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José Maçãs de Carvalho. Archive and Democracy
José Maçãs de Carvalho, Archive and Democracy
José Maçãs de Carvalho, Archive and Democracy

Archive and Democracy is an audiovisual essay José Maçãs de Carvalho (b. 1960), the record of a sort of “event”, whose central character is an underground, practically invisible community – Filipino immigrant domestic workers who live with their employers six days a week. On Sundays, they emerge to block and appropriate the streets, a human mass that “occupies” spaces creating territory, acquiring the density of a sort of sisterhood and making public and private space overlap.

In this exhibition, the videos functioned as a counterpoint to the series of photographs: while in the latter Hong Kong functions because it is far, as a skyline (a “sight-seeing” experience), as a landscape or “image of architecture”, in the former, the streets of Hong Kong are a place (a “site-seeing” experience), an inhabited, lived place, where people rest, sing, dance, celebrate, eat lunch and comb their hair.

Archive and Democracy proposes a narrative discontinuity that summons the exhibition space: architecture becomes a structural element of the project establishing a relationship between a range of audiovisual components – moving images, with sound or mute (sequences and loops) and still images.

MAAT Central
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