A vortex, a table and a manifesto attract and collect silhouettes, things and remnants of a 'time of estrangement facing the world’, an expression by Odo Marquard which Solà-Morales quotes in Territórios and which Susana Gaudêncio reprises in the title of her exhibition.

A vortex, a table and a manifesto constitute the scenery to which the artist translates meeting rooms where, in a global world, are defined the strategies of their totalitarian standardization, i.e., of their inevitable oblivion. In this scenery, the window through which time meets the landscape’s reliable constancy, the accidents of the location are invested as referents. This window is replaced by a screen with a looped animation. Here all places fade away into a configuration of  silhouettes and the things that inhabit them. They are attracted by a vortex disappearing into the blindness of its rotating motion.  Opposite the screen (facing the world) stands a table, identical to the ones where negotiators sit around in rooms like these, covered by a polished metal plate inscribed by traces of random notes, from a meeting that never took place. On the other side of the table, opposite the world, a timeless, placeless and wordless manifesto, materialized in a life-size etching (proof) of the table top, replaces the image of the landscape, always the same in rooms like these, not corresponding to any particular location, its concept only intended as an abstraction.

 Maria João Gamito

May 2012