Cinema “We must first look for centres of simplicity in houses with many rooms. For as Baudelaire said, in a palace « there is no room for intimacy” (Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 1958) This project started some years ago, as an invitation to document a building that was bought in order to be transformed in a Hostel. The building was originally constructed by 1948 to be a cinema, located in a small village close to where I live, near Setúbal in Portugal. It was titled as Cinema Victoria. It close his doors around the 80’s, and then it begun a process that lead to several transformations, first as private medical clinic, and after that, as an attorney’s office. Finally it was left derelict for about twenty years. I recall that, in the beginning, I wasn’t really excited about the place. It seemed to me, at the time, that the possibilities were very limited since there was nothing there to be seen, nothing to be shown, so at some point I was about to quit. What really disappointed me was the fact that, there were rare signs of the original cinema, since walls were built in order to create rooms and corridors and more rooms. Moreover, artefacts like film projectors and projection screens, they were long gone. Only one object remained… But instead of quitting, something lead me to move forward. And so, little by little, it became a kind of obsession and a whole process of discovery. There were times in which I entered the building early morning and I left it late afternoon. Day after day I repeated the process, again and again and again for a whole year. From the ground floor to the first floor and back. Always looking, always listening, always walking and always searching. And so, by this process of repetition and circularity through space I created a strong tie to the building. In that sense, these photographs are the outcome of a poetical approach of insistence and revisiting. Images were created “out of nothing” by giving time to the process, not only by an “extractive” praxis. The images showed here are but a fraction of the total body of work. By the time I finished to edit, I had about fifty to sixty photographs that originally were chosen for a photobook. Then I made a much shorter selection of thirty, which became my “official” portfolio. I built it, as I mentioned before, around the ideas of circularity and repetition represented by the cyclic movement of my body through the space. In that sense, this shorter version it’s a twenty four hour cycle that starts with the only object that remained from the original cinema, and finishes with it. As Gilles Deleuze stated in Difference and Repetition (1968) “Repetitions repeat themselves, while the differenciator differenciates(*1) itself. The task of life is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed”. This portfolio is to be presented to “Representations of Space, Architecture and Conflicts” section. (*1) Transl. Paul Patton, 1994, Columbia University Press Fernando Brito – Dec. 2020