Urbanautica

LUÍS ANICETO. THE ACT OF DRIFTING

by Steve Bisson

«Walking for me is the equivalent of thinking, becoming aware of my position in the greatness of the territory, identifying different dimensions and patterns, meeting the other, and ultimately refusing confinement.»

Luís, firstly, you are Portuguese I wonder about the places where you have grown up. Any memories?

Luís Aniceto (LA): Among the various memories, I believe that the most relevant in my relationship with the landscape is the space surrounding my mother's house. I grew up in Cacilhas, in the city of Almada in Portugal, on the ninth floor of a series of modernist-style housing blocks that dominate the surrounding landscape. The row of buildings I lived in faced the river's concrete banks from where you could see the Mar da Palha, a quiet basin in the Tejo estuary. In the distance, an arch of several villages was drawn where the factories' chimneys could be seen, followed by a row of mountains that stood out against the sky. It was a relatively bucolic view. In the foreground, across the avenue that separates my house and the river, it was one of the largest shipyards in Portugal (Lisnave), once also considered one of the world's largest.

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'Doca 13'

From the windows, I watched the entrance of massive oil tankers, the cranes' mechanized movement and the frenzy of the workers cutting, welding and sandblasting. At night, when the clouds were lower, the sky took on the heavy orange color of the powerful sodium-vapor lamps that illuminated the shipyards. To all this was added a set of noisy sounds that I still remember today. Below, there were buses unloading hundreds of workers, and there were strip clubs with nordic names like Oslo, Copenhagen and Norway. There was also the Canecão, a famous brewery at the time, and above it a Bingo where people played illegally. To the thousands of workers of Lisnave, and to the sailors brought from all over the world, were added the workers of other shipyards such as Parry & Son and Arsenal do Alfeite, these of smaller dimensions. Overall, the vision was all a sequence of layers that created a force close to vertigo. It was such an imposing ode to the working and industrial world and the violent transformation of space.

What about photography, when did you step into the visual world?

LA: I used to draw a lot when I was a child and sometimes my parents would bring me to exhibitions. At the time I bought lots of comics and was often more interested in following the story from the sequence of images than from the text. During high school, I started studying the history of art and then got interested in industrial design, probably influenced by my father who was a teacher in metalworking.

During this time, with my maternal grandfather's death, I discovered a series of cameras, negatives, and photo albums from the time my family lived in the Belgian Congo. Portugal has never had colonies in Congo, but my grandfather decided to seek his fortune there. Although I was aware of this past, I had never suspected the existence of these images until then. Through them, a window opened onto an inaccessible time, where one could now see distant faces and places. However, underneath the surface of this personal encounter, there was historical evidence of an undeniable and painful colonial past, which has been always difficult to face, either collectively or within our families.

Apart from the images that I'm keeping for the moment, I'll be ready to recall my family's history - my immediate interest has fallen on the cameras. To my eyes as a design initiate, they all seemed to be eccentric mechanisms from the past. From this moment, my growing enthusiasm for photography started. I learned the basics and started developing and enlarging negatives at home. In the afternoons spent in the university library, I got to know the work of Magnum photographers and other classics of the history of photography. Slowly, I let myself be seduced, and I wanted more and more to inhabit the images, including mine. It's a strange, silent, static, and delimited world, similar to drawing, where the imaginary would now intersect with the real.

After university, I had the opportunity to study at the Portuguese Institute of Photography (IPF). For the course's final work, I decided to develop a project about a small fishing village not far from where I grew up, called Cova do Vapor, where the sense of community is still strong and alive, and the houses were built by the residents themselves. I spent a lot of time gaining the locals' trust and managing my anxiety about doing something I have never done. When I handed in the project, I felt for the first time that I was building something in which my gaze lived alongside that of others.

You worked for some time with Cesura in Italy, also assisting Alex Majoli. Tell us about this experience and what have you learned? Can you explain better the work you contributed to Offside Brazil, produced by Magnum Photos and Instituto Moreira Sales?

LA: After finishing my photography studies, I worked for almost four years as a photo reporter. Although I found the experience motivating, I decided not to end my journey here. I applied for an arts program and got a grant that allowed me to go abroad. I chose the Italian collective of photographers Cesura, led by Alex Majoli, and after a while, I found myself in Italy, in Pianello, a small country town surrounded by the Piacenza hills. Waiting for me was a group of photographers, all more or less my peers, with a great desire to work, in a space where people were coming and going, creating a lively context for sharing ideas and experiences.

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'São Paulo'

With Cesura, I found fertile ground for thinking and discussing photography and absorbed everything I could. In the six months of my grant, I perfected the art of making good pasta, learned Italian, carried firewood and helped with the planning of exhibitions, archive management and post-production. I was particularly attracted to the idea behind the collective: a space where you become a photographer in the most comprehensive sense. More than a photographic studio, Cesura resembled a lifestyle. At the end of the grant period, I was invited to stay for about another two years. I took part in the coordination of masterclasses, publications, projects and short films. At the time I was also focused on a project on the Italian railway landscape, where I would take pictures during my journeys, through the windows of trains. A desire to keep the landscape in motion, to become a spectator of a glass cinema where houses, roads, countryside, cities, and people present themselves as a continuous parade of images.

© Alex Majoli / Magnum

In the meantime, I also worked as an assistant to Alex Majoli. Later, I had the pleasure of accompanying him to São Paulo for the Offside Brazil project. The goal was to give visibility to Brazil beyond the World Cup. Besides specific work coordination, I was mainly involved in shaping the light with flashes, which gave a theatrical aura to the scenes. Among the various daily events, we focused on demonstrations, political campaigns, and camps of the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST). Perhaps one of the scenes I remember best is the occupation of an abandoned hotel in the center of São Paulo. Once the door of the building was open, we went inside and started taking pictures. As the flash lit the darkness, a stream of about 150 people, including youngs, elderlies and women with children in their arms, hurriedly marched in to close the door to stop the police, who arrived shortly afterward.

So you went to Brazil, where you made a series of black and white photographs of São Paulo, among other things. Which face of the "Cidade Cinza" did you choose to tell?

LA: I had never been outside of Europe until then and hadn't even thought about going to Brazil. Even if there is a link between Portugal and Brazil due to the colonial past, it was not a country that was part of my imagination. However, when I arrived in São Paulo, the impact the city had on me was very strong. Not only for the urban mesh density but also for the frenzy of bodies. The period was both festive and controversial due to all matters relating to the World Cup. There was a constant appeal to the international media to deal with local and national injustices. You could perceive that the police were forcing themselves to maintain discipline in some situations, given the media exposure, and that areas such as Cracolândia had been "cleaned up", even for Prince Harry's visit.

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'São Paulo'

The photographs of São Paulo were made during my spare time. I wanted the images to reflect an inevitable wandering, flânerie. I was interested in the disconnected and casual space. The urban landscape's thickness seemed to open up in overlapping layers of blind walls, poles, cables, overpasses and roads. Although the verticality of the city was present, I was also looking for the horizontal city, the space where the daily drama was felt and where a certain social cartography could be found. I also wanted to give visibility to an ambivalent feeling that the city caused in me, a sort of instability that was both distressing and liberating. I still remember some areas in the city's immense space, where a strange silence seemed to charge the atmosphere with unpredictability. Along the way, I came across countless objects that looked like provisional statuary from that historical moment, which revealed its roughness but also its authenticity.

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'São Paulo'

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'São Paulo'

Your photography researches and measures itself with places, questioning them. However, your imagination escapes the mere documentary; it is expressed almost in an impressionist way, with thick brushstrokes. Somehow there is a need to decode space through sensations. To distill the elements that compose it. Tell us about your approach to projects.

LA: My projects stem from a continuous research that matures over time. In general, I always try to find out about what I photograph, trying to exploit the intersection of different types of knowledge, both written and visual. I think they are important for forming a conscience that goes beyond the immediacy of the photographic record. Alongside, there is also the subjective space of sensations which is of enormous importance. By this, I mean the construction of an imaginary, the creation of a parallel world that acts as an expressive filter of a large and complex reality. It is often in the photographic process that this imaginary is synthesized in the form of a key image. From this encounter, between the mental image and the photographic image, a language emerges with which I can communicate my experience and from which a common thread is established that visually guides me during the project.

The act of walking is equally important. It is through its practice that the discovery of a space that expands and diversifies opens to unforeseeable possibilities. Walking for me is the equivalent of thinking, of becoming aware of my position in the magnitude of the territory, of identifying patterns, of encountering the other and ultimately of rejecting confinement. It is in the act of drifting that space is experienced and expressed, and where we expect the impact of the landscape to tell us something about our history and our very existence.

In the magazine ZONA project, we find your interest in geography. Tell us more about the methodology?

LA: The ZONA Magazine project was born on my return to Portugal. At the time, I was thinking about shaping a series of ideas about the history of places and their representation. It is a magazine centered on the territory in which I grew up, Almada, and which I have been photographing for some time. I chose the magazine format instead of the book because it allowed me to work continuously on different themes and follow their evolutions. With some material already in our possession, we made a dummy that we presented to the Almada town hall, which agreed to finance the magazine's printing. The first issue came out a few months later. In all, we have published three.

© ZONA Magazine, Issue #3

Since the territory was vast, we decided to focus on the river area by dividing it into three zones. This portion of territory, which had been a determining factor in the city's evolution, presented itself to us as multifaceted, both for its economic importance and for the forgetfulness and uncertain future of some of its areas. The content of the magazine is divided into three parts: a) A photographic survey of the area in question; b) A reinterpretation of the past of each of the areas through archive images; c) A small tribute to the community, through the portrayal of popular characters who tended to populate some of its inhabitants' collective memory. In addition to each chapter comes an introduction written in three languages - Portuguese, Spanish, and English - to provide the reader with context.

© ZONA Magazine, Issue #1

© ZONA Magazine, Issue #3

© ZONA Magazine, Issue #1

ZONA Magazine thus embodied the idea of putting into perspective a territory with which we felt an affinity. At the same time, it was also a territory that we understood to mirror many others, indirectly offering us the possibility of commenting on a process of urbanity at a national level. Although the landscape is predominant in the work developed, it was an experience full of encounters and conversations where the oral story, with its myths and characters, gave the space and its places a narrative kept alive over time. This collective memory on the territory excited us so much and that we felt shared by the public who accompanied us.

It seems that your interest in photography goes very well with your interest in publishing, study, and research. Let's say "cultural design" to simplify. So, in this regard, I know that you have worked in Portugal in the educational field. What did you do, what projects did you love? What have you learned that you would like to share as lessons with our readers?

LA: After my return to Portugal, I tried to regain some contacts. One was the Portuguese Institute of Photography (IPF), the school where I studied. After lecturing a workshop on the theme of urban landscape, I was invited to teach photo composition, both in the professional and short-term workshops. Thus I developed a syllabus, which served as a starting point for a critical and practical photographic image analysis. A structure that I would change every year in an attempt to update, improve and make accessible a sometimes hermetic visual discourse. However, it was by seeing and discussing the images the students would bring for each exercise, that I learned the more. In these moments, the images would become shared ideas and students would have the chance to nurture their desire to observe and build their personal interpretations.

After three years of working as a teacher, I was asked to take care also of cultural programming, both in Lisbon and Porto. At the time there weren't many activities going on and there was a need to stimulate the community students. I started by inviting former students, now professionals, to talk about their careers and present their portfolios. After that, a new cycle of lectures was created in which the guests were prominent photographers in the Portuguese photography scene. School exhibitions and other public activities have been added, including a masterclass with Alex Majoli, who was the first or definitely among the first international guests of the Institute.

I would like to talk now about your recent 'Margem Sul' project. First of all, let's talk about a place that belongs to you, that you know, that you have lived. Can you tell us about it, even in the evolution that you have witnessed over time?

LA: "Margem Sul" is the name given to the territories on the south bank of the Tejo River facing Lisbon. Although there are nine municipalities in it, the project focuses on the two that are most familiar to me, Almada and Seixal. The demographic and urban boom began in the 1960s and 1970s. Until then, these territories were predominantly rural, with a small manufacturing industry. The construction of the 25th of April bridge, which connected the two banks, the extension of the railway line, and the establishment of heavy industry (Lisnave, Siderurgia Nacional, and Companhia de União Fabril), led to a growing migratory flow from the South, transforming peasants and artisans into factory workers. Later, with the end of the dictatorship and the dismantling of the colonial apparatus, people from African countries arrived too, including many Portugueses, the "retornados". Margem Sul became quickly attractive for its affordable housing, building plots, and its location, right in front of Lisbon. They have grown sprawling as dormitories, without a common strategy for their development, sometimes resulting in sort of unfinished settlements that fail to abandon this image completely.

© Luís Aniceto, from the series 'Margem Sul'

In the following decades, to improve the quality of life, the city built housing and social infrastructure. Sporting and cultural activity have grown, having a strong expression in theater and music, where the younger segment of the population has been extraordinarily active and dynamic. New routes have been opened up, some means of transport have been modernized, university centers have been created and efforts have been made to redevelop public space. At the same time, and despite a certain cultural dynamism, the end of heavy industry, the arrival of large shopping centers and the ageing of the working population have had an enormous impact on trade and local life. In addition, the housing crisis in Lisbon, caused by mass tourism and the financialization of housing, has recently spread to some of these areas, raising the housing price.

'Margem Sul' reflects on the disordered nature of particular urban planning, let's say "Latin". We often find a way of understanding building and construction in southern European countries, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy. A chaotic development that proceeds casually, by attempts, mixing codes and appearances. An inefficient, heedless of the past, a discreet mediocrity behind which corruption, incompetence, political negligence blooms. An almost blinding dimension comes to me to say, which you have, among other things, interpreted through the use of light that returns a contrary vivacity. What choices and criteria have you adopted to restore this place in your way?

LA: "Margem Sul" stems from the desire to create a project centered on the landscape of my everyday life. At that time I was beginning to take an interest in the themes of the city and the territory, and I wondered how much the everyday space could influence my gaze. At the same time, I was reading about the work of photographers such as Marville or Atget and various photographic missions (FSA, DATAR, Viaggio in Italia, etc ...). Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernandes, or Lewis Baltz has also a strong impact on my work. In their photos, I find remote places that feel familiar to me.

"Margem Sul" aims to build a body of images that was the visual sign that time and the city had fixed in my understanding of the territory. A sign that I recognize in the urban structure made of anonymous and indifferent buildings, where the construction made according to the taste of times generated a strange hybridization in the landscape, far from an aseptic and rational standardization. Places where cars, victims of accident and neglect, lay mute like useless statues and mingle with the remains left by the transformation of space. But also places that seem suspended, unfinished and therefore liberating.

All this was expressed for me in direct and intense summer light. A light without artifice that offers everything to be seen and where, under an infinite blue sky, the matter would cut itself into the void like a layered theatrical scenery. A space where clarity evoked, on the surface of facades and objects, the aggression of time and the continuous urban transformation. An aggression that I also wanted to translate into the dryness and hardness of the soil, similar to that of asphalt and concrete.

"Margem Sul" sketches an imaginary, again without describing a context too affectedly. What emerges is a constructive paradigm that stinks of consumerist ideology, incredibly greedy for land. A land that you often show us arid, dirty, invaded. The contradiction is alive and very explicit. Heaven seems to be the only way out. Of course, it is an imaginary, a landscape observed and constructed through the camera, yet it makes me wonder how much Portugal is inside this work. Portugal as a mentality, as a habit, as future projections?

LA: After the end of the dictatorship (April 25, 1974), Portugal suffered from a housing problem inherited from the Estado Novo, accentuated by the increasing migration to urban centers and the massive return of populations from former colonies. In order to overcome the shortage of housing and related infrastructure, the construction followed the logic of vertical housing, different in all aspects from the state employees' quarters built during the dictatorship. This new construction, for which private initiative will bear a huge responsibility, will often take place without a master plan to coordinate the various areas being developed. For decades, several projects have been incomplete due to local power negligence or corruption. Sometimes the building already existed without adequate access, electricity, and basic sanitation completed, frustrating the expectations of those who have invested in a supposedly improved quality of life. In the process, the occupation of the territory, which until then had been limited and contained, became widespread and fragmented, having as its correspondent a multiform and "uncharacteristic" architecture, which from then on came to represent the image of a profound transformation of the urban and rural Portuguese landscape. In the 1990s, already after joining the European Union, the construction of highways and communication networks further accelerated the end of the myth of the countryside, colonizing it with its urban codes.

I believe "Margem Sul" partially reflects the constructive paradigm that you mention. Indeed, the vulgarity of its omnipresence almost induces blindness towards this issue. While it arouses a certain fascination for its ability to metamorphose and aggregate elements into a baroque pastiche, it should also alert us to the lack of understanding of this phenomenon as something that cuts across all disciplines. The process of urbanization has long since disrupted the city's concept, and it is an ongoing debate among planners, architects, sociologists, and geographers. In this regard, among the various dissertations, the recent work developed by the Portuguese geographer Álvaro Domingos is quite clarifying. We can almost say revelatory in that, through his text and its images, an unknown country is shown, one which we have mistakenly thought we knew.

The title "Tempo Morto (Dead Time)' I find very suggestive. Is photography for you also a "dead time," a time in which we can be present?

LA: "Tempo Morto" is a project that I developed in Lisbon during the Euro Zone crisis period. At the time, I was still in Italy, and every time I went to Portugal, I dedicated myself to this. I was interested in carrying out a project that would intersect the city's landscape and its social geography as well as the state of crisis of a weak and indebted economy. A theme I had been discussing extensively with friends, and that presented itself as an opportunity to photographically deepen a narrative made up of cultural paradigms and visual metaphors. The name given to the work comes from the sensitive impression, in the political and social landscape, of an inability to react collectively to the current moment. Besides the fact that you write it in the same way, both in Portuguese and Italian, it reflected that idea of a suspended dimension. I later realized that the term "dead time" already existed in physics and that it refers to the period of time in which, after an action, a given system is unable to register a new action.

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Luís Aniceto (website)
ZONA Magazine

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