BOUNDLESS BOUNDARIES

installation by FUSA MIRACLE and JOÃO Ó

Description

The title of the work hails from a linguistic contradiction which stands at the root of the leit motif for this installation.

This contradiction questions the issue of the territory as a field of internal and external tension, which is to say, its interactive urban relationship both with itself and its surroundings.

The territorial field that we analysed within the scope of an artistic research branched out into three urban cases explicitly evident in the city of Macau. The criteria of choice were based on the impact upon the collective imaginary that these bring about:

 -        the orderly grid of the new external harbour reclamation area, which albeit recent has a deep impact on the life of the city  ;

-        the Macau RESERVOIR, which reflects an approach to the tension between the city and the water, its permanent perimeter;

 -        the Nobre de Carvalho BRIDGE, which stands as the first physically built example embodying the need of transgression of the territory that justifies the tension between the islands.

In a literal departure from the plans of these three case studies, and using work tools such as Autocad and Viz in exploring tri-dimensionality, transparency, and layering together with concepts geared towards urban design such as planning,  geometrical drawing and territory planning, we decided to explore the idea of the city in a more poetical and abstract approach bearing in mind the existing reality, i.e., a duality between dream and reality, travel and wait, day and night, line and space, in their complementary natures.

Time and space were unavoidable issues that we sought to integrate in this installation, insofar as the evolution of the city of Macau lays its urban impact on the flow of days, and therefore, it may be said that the history of this city is moulded by the paradoxical force of present time – the here and now.

The installation is composed by three suitcases of light that allow for a manifestation of the ebullient, immeasurable imaginary of the territory, intangibly projecting the contemporary need of approaching the urban theme of the city and questioning the sense of coherence or incoherence that it is assuming.