O Passageiro

The sea cave is the structure and environment of the project “O Passageiro” by Nuno Cera presented in the mirror cycle of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, at the Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Velha. Geological phenomena with a great symbolic representation, spaces of conflict, places of the sacred and of tension between light and shadow, caves represent zones of passage between dreams and ideas. Natural retreats, hiding places, places of invisibility and the illusory, from which one sees without being seen, caves are also eternal abodes, the first and the last, the maternal cave and the natural tomb.

Following the romantic ideal that nature is powerful and that it will eventually prevail over man's temporary creations, romantic sensitivity, with its strong expressions of atmospheres as in the works of J.M.W Turner, Francisco de Goya and Caspar David Friedrich, places special importance on intuition, imagination, feeling, and new emotions such as fear, terror, and surprise, focusing on nature as a place free from social judgment or rationalization.

The photographs, vertical and black and white, observe the passages, from inside to outside, in the transition between light and shadow, between knowledge and ignorance, between the sacred and the profane, in a possible reinterpretation of Allegory of the Cave of Plato.

The video, with its temporal structure, edited following the Fibonacci number ratio, forms a web of movements entering and leaving the sea caves in an endless oscillation between the outside and the inside, between the known and the unknown. The true and only moment is the moment of transition and the moment of passage.

“O Passageiro” is also a form of introspection; of questioning and a portrait of the contemporary social and political context.

Ciclo Espelho

The story of Santa Clara, 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 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 Penélopes 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 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 century. XIII 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 monastery of the Clarissas Coimbrã 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 Mosteiro de 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 (ruine + 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” (Mirror) due to the unusual condition of Santa Clara having lived together for three centuries with her symmetry reflected on the riverside 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. The CAPC couldn't help but revisit the potential for ambiguity associated with this experience.

Pedro Pousada
January 2012