Organization: Arquivo 237

Curator: Andreia Garcia

Sound Design: Filipe Raposo

Manipulation:
The Return of Utopia

Text by Andreia Garcia

In the Post-truth era, when facts do not matter anymore, considering the idea of manipulation through an architectural context requires one to think about the tools of their own discourse.  

Nowadays, public opinion is based on an appeal to emotion, to their beliefs and on the repetition of a non-truth until it becomes a non-lie.

This is the era of manipulation. It is the era of the portrayed image, more empathic than factual.

Assuming the desire to analyze urbanity, acknowledging the decline of a common look over reality, The Return of Utopia challenges the contemporary tools through a game of utopias, in a new context of truth, which is the post-utopia.  

As in Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past , where it is represented the non-abandonment of what constitutes the story of ideas that push us into the creation of a new, absolutely true, expressed with emotion over a photographic portfolio, this exhibition is an interpretation of the post-truth about architecture, city and urbanity.

In this sense, Tiago Casanova creates an original work using a video-graphic configuration that he adapted to the installation, pursuing the idealization of a circular building, established in an abstract (dis)figured context. The exhibition seeks to establish a strong relationship with the body and the spectator, starting a process of multiple truth about one truth: a disorientation over an orientation, a look on the society about the precision of the capture of a gesture, a critical development on the march towards a new way to observe.

Filipe Raposo collaborated in the production of the show, designing the sound effects that enhance our sensorial and spatial experience.