Installation with hand-painted copper tiles and photographs with various dimensions.

Very Typical

Text by Ana Matos

“In Nature, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, Lavoisier proclaimed in the 18th century. We have been living with this teaching ever since, in the hope – hopefully not vain – that such transformation contributes to an improvement for Man and Mankind. This has happened in many areas and we certainly do not wish to attract bad auspices. That such transformation does not come from the cities, like a Cassandra of our times, auguring the end of this concept where people coexist organically with the services provided to those who live and work in those cities or visit them. All of this significantly conditions the political strategy and the strength of citizenship. It is to that end that artists and art, in its more ethnographic approach, can contribute to a reflection on contemporaneity and the problems now faced by Humanity.

Tiago Casanova’s Very Typical, dwells on his concern for the identity of the territory, the collective memory of a place, the symbolic nature of “things”. Given what art, and photography, can express of what is real, this work is an allegory of a Lisbon gradually metamorphosing under the stress of endemic, political, social and economic reasons, its traditions voided of meaning by massification. With decisive moments of poetry, Tiago Casanova brings us close to the relationship between those who live in the city and those who visit it, a relationship that is often paradoxical but that does not have to be so.

Exploring the “expanded territories” of Photography, this project comprises photography, installation art and performance art in a sequence of multiple interventions that took place throughout the city during the period of the exhibition, part of the artist’s larger project Gang do Cobre. Very Typical reflects a critical stance, ironic in nature, an act of rebellion that attempts to suggest some poetic order among the chaos, so that Lisbon continues to be ours, of everyone and for everyone.