CRIL. Under the light of the sun also the sounds shine: Photography, a mode of inhabiting the world

Abstract

This project has its origin in an article for the first number of the magazine Passagens and it was redone(1) for my Master Thesis, presented at the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo in 2013. One intends here to question photography as a way to inhabit the world, where the watching of photography is a keeping and a taking care of. Photography here is understood as a vehicle of the images of the world and in a certain sense as a construction of a real, as other representations can do it, but with the peculiarity of being, among other signs, content in the semiotic theory of Peirce. This content, as among others refer Roland Barthes(2) and Rosalind Krauss(3), is demonstration of the veracity of the photographic images whose origin was in a “reality”. The connection between the chosen reality and my watching coincides on the photographic surface, that is: the reference transfers to the watching of the author or the spectator. To inhabit is like a question which that reference puts in a condition of otherness, welcomes, attempting at an answer. The spaces, the objects of these photographs, are found along the CRIL (the internal ring road of Lisbon), which, together with the river Tagus, form a circle around the city. This is an urban path that connects in a little time the architectures and the urbanisations I photographed, through roundabouts, exits exclusively for all kinds of motor vehicles: private, public and heavy transports. The automobile is in fact the only way to be, temporarily and in a relative movement, in that urban space. To watch this route inside the compartment is like being seated in an armchair watching a road movie, of which we can decide even the speed of the frames, the beginning and the end of the sequences, as well as the soundtrack. But never stop or leave the "sequence plan" other than by the exits especially designed for that effect. I covered each exit and roundabout of those 20 km, whether in fractions or in its total extension. The construction of the cabin, the unlimited possibilities to stop, the linearity of the perspectives through which to look, induced in me the need to leave that ring road. Every driver wishes to reduce to the minimum that waiting time, and does not see much of that sequence plan, composed mostly of road signs, shopping centres and billboards, exactly like a film on TV constantly interleaved by advertising blocks. The relation that each of us has with a space, like the speed with which we watch it, determines the outcome of that observation and the meaning we give it. To produce photographs implies a time that needs to be found and cut off the mechanical routine of life, and one needs mostly to be aware of oneself and everything that surrounds us. To photograph from the automobile would have been like changing the direct experience in the space that I ascribe to the photographic act, as a reflex of an observed reality, eradicating that essential part of its process which is to find the place itself in which one is able to be.