Eduardo Matos
Salgueiros – As cidades novas (Salgueiros – The New Cities), 2005-2006, by Eduardo Matos
A newspaper article announced the existence of a piece of wasteland in the city, crushed between urban buildings and a busy motorway. This article spoke of a lake and of wild flora that had spontaneously grown around it; bushes, plants and flowers that formed a kind of barrier to the exterior and that seemed to represent a microenvironment. Curious about this story, I visited the place several times and, without a script, in a leisurely way, I waited and hoped that the inspiration for the “work” would come. Although the newspaper article was quite faithful to the original, it did not supply a complete description of the place. There were other things… The small lake with its green margin was also a dump, a fishing lake, a place where families gathered at the weekends, a place where people use drugs, a kind of playground both for children and adults, a place for crime and police arrests. The rubbish business is quite prosperous in that place. I was uneasy about the people who spent hours, even the whole day in that place. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with what was going on and I didn’t even think about asking questions. I imagine that if they were there it was because they wanted to be alone and liked to be amongst nature. These are very good places to be alone, nobody asks questions, silence is a rule. After all, the city was just there, behind our back.
EDUARDO MATOS was born in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1972, and lives and works in Porto (Portugal). He graduated in Fine Arts (Painting) from the Fine Arts Faculty, University of Porto and has since 1999 worked as an artist and exhibitions curator. His works intersect the languages of image/video/sculpture with the spatial and interactive three dimensionality of the installation. In his site-specific works, he recreates and deconstructs the simulation of a game that contains aesthetic, social, political, and geographic and identity metaphors. He collects elements and remnants from the civil universe- its codes, laws and rules, events and history- that he uses to fill up a space, in a composition, that attempts to establish a relation amongst them. These are not narratives or descriptions but disrupted images, which build up realities and question the organizational, management and learning processes that are part of modern democratic society. He is one of the founders of the Salão Olímpico (an independent arts project). In 2007, he publishes in a partnership with José Maia, the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum and the Vila Flor Cultural Centre, the book Salão Olímpico 03/2006 and the exhibitions Busca Pólos.