Vagância (et autres dalles lumineuses)

Following the photographic notes I brought back from a residency in Lisbon (Homa Lisboa), I returned for another stay to compile an alphabet from the lettering I encountered on Lisbon’s cobbled sidewalks.

I photographed each letter individually from the signs inscribed on the ground (with black cobblestones among the white ones) in front of the entrance to the premises named as such (“Sociedade” is one example); all the letters, whether uppercase, lowercase, with or without accents, cedillas, or umlauts, as well as all the punctuation marks I could find during my wanderings around the city, in order to gather as many as possible to compose the most complete typographic set possible.

In a second step, I use them to form other words, in a new form, in a different situation. The choice of words is inspired by words encountered in the city, particularly in graffiti. The Portuguese, French, or other language is chosen taking into account the origin of the words and the context in which they are de-situated during an exhibition.

The resulting piece is a floor installation of a word, made up of prints of individually photographed letters. The letters are arranged in a 60 x 60 cm square format. The prints are backlit, placed on light boxes on the floor. I use recycled lighting tiles, materials that a school was getting rid of. The first three words that inspired the project, Vagância, Pavé, and Revolução, influence each other and suggest a connection between them, a meaning that seems to have evaporated from the city sidewalks.

In the first installation, the word “vagância,” which has two meanings in Portuguese, vagrancy or laziness, was chosen for its second meaning, which evokes a certain relationship with the city linked to walking and drifting, wandering the streets, which allowed me to collect all these letters. In French, the sound of the word, when we don’t know its translation, makes us think of something between vagueness and vacancy—free and indeterminate time (boredom?) that opens the field to creation…