Cidade de Vila do Conde
2023 | Pen, coloured pencil, paper | 50 x 70 cm
Private collector
Auto da Barca do Efémero
2023 | Hillside Fórum Tokyo | Tokyo, Japan.
My Plan For Japan | Solo exhibition.
Images by João Rey.
Imagination, not memory, guides the mental and graphic constructions of "My Plan for Japan", composed mainly of "paper architecture" essays. The central work does not deviate from the principles that characterize the author's work: the extreme care for detail, the obsession for rigor, the ritual of repetition, the demand for the just composition of drawings made entirely by hand. Accepting error, seeking perfection, this is the design of all the drawings presented here. Japan is AA's favorite country, she confesses, and everything is born from the impact caused by the total loss of the (behavioral) mental codes of a western woman confronted with the invisible but infallible rules that organize life inside and outside the fascinating gigantic Japanese city.
Presented at the illustrious Hillside Forum Gallery in Tokyo from 30th of May to 04th of June 2023. The exhibition was part of the official commemorations of the 480th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Japan.
10 cidades
2023 | Bic ballpoint pen, posca, coloured pencil, paper | 400 x 255 cm
Author’s collection
Babel
2019 | Bic ballpoint pen, paper | 200 x 150 cm
Author’s collection
The biblical myth about the very first megastructure, that aimed to be an immense home for all men, enabling them to reach the divine skies, motivated this huge drawing entirely made with Bic pen.
Based on the 16th century Pieter Bruegel's famous painting that captured the architectural ideal of a monolingual civilization, this Babel proposes a darker and denser atmosphere that recalls an almost apocalyptical ending. Having taken more than half a year to develop, and due to its density, the work demands a very prolonged viewing and interpretation from the observer.
And They Were Sheltered Together
2022 | Mixed technique, paper | 70 x 73 cm.
Private collector
Pushing the drawing towards the essay.
The image appears out of phase, superimposed, cold, analytical, intangible. But even so, not at all exclusive. The title proves that the future has long been surpassed, and not only by the present.
Fictions
2020 | Bic ballpoint pen, coloured pencil, paper | 132 x 92 cm.
Author’s collection
Flying houses, unstable structures, impossible kurofune, cities made of bamboo, origami buildings and other fictions have passed in front of the sheet of paper. The person who captured them applied filters, duplicating the image. There is always at least two versions of the same story. Constructions do not come from the future, but from the past, because they are archaic. Travelling to Japan is at once a trip to the past and to the future, the two not mutually exclusive. "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past."
The delirious story of the Capsule Tower
2020 | Bic ballpoint pen, graphite, paper | 93 x 132,5 cm.
Author’s collection
Kisho Kurokawa's iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower, situated in Shinbashi, Tokyo, was one of the most prominent heir of the Japanese Metabolism, the ultimate 20th century utopian movement that proposed a city made of architectural structures working like living organisms.
The building, designed to last 200 years by being continually renovated and having its pieces plugged in and out, came this year to its final dénouement. The futuristic capsules were dismantled and sadly scattered. In this "delirious story" the artist proposes a parallel future, where the metabolic intention was grandly achieved: the building grew imposing towards the skies, remaining permanently under construction.
Kyoto Twins
2022 | Bic ballpoint pen, acrylic, paper | 152 x 166,5 cm
Author’s collection
This drawing belongs to a collection called ‘Forever Lost”: some kind of theory of relationships, fragility, complexity, transience, imperfection, perishability and other non-listable concepts.
Two twin buildings observing one another through the moon.
Vertical Reclamation of Individual Spaces
2018 | Bic ballpoint pen, acrylic, paper | 100 x variable height (150 to 240 cm)
Author’s collection / Private collectors
What if the city’s only option was to grow upwards, turning commonplaces into an endless vortex of rooftops? What if the architect was able to project the outcome of already aged, obsolete, decadent structures?
The Vertical Reclamation of Individual Spaces is a series of vertical drawings that evoke fictional reality and the relationship between unseen humans and the buildings they inhabit.
The Ideal City (A Cidade Ideal)
2020 | Bic ballpoint pen, paper | 333 x 333 cm
Author’s collection
After a long walk, the traveller reaches the Ideal City, only to discover that it is made up of countless ideas. The architects wanted to transform the city through their visions, but is the form most sensitive to time and history?
The visitor decides to stay. Is there life for utopias beyond representation? He has no answer, perhaps he never will.
Tange Meets Miyazaki
2020 | Bic ballpoint pen, colored pencil, paper | 125 x 154 cm
Private collector
This drawing belongs to a collection called ‘Blind Dates”: unusual meetings give rise to megastructures that became delirious after swallowing the entire city.
Architecturally rigid, but animated and inhabited by beings the size of Arrietty, our imaginary friends. Welcome to nonsense.
Forever Lost
2019 | Bic ballpoint pen, acrylic, paper | 152 x 166,5 cm
Private collector
A floating city exposed to the wind.
The metaphysics of the line, also curved, in a drawing that was made and remade, time and again, line over line, like Borges’ Menard Quixote.
Kikutake meets Arriety
2020 | Bic ballpoint pen, colored pencil, paper | 152 x 149 cm
Private collector
This artwork belongs to the collection Blind Dates, one of the six collections created for the exhibition No Plan for Japan.
Usual meetings give rise to megastructures that became delirious after swallowing the entire city. Deprived of context, they are like containers of all there is. Architecturally rigid, but animated and inhabited by beings the size of Arrietty, our imaginary friends.
Guimarães - Incomplete Futures (Futuros Incompletos)
2015 | Multiple techniques | 21 x 29,7 cm
Exhibited in Casa da Memória, Guimarães.
“The documents on display were discovered in an underground and hitherto unknown compartment of an ancient library. Historiographic experts attribute the 10 illustrations to different authors and date the discoveries to the beginning of the 3rd millennium. All the drawings are partial visions of the same city, located north of the territory once called Portugal, in the former European Union.”
Essay on Lightness (Ensaio Sobre a Leveza)
2014 | Drawing technique | 70 x 100 cm
Private collector
Technical drawing of the imagination. Single elevation with 30 hanging araucarias.
