2023

A Multiplicação dos Fingidos

Land Art Cascais

The project's title “A Multiplicação dos Fingidos” (The Multiplication of Fakes) comes from the description at the entrance to the Hermitage, in the stone engraving, where there is a descriptive text mentioning the past content of the Hermitage's interior decoration - ‘The interior is modest and had records of fakes. Painted imitations of noble and expensive materials such as marble’. ‘The Multiplication’ takes up the biblical episode of the “Multiplication of the loaves”, at the same time as echoing Minimalism, where repetition and multiplication of an element weave the fabric of visual or sound fields. ‘Fingidos’ (fake ones) is phonetically very close to the word “Tingidos” (dyed ones). The plant substances used here to dye the fabrics are two - Rubia cordifolia (also known in medieval Europe as garance, an invasive plant found everywhere in Portugal as well as at Quinta do Pisão) and a former mulberry leaf tract (from India) - giving the fabrics their pink and green colours respectively (Fig. 4). The installation will consist of placing the twenty-four or so dyed fabrics cut in a triangular shape on the floor, chromatically interspersed, juxtaposed and/or superimposed, covering the entire floor. The floor of the hermitage up to the step that borders the small altar. It is true that the project I'm presenting here interprets, rather than reiterates, the notion of Land Art, with ‘Land’ being its material and position - the plant extracts from the earth and the horizontal age of the ground in the installation of the Hermitage.