Text of the Exhibition Trip to the interior of imagined cities, Octávia

Round the Corner, Lisbon, 2009

Curated and written by Ana Pinheiro Torres

This exhibition constitutes the second phase of a project that Carla Rebelo has been elaborating from Italo Calvino's book The Invisible Cities, materializing a succession of works, essentially installations. This project started in an exhibition held in March this year, where the artist presented the first three works in this series. Using Endóxia, the carpet city, the artist created Inner city, an installation built from a relationship of memory and physicality with her original city, Lisbon, and which constitutes an emotional map of her personal geography. In the memory of spaces and relationships, Ersilia was the city that was at the origin of the creation of a housing space defined by threads, symbolizing the memory of its experiences and the relationships of the “characters” who lived it. Finally in The Cities and the Sky, the starting point was Tecla, the city that wants to build itself in the image of the drawing of the stars. An installation was created where a starry sky designed from the shape of the constellations, simultaneously defined the paths that evoked the plan of a city.

In this exhibition, Journey into the imagined cities, Octavia was chosen, the spider web city as a starting point. In this new work Carla Rebelo takes up the theme of the urban fabric, now as a fabric - the streets and paths constitute a network whose construction seems purposely designed to arrest. There is a rational and logical order that presides over the construction of the spider webs - the points of support and tension are meticulously evaluated, obeying a need for organization. The same order that presides over the construction of cities. Similarly, this piece is built in the exhibition space with carefully chosen support points, using red thread, which again suggests an internal geography, that of the body itself. The observer, prevented from moving freely in space, is simultaneously inside and outside the web.

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