Between corners: the resistence of what remains
"And because the world, though round, has many corners.”
Caio Fernando Abreu
“While colonialism raised the cross as its aegis, we survived by loitering in the empty spaces it left behind, occupying and inventing the corners of Western modernity, practicing the crossroads as a field of possibilities.”
Luiz Rufino
Corners are points of intersection — both physically and symbolically. They mark the convergence of paths and the possibility of unexpected encounters, serving as spaces of sociability and exchange, of confrontation and resistance. At times, corners meet and form crossroads — sites charged with spiritual energy and potential, where all paths intersect, converse, intertwine, and mutually influence one another. It is in this place, where the pulse of a city can be felt, that Sonia Távora focuses her latest research.
Trained in architecture, the artist pays special attention to the human aspect of buildings and urban spaces and their impact on contemporary subjectivity.
Since 2018, Sonia Távora has followed the transformations reshaping the Portuguese capital — shifts that echo across many global metropolises. Buildings that housed generations of families become speculative assets in the portfolios of investment funds; century-old shops give way to global chains of generic commerce; entire neighborhoods are converted into showcases for international tourism. The impression is that cities have ceased to be spaces of coexistence and have instead become commodities in circulation, contested by global investors who see real estate as one of the last frontiers for capital appreciation. On the corners of these cities, tourists and temporary residents increasingly bump into each other.
It is within this global context that Between Corners: The Resistance of What Remains emerges — a project in which Sonia Távora portrays this new type of city: fragmented, fragile, and sterile. She works primarily with cardboard panels — a material traditionally used to package goods — which here becomes a symbol of the commodified city. By reimagining the technique of woodcut, used in Portugal since the Middle Ages and brought to Brazil by colonizers, the artist replaces wood with cardboard, evoking the precariousness of the present. Her monotypes on rice paper function as fragile, dreamlike records — traces of an urban space in flux.
Her installation reminds us that while some cities become inaccessible to their own inhabitants, others are reduced to empty backdrops, where the 19th-century flâneur gives way to the 21st-century tourist-consumer. If, in the past, to flâner was an act of contemplation and a form of resistance to the pace of modernity, today this right is increasingly restricted. By naming this stage of her research the resistance of what remains, the artist highlights the dignity of remnants and the small acts of persistence — where art can be a weapon against erasure, forgetfulness, and solitude.
Cristiana Tejo
Caio Fernando Abreu