On the pottery wheel I pedal some kilometers until I build the clay wall. To get home or to the studio, I pedal some meters more. I take note of the paths, the colors, the smells. I pretend I am reinventing the wheel, the bubble of my conviviality, the comings and goings.
As the clay is baked, the terracotta dismantles the lines of connection, such is the strength of my desire to see the colors changing with the increase of temperature. The drawings, now engulfed by the soft folds of the ceramic, before the ones made by the fire, showed the paths of the village, of the waterside walk. Repositioned, the circular maps were laid on the pieces of wood from the old cork factory where Armazém 56, space of the art residency, is now located.
Little routes redone. 1200ºC terracotta ceramic, transparent glaze and manganese oxide; woods found in the atelier's wasteland, remnants of objects from the Mundet factory. Photo by the author. 2020-21.
The fragmented and isolated paths make up stories of a crafting process in a desire of mapping the relations, the ways of access and the points of reference on the wheel remade from the ceramic.
The lined-up pieces are supported by objects found around the old factory. They are made of cylindric wood, carefully cut to make the corks in the exact shape of the empty space of the bottle, receptacle of the elaborate wine.
Instrumental and technical efforts add up, on the cylindric folded maps and the factory pieces, so concerned with yielding information and uses. They thicken the impossibility to continue on the same paths, without, nevertheless, stopping to go through them, in ways of containment and reinvention, while they travel through our spaces of observation in circles, cylinders and folds.
