Out of Sight, Out of Mind takes as its starting point places that remain difficult or virtually impossible to reach, whether through geographical isolation, political restriction, spiritual significance or the limits of human access. Known through coordinates, maps and images but rarely encountered directly, these locations occupy an ambiguous space between geographical fact and fiction, sustaining the fantasy of somewhere beyond the problems of the inhabited world.
The exhibition confronts this fantasy with the impossibility of complete escape. Point Nemo, the most remote location in the Pacific Ocean, for instance, contains traces of microplastic pollution despite its extreme isolation. Moving between references to distant sites and the physical conditions of the gallery itself, Out of Sight, Out of Mind considers remoteness as both a spatial condition and an escapist projection — and asks whether anywhere can remain truly outside the systems we might wish to leave behind.
Location
Balcony, Lisbon
Dates
2020
Materials
Acrylic resin, pigments, mixed textiles, found wood, rubber-coated steel U-bolts, acrylic paint, industrial floor paint, rope and marble aggregate.
To Fill in a Gap, To Plug in a Hole or How to Postpone an Imminent Problem begins with a fabricated premise: that a 3.9 km tunnel once connected MUDAS.MACM and Galeria dos Prazeres, with the wood-fired ovens found in both spaces presented as its surviving entrances. Textile panels and sculptural elements extend this fiction, treating an unverified narrative as if it were archaeological fact and testing how easily absence can be filled by a convincing structure.
The sculptures are made from wood marked by disease, its damaged surfaces concealed while the material continues to change internally. This tension between appearance and instability runs throughout the exhibition, where repair, omission and fabrication become ways of negotiating what cannot be fully resolved. By collapsing real and invented histories, the work asks when filling a gap becomes a necessary act of connection, and when it becomes a way of postponing a problem that remains unresolved beneath the surface.
