INVISIBLE PORTOS: INVISIBLE NARRATIVES IN THE CITY OF PORTO
Mapping and surveying the place, Porto.
The project Invisible Portos: invisible narratives in the city of Porto, developed for the UC RDIT (Representations, drawings and images of the territory) seeks to imagine parallels between the built spaces of the city and the literary work Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. From the search for physical structures, stories and words, a collection of archives was assembled to illustrate the invisible narratives found, in a map which it is intended to understand the relationship between the constructed visibility and the life that develops in it.
The poetics of Italo Calvino's literature serves as a magnifying glass to cast a keen eye not only on what is seen, but on what is invisible, on what is not palpable, but which gives the city its status of "Symbol capable of express the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglement of human existences”¹. Through this literary magnifying glass, a search was carried out in the territory, marked by the daily life in which places were explored and associations were sought through words and history, through life and through memory. Invisible narratives are discovered through association and familiarity, as the project is about an artistic and personal interpretation of a literary work and the urban landscape.
Another component that characterizes the work is geometry and drawing, from which the interpretations of the words take shape. The hexagon, the geometric shape chosen as the basis for the reproduction of the drawings and photographs, symbolizes the formation of societies, alluding to the hives of bees that come together and form their colonies around a queen. This symbol multiplies over the urban surface and the grouping of lives and spaces transforms it into a stage of contradictions and overlaps.
Materiality, which comprises the materials that build cities and is intrinsic to life and spaces, is manifested in this work through the use of acetate, tracing paper and stone. The transparency of the vegetable and acetate reinforces the idea of overlapping memory and time, and the stone reminds us of what is permanent and solid, immutable and resistant. Irony and contradiction guide the invisible narratives.
Maps, drawings, folds, historical photographs and objects make up the collection of this archive that reproduces some of the various constructed metaphors that Marco Polo narrates to Emperor Kublai Khan. In this imaginative journey between the material and the immaterial, there are six cities found in Porto: Isaura, Tecla, Zirma, Otávia, Diomira and Clarisse.
Tecla narrates the construction, which above all fears ruin. The inhabitants of this city never stop “(...) hoisting buckets, lowering iron cables, moving long brushes up and down”, because they fear that after completion the city will begin to destroy itself. The metaphor exposes the contradiction of temporality over matter, which, after being completed, will inevitably decline. To exist is to be in decomposition? For this territory works that are at the beginning and at the end of the journey of daily exploration were chosen: at the foot of my house. The drawings and speculations are inspired by urban plans and construction projects (in blue) and demolition (in red), used in architecture offices in Brazil to determine what should be built or demolished.
Diomira symbolizes memory and what is between the present and the past: possibility. The city of sixty silver domes becomes crystalline, a fading memory of what was once the Crystal Palace, in the midst of its flowering gardens. Its absence opens up the question that guides this narrative: what if there were sixty crystal domes in the place of the current Arena? Memory is a guide to the future, a reminder, but it can also be a key to other stories that didn't happen.
Zirma is the narrative of repetition, which multiplies its elements to fix some image. How many times do we travel and come across similar figures, similar constructions and spaces, people and objects that transport us to another city, in another country or continent? The symbols repeat themselves, “The city is redundant: it repeats itself to fix some image in the mind”. Based on this tale, we can imagine ways of fixing, through repetition, collections of memories, small fragments of a whole that originate the collective space, represented here by the São Bento station and surroundings.
Otávia is the city of passage, with its “spider webs”5. The tracks that connect two mountains, located over an abyss, are the base for the city that hangs from it and communicates through it. The Luís I bridge, an important symbol of the city of Porto, connects places, memories and people physically and mentally, as its existence conditions movements, but also lived experiences, which become memories, collected in photographs and images in memory. What is a bridge if not a connection between two worlds, real or imaginary?
Isaura is the narrative of subsistence, about water and life around this element that conditions life, in all its aspects. The Arca d'Água garden is the territory that gives visuality to this story, as the water that supplied Porto for a long time came from there. A large underground aqueduct stretched from north to south, supplying the needs of the city's residents. “An invisible landscape conditions the visible landscape”, as in Isaura, Calvino's city of a thousand wells. "Everything that moves in the sunlight is propelled by the cloistered waves that break under the limestone sky of the rock."
Permeating all of these is Clarisse, “(...) a glorious city, it has a troubled history. Several times it decayed and flourished”. This narrative deals with civilization and the course of society through time, always conditioned by events, sometimes predictable, sometimes inevitable. Every territory is subject to wear, mold, ruin, so it is possible to identify Clarisse from all sides. The adaptation and reuse of what used to be a house and is now a museum, of what in the past were “(...) the Corinthian capitals that were on top of its columns” and which are now ruins for a chicken coop. The city tries to rebuild and redeem itself through loose fragments, about which little is known and much is deduced. The attempt to remake this place in its heyday of glory is only capable of painting a misshapen caricature, transforming the authenticity of the now into an incongruous reproduction a la Viollet-le-Duc. We are all subject to the rise and fall that time imposes.