Between corners: the fragility of traces
"This Lisbon, which struts like a satin-clad lady in bright rags, is a city that appears majestic but, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be all cardboard and crude stitching."
As Farpas (1871), Eça de Queirós
"The city never stops, the city only grows: those above rise, and those below fall."
A Cidade (1994), Chico Science & Nação Zumbi
The figure of the flâneur, conceptualized by Walter Benjamin, is one of the icons of the modern city, representing a new form of sensory and perceptual experience mediated by the urban environment and the commodification of society in 19th-century Paris. The flâneur is a passive observer, a wanderer who explores the city, especially through commercial arcades, absorbing its contradictions and resisting the accelerated pace of modernity and unchecked consumption, capturing the cultural, social, and economic transformations brought about by modernity. Although Benjamin discussed the flâneur during the interwar period, with Paris as a starting point, this concept has remained a constant reference up to the present day. However, in a Lisbon context of the second decade of this century, marked by the acceleration of gentrification, precarization of labor, and touristification of cities, who is the contemporary flâneur? What does it mean to wander nowadays through an Instagrammable Lisbon? Who can wander?
Since 2018, Sonia Távora has been observing the transformations through which the Portuguese capital has been passing. Buildings that have housed families for generations are becoming short-term rentals, century-old
shops are giving way to generic commerce, entire neighborhoods are turning into scenes of consumption and “experience,” creating the impression that Lisbon has abruptly leapt from an early 20th-century economy to digital neoliberalism. A city for sale. In the project Between Corners – the fragility of traces, the artist represents the city fragmented into cardboard panels, a material that wraps goods, highlighting the state of the city-as-commodity. She reinterprets the woodcut technique, used in Portugal since the Middle Ages and brought to Brazil by colonizers, by replacing wood with cardboard. The monotypes on rice paper are fragile, dreamlike records, like recollections.
Around the world, homeless people use cardboard to protect themselves, whether by lining the ground, covering themselves, or creating small huts. Although in Lisbon the homeless population mainly uses camping tents, Sonia Távora's cardboard city is also a metaphor for this social aspect. The fragility of a city that could collapse at any moment.
Cristiana Tejo, Curator