For the past month, I have been living and working in Barreiro , at the Pada Studios International residency, situated in a post-industrial park. I started a project aiming to explore over two months the dynamics of my interactions with the place and its materials. Here is some context: the park. It is a vast “dystopian” landscape where remains the colours of past chemicals activities, the ruins of brutalist architectures, the resistance of native flaura and fauna amongst new introduced invasives species. I was surprised by the appealing aesthetic qualities of such landscape, an intriguing beauty of resilience in despair, of life against all odds. In Barreiro, left over materials and teared-down buildings are visual poems of defiance of time. Within this park, beats the heart of a recycling factory, transforming electrical cords into, if possible, re-usable particles of materials.
