“2.294 reflects about the site and it’s relation between permanence and displacement. The coexistence of ōilha’s remaining structure and it’s anaesthetized refurbishment, is an exercise of conflict between the ways of inhabiting the space and the methods of capitalizing it. Inside the intervention, a square meter is removed from the territory and the remaining enclosure assumes itself as a boundary of a space-body.
Due to its materiality and construction, the artist Miguel Teodoro introduces the instability and precariousness of the structure, promoting a poetic reflection on the fragility and failure of the urban reality itself as a common place.”
Patrícia Coelho
The installation “2.294” thinks about the place from the constant relationship between permanence and displacement. The coexistence between the remaining structure of the former “ilha” (social housing structure caracteristic from Porto) and its aestheticized reformulation opens a field of conflicts between ways of inhabiting the space and new ways of capitalizing it. From a critical perspective, the “ilha” is thought of as an evolving and disobedient structure from the urbanistic point of view, which summons the public conviviality of the street into the private domain. This coexistence between the renewed informality, the new ways of using these spaces and their transitory condition, defined the starting point for Miguel Teodoro to think the occupation of Óilha.
From the extrapolation of the perimeter of a square meter - unit that regulates the economic, commercial and relational link with the urban territory - emerges “2.294”. a transitory structure that convokes gestures and refunctionalizes objects, close to the informality inherent to the housing structure of the “ilha”. Similar to a permeable dwelling, which both shelters and reveals its interior, the artist arranges the installation centrally in the garden space as a reference to the structure of a hortus conclusus, whose sense of ownership and the whim of contemplation is here questioned. Inside the dwelling, one square metre is removed from the territory. The remaining shell is assumed as the border of a body-space, confronting the absence or interruption of the continuous surface of the territory as a possibility of growth of this habitable body. The intervention, by its materiality and construction, introduces the instability and the precariousness of the structure and potentiates a poetic reflection on the fragility and the failure of the urban reality itself as a common place.
Temporary installation ÓLIHA - Experimental Platform between Architecture and Art
Porto 2020