O Rio Voador

There are no rivers that are not flying, as indeed any concept. But here, the evocation of the river reminds us that it divides the city in two, with it the city becomes two, a place that is at least two. On the other hand, causing a break in the city, the river can be seen as a kind of suspension from reality. And, as we all know, it runs elsewhere...

In this capacity for abstraction that the experience of a river enhances, blurring the contours of a physical or mental place, a river is above all an aesthetic experience.

For this exhibition, artists were invited to participate with works based on the idea of “flying river”. Or rather, they were faced with the fact that the exhibition was called “Rio Voador”, presenting works that inhabited this context.

Thus, the pieces exhibited here, whether the idea of a river is explicit or not, using the image of the river in the metaphorical potential of a river, are located above all in a universe where the possibility of a flying river opens up.

António Olaio
March 2012
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Parallel to this one, at the Water Museum, we can see an exhibition built by Architecture and Design and Multimedia students from the Universidade de Coimbra, exploring other potentialities, in the transformative expectations of the disciplinary specificities of design and architecture.

And, at the same time, being students, in the potential for disciplinary dilution that this condition allows.
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O Rio Voador

“Rio Voador” is a project that results in two exhibitions. The second, an exhibition of visual artists, will take place at Círculo Sede. The first one finds a place and conceptual context in the Museu da Água.

In this museum, right next to the Mondego River, the pieces in this exhibition can appear as an echo and drift.

The works carried out by the Architecture and Design and Multimedia students at the Universidade de Coimbra find different ways of responding to this challenge.

The Design II students, from the architecture course (works coordinated by professors António Olaio and Pedro Pousada), created a suspended piece extending lengthwise into the exhibition room of the Water Museum, blue, linear, as an abstraction or synthesis of the idea of a river, made of the combination of pieces created individually by each student. This “flying river”, thus autonomized, stems from the idea of a river that concentrates its own banks, a synthesis of the idea that a river includes its banks. And, in the contamination of the idea of architecture, this river is a constructed river. Solidity made liquid, fluid, in these forms that extend like a river.

And, on the walls of the exhibition room, the works of the students from the Design and Multimedia courses: The Design and Representation students (works coordinated by professor Alice Geirinhas), on cut-out paper, echo the linear course of this imagined river, in silhouettes that are reflected as margins that are reflected, but the reflection is something else, in a river that creates its own reality. Composition Studies students (works coordinated by Professor António Olaio), in projected images, show us the abstraction of the flow of letters that, instead of producing text, meaning, produce the meaning of a flow of forms. Evoking the meaning of a discourse, but above all being a plastic exploration of a pre-discursive condition, of the pure plasticity of thought.

In fact, in any plastic production, the essence is always thought. And here, thought finds an eloquent symbolic translation in the idea of River.

In the river where we can mirror ourselves to see ourselves, recognize ourselves, but in images whose contours become changeable, dynamic, due to the force of a mirror surface in permanent motion.