What can be in common between two cities so different as the modern and utopian Brasília and the historical Barcelona? Between the first, where one can only move by car and the second, where walking is the best way to get from one point to another, one would be tempted to  say nothing. However, putting side by side Karina’s video-objetos where she traps Brasília’s urban spaces and the large format photos of Barcelona’s square produced by Liberto Fillo, PARADIGMAS tries to weave a thread between the two cities.

Fillo, a Panamanian who lives in Barcelona, “recorded repeatedly framed architectural spaces to enable a new openness to the imagination,” explains the Brazilian curator Graça Ramos in his introductory text of the display. His photos taken from the top of buildings “give to Barcelona’s squares a grandiosity even when they are very small,” Ramos added. In this reading of reality, “rather than a documentation of these breathing spaces, what Fillo does is a poetic narrative about the human in their ways, misguided in their actions and pauses at the scene of the city.”

The brasilien Karina Dias, aims to “metamorphose the daily state of blindness into a desire to see, to see landscape,” announces Victor Ramirez, a young curator who reads from the distance the work of  another young artist and her city in order to verify that “to embrace the vast expanse of the Brazilian capital  it is required (…) a kind of prosthetic eye.” So says Ramirez, Dias uses a series of devices that eventually “result in boxes that contain images of urban spaces transformed into poetic and intelligent souvenir -Souvenir-Brasilia, 2011.” “In a fighting game, the elusive urbanism against meditation and concentration, the gigantic scale compared to privacy, the coming and going, fast, motorized, sliding against smooth, ride the car, flashing eyes off the insatiable curiosity of the voyeur. The invitation is clear: stop, breathe, contemplate.”

Karina and Liberto built their own landscapes from two very different contexts and seeing them together is an opportunity to think about our condition as people of any and every city, allowing a match between these two cities.

With the support of: