treasure of a certain type of human life, the physical vestige of a pre-bourgeois and pre-industrial organization of community space.

In the final phase of the XXth century, almost three hundred years after its abandonment, the monastery acquires a new kinetic state, a new externality and a new subjectivity that places it in the world as a living object: the Interpretation Center of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha.

The design of this new building includes many elements of modernist research: the creative evolution of geometric essentialism that does not mimic, that does not illustrate but that at the same time manages to establish a narrative relationship with the place, the functional clarity of the parts, the phenomenology of the body that enters, which becomes aware of the reversibility between the built interior and the contemplated, lived exterior. A segmented longitudinal nave, with vast fenestrations that accentuate fluidity and not the solid, the visible and not the hidden as a propagation of the real in the architectural space. Two bodies (ruin + monument), (house + museum) face each other and are completed (or disbanded). Time is recognizable by what defines the differences between these two points and in the flow produced by the movement between these architectural categories, space overcomes its condition as a vehicle, as an object and “mixes with the world”.

The thematic motivation for the exhibition that CAPC now organizes in this space under the title of “Espelho” was the unusual condition of Santa Clara having lived together for three centuries with her symmetry reflected on the banks of the Mondego.

The perceptual strangeness with which the presence of this reality was viewed still lingers in the memory of this space. This relationship between the object and the inverted representation of its externality, the architecture “seeing and being seen to exist”, contradictorily revitalized the constructed matter as a liquid, expectant anamnesis, like the space of a previous, finished life whose double “drowned”, like “a hall at the bottom of a lake”, was also the mark of the incomplete and the invocation of a return.

The architectural form existed doubly as a freezing of an anthropological metabolism — Santa Clara, the ruin, had gained an indexical character, recalling the organization of community isolation, the hierarchization of humanized space — and as self-representation on the lake surface. CAPC couldn't help but revisit the potential for ambiguity associated with this experience.

Pedro Pousada
January 2012