...our constructions are just a footnote of infinity...
‍Silvina Lopes Rodrigues
‍

Cláudia's doors

The house with the nº 18 at Castro Matoso Street in Coimbra is a house.

It remains a house, designed to have bedrooms, bathroom, living room, kitchen.

It has many more years of life as a place for art than it did when it was inhabited as a home. Time of which there is no memory. But it persists as a place from which art appropriates itself.

It no longer has bedrooms, living room, kitchen. Any space can be used for exhibitions. But it is the fact that it was a house that enhances the aesthetic experience. That creates the place from which things happen.

Nobody knows where the doors of those rooms where art is now exhibited will have ended up.

The privacy of those spaces is open to everyone, in a place that is not inhabited, but which is assumed to be a metaphor for all housing, for all living. But without getting used to it, because it is renewed by the eyes of each artist that temporarily inhabits it.

As now, Cláudia Renault does it, an artist who, for the first time, seeks to return the doors to her.

As clues for this text, the artist herself suggests the words: doors, open, close, passages, openings, paths, connections, crossing, the unknown, relationships, connections, directions, directions, directions, directions, future, infinity.

Because those doors are no longer the doors that house had. Or they will be the doors of that house, but after going around the world, transfiguring themselves, then taking the form of the other doors they encounter.

Home return doors.

Ports that are different.

Doors that are already all doors.

António Olaio
Coimbra, November 14, 2014