PRIMROSE: an other PORTO Atlas
It is madness to think that one must be an artist or that one must be a gardener.
The soul lives in the consent of its power. And Primrose is not a rose;
it is a spring measure, 'too quickly eroded', as Milton said.
Agustina Bessa Luis
When we invited Manuel Valente Alves to develop his “PORTO Atlas, a photobook” (2021) in any way he thought of, he proposed to produce a video, a work that is now presented at MIRA FORUM. His proposal did not unfold the book into a classic exhibition, but instead resorted to another support that gave us a Porto that we paid little attention to, that we almost ignored.
We start from a work that consoles us as people from Porto who move around their city daily in a way of working or in a way of banal use of going from one place to another. It is Porto that our eyes sweep with our gaze, using the city as a medium. The book references places, organizes itself into routes and inhabits the spaces we inhabit. It consoles us, because the author's look is the look of someone who uses the city in an intimate way in the banality of days.
The proposal that now brings us is that of a Porto that we see less, look at less and that, therefore, worries us. It offers us the sea without referring to the location, the waters of the river and lakes without identification, the trees, the canopies, the trunks, the grass floors made of light and shadows. While the Atlas book secures us because there is a precise cartography, a spatial location that we recognize, a toponymy, “PRIMROSE” leads us astray – and the sound accentuates our bewilderment – taking us on a journey punctuated by the camera’s movements to remember us. in the author's other works - “Hotel Europa” and “Hotel América” - in the running and flowing of landscapes through the windows of a train. For a moment, we feel comforted because we recognize a lemon tree like so many that populate the backyards of Porto, an orange tree over the river, we recognize the Fontainhas and their vegetable gardens, the magnolias of so many streets and gardens, the scintillation of the river waters that a boat through.
Unlike the Atlas book, PRIMROSE blurs us from the reality of the precise place, mapped to focus on what is essential in a city: the nature that supports it and that, imprisoned by construction and the routines of life, becomes invisible. In this sense, we can say that the video completes and complicates the idea of a city that only survives in relation to nature. We travel in the book through the streets of the city, we continue the journey strolling through the nature that supports it.
PRIMROSE also takes us on an inner journey because, softening the places, blurring the elements, associating different realities in plot – as if it were free associations – we summon our intimate scenarios. However, this dreamlike and poetic dimension is interspersed with images that bring us back to the clear and distinct reality of nature. What marks PRIMROSE is this balancing of images of a nature that is given to us by a mediator who travels in space and time that irremediably flows.
PRIMROSE leads us, almost in a prayer, to say: blessed are the light and the shadow, the still or stirred waters, the leaves and the herbs, the flowers, the trunks, the branches and the leaves, the sky, the wind and the mixture of all this.
This manifesto of love for Porto ends with a balloon of S. João that, in solstice time, gets up, flies and goes.
Manuela Matos Monteiro, “PRIMROSE: an other Porto Atlas”, in: Leaflet for the exhibition PRIMROSE: an other Porto Atlas, MIRA FORUM, Porto, 2022
