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What remains after the fury of the waters? The subtle poetry that dazzles peripheral territories? The remnants of happy days, reborn in the first hesitant rays of sunlight, poised between a new rainy season and a premature spring? The shadows of happy days await us beneath the now decorative chimneys and the cracked walls? The raw poetry of the silenced, spilled out on the sordid walls.
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limited edition of 10 numbered and signed copies, a5 staple chase with b/w photographs
The Other Side suggests a shift in perspective.
This selection of photographs, rescued from the shipwrecked archive of Luís Martins Pisco, was captured across the river, on the Other Shore (the south bank of the Tagus in Lisbon). It forms a kind of exercise in “suburbanocentrism,” reclaiming for the periphery its right to a central place in the narrative. Fascinated by the crossings of the Tagus and the Seixal estuary, Martins Pisco maps out a personal geography where ferries, tides, fishermen, derelict warehouses, and the ebb and flow of river life become a precious document for the memory of a transformed landscape.
Guided by the rhythm of the waves and inspired by the song of the Tágides, those eternal river muses, Martins Pisco’s photographs carry us on a gentle tide of nostalgia. But this is not the longing for a beautiful, idealized past. Rather, it is the portrait of a landscape in the midst of shipwreck, where the river's ancient life and its old rhythms have long receded from view. In this new landscape, faluas have given way to ferries. They no longer inspire children's songs. They have morphed into leisure boats.
In Martins Pisco’s river images, we glimpse in the background the old industrial buildings still standing, not yet replaced by suburban blocks. And yet we know they, too, are destined to sink under the rising tide of real estate speculation. It is as if Luís Martins Pisco's photographs were capturing a landscape slowly going undersinking into the waters of the Tagus, spellbound by the siren song of the Tágides.
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Last flowers for the hospital is a set of images inspired by a song, made during a two-month period of convalescence at home with reduced mobility, which coincided with the hospitalization and death of a loved one.
The still lifes that were an experiment in the studio with artificial light gained increasing significance as the days went by, until they became a modest tribute to an important person in my life and a small portfolio about grief.