FMBP - "Braço de Prata" Military Plant
“a space revisited”
The idea for this project was born on an exploratory ride on the eastern zone of Lisbon, and by the attention I always deserved to the numerous areas, once built with factories and warehouses, which, between the Tagus river and the hills, mediate the prime area of the city and the buildings adjacent to the Parque das Nações area.
The search for meaning in the passage of time, the ephemeral that afects us day-by-day, the big changes and transitions that run through society as a whole, always deserved great attention from me.
The life experiences have redoubled this search for meaning, which is focused on two major concerns, deeply interconnected: on one hand, I’m interested in the human experiences, by reading and observing documents which, in teit or image, enable to (re)construct the past, and, on the other side, the search for the ephemeral in objects, buildings, spaces, has served for a better
understanding of those experiences.
Photography, while archive, has served this dual purpose of understanding the past, throughout the images that I gather and see in family documents or other supports, but has primarily served as a mean to capture the passage of time, by reading the traces they present nowadays.
The photographic reading I have undertaken on “Braço de Prata” Military Plant, more than a systematic survey of a rundown area, was an attempt to understand everything that justifed it in the past, from labour between man and machine, which flled the nowadays empty rooms.
Who enters nowadays the “Braço de Prata” Military Plant, in front of the offices and warehouses of Matinha neighborhood, more than twenty five years after its complete closure, and many more years since the time that labored in full, at the end of portuguese overseas war, has the feeling that time has stopped.
That space was suddenly deprived of life, as if the camera shutter, for any strange phenomenon, crashed on a particular frame.
There, everything remains as before, but in a way that reflects the inexorable passage of time. The huge halls, stairs and lifts, glazed walls, ceilings and skylights, the workbenches, leisure areas, the remnants of the labour of men and machines.
It was precisely the attention deserved to this involvement between the environment and time passed that I tried to capture with this Photographic Project, on a set of images which sometimes seek a detail from the vastness of space, a nook, a framework that, in the beauty of the lines and colors, reveal something of what once was, so the record and history shall not be lost.
But it is also a call for the future, for the use of “Braço de Prata” Military Plant on such a way that could respect the nobility of the old building.
The images presented on this gallery were chosen from a wide range of slides captured between November 2007 and May 2008, with a Mamiya 645 AFD camera, using medium format film, with fixed focal length lenses (80mm f/2.8 and 150mm f/3.5) and variable (55-110mm f/4.5), and subsequently scanned in its original size and framing.
rui delgado alves
Novembro/November 2019
Read MoreThe idea for this project was born on an exploratory ride on the eastern zone of Lisbon, and by the attention I always deserved to the numerous areas, once built with factories and warehouses, which, between the Tagus river and the hills, mediate the prime area of the city and the buildings adjacent to the Parque das Nações area.
The search for meaning in the passage of time, the ephemeral that afects us day-by-day, the big changes and transitions that run through society as a whole, always deserved great attention from me.
The life experiences have redoubled this search for meaning, which is focused on two major concerns, deeply interconnected: on one hand, I’m interested in the human experiences, by reading and observing documents which, in teit or image, enable to (re)construct the past, and, on the other side, the search for the ephemeral in objects, buildings, spaces, has served for a better
understanding of those experiences.
Photography, while archive, has served this dual purpose of understanding the past, throughout the images that I gather and see in family documents or other supports, but has primarily served as a mean to capture the passage of time, by reading the traces they present nowadays.
The photographic reading I have undertaken on “Braço de Prata” Military Plant, more than a systematic survey of a rundown area, was an attempt to understand everything that justifed it in the past, from labour between man and machine, which flled the nowadays empty rooms.
Who enters nowadays the “Braço de Prata” Military Plant, in front of the offices and warehouses of Matinha neighborhood, more than twenty five years after its complete closure, and many more years since the time that labored in full, at the end of portuguese overseas war, has the feeling that time has stopped.
That space was suddenly deprived of life, as if the camera shutter, for any strange phenomenon, crashed on a particular frame.
There, everything remains as before, but in a way that reflects the inexorable passage of time. The huge halls, stairs and lifts, glazed walls, ceilings and skylights, the workbenches, leisure areas, the remnants of the labour of men and machines.
It was precisely the attention deserved to this involvement between the environment and time passed that I tried to capture with this Photographic Project, on a set of images which sometimes seek a detail from the vastness of space, a nook, a framework that, in the beauty of the lines and colors, reveal something of what once was, so the record and history shall not be lost.
But it is also a call for the future, for the use of “Braço de Prata” Military Plant on such a way that could respect the nobility of the old building.
The images presented on this gallery were chosen from a wide range of slides captured between November 2007 and May 2008, with a Mamiya 645 AFD camera, using medium format film, with fixed focal length lenses (80mm f/2.8 and 150mm f/3.5) and variable (55-110mm f/4.5), and subsequently scanned in its original size and framing.
rui delgado alves
Novembro/November 2019
