Casa
View InfoSolo exhibition, Green-house program, Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon, Portugal
Casa is an installation that Luísa Jacinto has conceived specifically for the spatial, historical and scenographic characteristics of the Medeiros e Almeida Museum House. The artist engages in a dialogue with this setting in its existence as a home, an incubator of life, distributing her installation between two rooms and weaving a network of meanings that the observer can discover as he or she experiences the components that make up the project.
The collection inherited by the Museum House transpires a strong atmosphere of domesticated nature. It is in the relationship of this presence with the archetype home, in its role as simultaneously protective and restrictive of what there is inside, that this work operates, either as a short-circuit, or as an injection of a breath of life.
The two component parts of the installation are on the first floor:
In the bedroom, the lights are off, the furniture is covered with sheets – the house is uninhabited – and all that remains visible is the panelling of the walls, decorated with animals, trees, fruit and flowers framed with soft-hued arabesques. The installation immerses the receiver in a thunderstorm at its height – the sound of thunderclaps is accompanied by flashes of lightning. In the study, a moment after the deluge, a dual projection sends a rainbow across the room.
The two moments of Casa present the contrast between might and fragility, and share a natural meteorological instability – both the storm and the rainbow are fleeting phenomena, opposite extremes of nature from which our home separates us. At any given moment there are around 2000 thunderstorms taking place on Earth. Adrenalin and unrest, awe and seclusion.
In a place with an immense profusion of possessions and an implicit and all-pervading presumption of stability, Casa returns to something fundamental, something very simple and strong that is independent of any human action and is unpossessable. But there is an irony within this work – this human-made storm and rainbow.
A publication was released for each participating artist within this exhibition series.
Luísa Jacinto presented Nuvens [Clouds], a compound of reproductions of clouds taken from paintings at the Medeiros e Almeida collection in exhibition at the Medeiros e Almeida Museum House.
Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida
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All images © Pedro Guimarães