AMORES
a floating island for lisbon
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta
the great estuary
lisbon | 2005
galeria de arte contemporânea quadrum
november | 30 | 2005 | 18:30
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Amores - a floating island for Lisbon
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
It was a sunny day
in Lisbon when António Cerveira Pinto and I had a lunch
in a restaurant not far from the Quadrum Gallery.
He told me about his great project on a petroleum free city,
for the Olympic Games in Lisbon, in 2020.
I dived in his words, ideas and dreams with the same light of
his projects - of his transdisciplinary, transcultural and transmedia
masterwork.
A true social sculpture, as Joseph Beuys would have said.
Everything present at the wonderful estuary of Tejo.
The brightness of his eyes quickly unveiled me the magic of his
amazing project.
He invited me to elaborate a project of architecture, integrated
in his great work of many thoughts, many sounds, many images
and people and worlds.
I immediately accepted.
I had concluded another project - a nucleus of creativity, a
mutant and deprogrammable floating platform at the Maggiore Lake,
in the frontier of Switzerland and Italy, near Locarno, where
I've lived in the last years.
An art and culture centre, a floating platform, mobile, permanent
metamorphosis, to be launched by Roy Ascott at the ArtEtics,
in England.
This project, in the Alps, operates new intelligent materials,
created with the use of nanotechnology.
António was wondered with it, as I was wondered by his
great masterwork.
This happened in the beginning of 2005.
It was great to have meet again António - a moment that
made us to recall our first meeting at the CyberFestival in Lisbon,
in 1996.
Since then, we met each other here and there - in 2001 when he
brought to Portugal, for the first time, a great American conceptual
artist, old friend mine, William Anastasi.
Multiple and coherent sensitivities, both free from the arrogance
of the small and, always, incompetent mafias, free from the closed
groups, dominions of putrid powers.
Our meeting that unchained my project as a contribution to the
Great Estuary was born from the friendship, from the mutual admiration,
from the freedom, from what Confucius designed as the excellence
of all relations - human or not - the reciprocity.
The second meeting, in the context of this project, was another
lunch - as it should be. At the table, with the wine, the flavours
and words, together the marvellous Tejo's landscape.
It was another magical sunny day - as it is almost always in
Lisbon.
I described him my project - a floating building, that can grow
or diminish, that can move from and to any point, a building
of irregular surface, using the movement of the waters and the
air to generate energy, making with the use of the fluctuations
and differences of temperature another important energetic element,
using daylight and heat as energy, constituting an organism where
everything can happen.
A deprogrammable human space, where it is possible to exist theatres,
restaurants, audiences, hotels, bookstores, stadiums, commercial
nuclei and expositions among so many other possibilities - a
total space.
A program always recreated and transformed.
Building covered by big fabric - like a kind of sailcloth - that
are accumulators of energy through the force of the winds.
Construction for a world free of petroleum.
And, however it clearly is about a project that implies the notion
of total possibility of transformations, a continuous metamorphosis,
it is in itself the materialization of the idea of freedom -
idea we receive from the old Greeks, according to which each
person must establish his own limits, his own borders.
Thus, it is mutant.
A project without implications in terms of environmental impact.
Any presence, human or not, means environmental impact.
Environment while humanity.
A project open to architects, urban planners, artists, economists,
biologists and many others, in a continuous elaboration.
A nonzero sum game.
Born from a nucleus, a navigable cell - with the aggregation
and the desegregation of a great number of other cells.
Everything forming a structure that modifies itself according
to a permanent creativity in a transdisciplinary approach.
Building whose irregular form improves the accumulation of energy
generated by the movement of waters and winds. Faces that also
are accumulators of solar energy.
Great flexible fabrics working as powerful accumulators of Aeolian
energy.
Module as octahedron - floating cell that can freely be overlapped
with other cells, making possible the generation of floors, walls
and equipment in an independent and changeable way.
Building structure that no longer is, obligatorily, cover, closing,
wall or anything similar - but yes, a kind of central nervous
system, bringing, through its edges, energy and all type of media
and communication systems, becoming something like an alive organism.
Floating building that moves between various places of the estuary,
livening up the most distant regions - but that can also be disaggregated
in parts, floating sectors spread to other points, or simply
modules that can join or separate from the structure.
A kind of organism internally working the differences of temperature
between the cold and the heat, above and below - producing internal
energy exchanges, in an endothermic balance.
A project that brings in its essential traces the continuous
participation of the human being, even at the level of its own
elaboration, of its own form, that never is the same.
Everything is change there.
Change only can happen with involvement, with the participation
of people.
This is the meaning of love - amores - participation, sharing
a same project, a same complex.
Idea on other ideas.
More than idea of space or meta-space - hyperspace.
The magical Camões' Island of Amores.
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