A renowned American artist, on visiting Lumiar Cité in Alta de Lisboa, one of the last entirely
new neighbourhoods to be built in Lisbon, commented that “good architecture does not have
to be more expensive then what has been built here”.
The exhibition at Lumiar Cité displays sculptures evoking modular forms in concrete that are
installed in dialogue with films and texts. The project is a collaboration between the
Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Florian Zeyfang and Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander
Schmoeger, members of the Viennese office schmidt-colinet.schmoeger dedicated to
architecture and artistic research.
Besides the subtle references to earlier exhibitions at Lumiar Cité, Schmidt-Colinet,
Schmoeger and Zeyfang translate their documentary and analytical project on housing
and half a year later
there was a lot of concrete
construction initiatives in Cuba during the first years of Fidel Castro’s regime – with an
emphasis on the phenomena of ‘microbrigadas’ – to the architectural characteristics and
psychological resonances of the Lumiar Cité space itself and the Alta...de Lisboa
neighbourhood, an urban requalification project that blends social with free-market housing.
The exhibition evokes the ‘microbrigadas’ as a unique solution to address housing construction
problems – reminiscent of the Portuguese SAAL project developed in the wake of the 1974
revolution –, and emphasizes the legacy of seeking aesthetically ambitious solutions, manifest
in Vittorio Garatti’s ‘Instituto André Voisin’. However, it does not ignore the structural problems
that have diluted the utopian promise.
Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger are architects living and working in
Vienna. Florian Zeyfang is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. They have collaborated on
projects and curated exhibitions that examine architecture and film in Cuba since 2003. They
have exhibited spatial installations–incorporating slide and video projections–in Rio de Janeiro,
Los Angeles, Havana, Gdansk and Berlin, among others places. In the context of the 8th
Havana Biennial they published ‘Pabellón Cuba, 4D – 4 Dimensions, 4 Decades’ (b_books,
2008) with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, a compendium on art, architecture and film in Cuba.
Recently, their work has also been presented at the Berlinale (2015 and 2013).
Entrada actualizada el el 23 mar de 2016
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