Órbitas – exhibition by Atelier de Lisboa at the PLMJ Foundation

Synopsis

Over the course of a year, a group of artists threaded parallel paths — at times close, intersecting even — exploring distinct photographic practices. Each with their own center of gravity: a theme, a place, an obsession, a question. Órbitas gathers the traces of these journeys: images born of singular movements, yet sharing a common restlessness — the desire to understand the relationship between gaze and territory, between image and presence.

The title evokes a constant movement, made of approaches and departures, repetitions and deviations. Like celestial bodies, each with its own trajectory, the artists assembled here orbit around realities that either challenge or sustain them, that leave their mark, visually, both through the friction of attrition and the vertigo of weightlessness.

Among the works, we encounter the radical abstraction of a domestic garden — the sight and sound of an intimate jungle inspired by Bosch’s hallucinatory worlds. Also present is the liminal territory surrounding Lisbon’s airport, explored with persistence and lyricism, revealing the unknown features of a familiar landscape. Other work seeks out the silent impact of nature upon the vernacular, as though the environment insists on infiltrating the cracks of daily life, its narratives.

One project follows Lisbon’s bus route 720, documenting both the passengers and the urban fabric that unfolds along the journey — a repeated gesture in which the banal is transformed into a sensitive sequence. A visual diary records, intimately, the year in which an artist quit smoking: inner transformation is mirrored in small rituals and everyday objects, as obsessive image-making replaces a vicious habit left behind. A marble workshop is captured through another lens, where the brutal labor of stonework appears to be carried out by an ellusive agent, perhaps hinting at the invisible agency of the photographer.

Finally, a series of images accompanies an artist’s search for an idea of refuge. Following the path of a watercourse, it establishes a contemplative and emotional relationship with the natural landscape, in search of a possible place — physical or symbolic — to rest the body and the gaze.

Órbitas proposes a space of intersecting readings, where each series of images functions as its own constellation, in dialogue through affinity, tension, or resonance. Photography appears here as the trace of a movement, the echo of an approach, the document of a presence — whether visible or not. At a time when speed and dispersion tend to erase the attentive gesture, this exhibition rehearses another rhythm: orbital, continuous, silent.

Enquiries

Visitas por marcação para o email fundaçãoplmj@plmj.pt

Authors represented in the exhibition

An exhibition of works by Teresa Júdice da Costa, Alexandra Cunha-Vaz, Miguel Fernandes Duarte, Rosário Oliveira, Austeja Šciavinskaite, Gonçalo C. Silva e João Xenico.

Curator

Pedro Alfacinha