EXHIBITION // TALKS
This exhibition is a presentation of a group of artists from the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal, who showcase their different visual languages and process approaches, using techniques such as painting, drawing, sculpture, instalation, video and photography.
“A Quimera I - Lisboa” is the starting point for an international artistic residency, organized by VelaturasArtProject, to take place in Aldeia de Ana de Aviz, between April 20th and 27th.
The challenge launched to the artists was to work based on the transformation of the place, in particular in the specific geographical, anthropological and sociological context of the community of Aldeia de Ana de Aviz, in the interior pine forest - Figueiró dos Vinhos -, creating the opportunity in loco to reflect on the place itself and on the place of art.
ARTISTS
Paulo Robalo
Susana Gorjão
Tatum Kempers
Rick Kup
Froso Papadimitriou
Located along the old Military Route—a 19th-century defensive axis that later became a symbolic boundary between Lisbon's center and outskirts—Reboleira is a neighborhood that reflects the urban contradictions of 20th-century Portugal. Born in the 1960s and 1970s, this neighborhood testifies to the emergence of an urgent urbanism, born outside of official plans, laws, and official maps.
More than a simple cluster of illegal housing, this was the site of survival architecture. The shacks, the self-built structures, the improvised materials—all point to acts of resistance in a country in transition, between the collapse of the colonial empire and the unfulfilled promise of modernity. Two major migratory flows passed through here: first, those arriving from the rural interior in search of work in the capital; later, repatriates from former African colonies, fleeing war and the collapse of the imperial project.
Both found an urban void in which to assert their presence: a void left by the state, which never truly reached the periphery.
Reboleira is not a forgotten place; it is a persistent space. Today, some houses still stand, scattered throughout an ever-evolving urban fabric. They are the material remnants of an era that the city has tried to erase, yet continues to confront us. These fragile structures, often rendered invisible, are involuntary monuments to a stubborn memory, not only of poverty, but also of the urgency of those who, faced with abandonment, have built a life for themselves.
In this fragmented territory, the city reveals its rawest face: a face in which inequality is inscribed in the space itself. And it is precisely in this fracture—between what has been denied and what has been affirmed out of pure necessity—that Reboleira stands as a living, albeit wounded, document of contemporary urban history.