STREET TOPOGRAPHIES: photography or sculpture ? (by Tom Lisboa )

“Street Topographies” overlays records of a given space, where each layer can be seen as a picture or even fragments of sculptures that give volume to the scene.

In this moment where photography is opened for shattering the sense of reality, this work takes the photography to borders with film and sculpture.  In "Sculpting in Time", the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky defines the essence of the work of the director: "We can define it as sculpting in time.  As the sculptor takes a lump of marble and shapes it, removing everything that is not part of it, also the filmmaker, from  ​a huge and complex solid facts of living, he cuts away everything that is not needed, leaving only what is necessary for the finished film, which will become an integral part in the cinematic image."

We tend to think that the film would be the duration, and photograph, the snapshot.  The pictures in “Street Topographies”, however, carry a multitude of simultaneous durations. Each box/object binds inside a collection of photographic moments, discontinuous and sparse. They are capsules that simulate time in the interval between one image and another, an almost film, stories that intertwine and enhance.

Furthermore, “Street Topographies” are almost real sculptures because of its three-dimensionality. The photographer stands as a builder of reliefs that will be driven by the interaction with the viewer. Displaced from the frontal view of the wall, these double faceted objects need to be investigated from various angles so that the photographic image is seized by what it can possess in volume and movement.