MULLER, Dominikus — “Zone of Breaking Waves”, in Be Magazine #20 - a yearly journal for art and criticism, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2013, pp. 18-19.
other texts
For Isabel Carvalho, things are always somehow in-between: between the text and the image, between the book and the space, between art and everything else. Take "Orla", for example. This was the name of her last exhibition in the gallery Quadrado Azul in her home city Porto staged during late autumn 2012. “Orla” is a truly beautiful Portuguese word, a word that refers to a transition: the zone of breaking waves, the small strip where the sea meets the land, and where the diffuse, intangible element of water with its open, indefinable states also encounters the structured solidity of the earth, an ordered space; giving as much to it as it takes in the stoic rhythm of the waves.
Carvalho comes from text, from writing, from reading, from making and publishing books. Since 2007, she and designer Pedro Nora have been running a small publishing business called Braço de Ferro in Porto. And only by stepping out from here does she enter concrete space, a space with four walls in which things and people can meet, like authors and ideas in a text. Her project space Navio Vazio, which she ran until autumn of last year, can be described as a direct three-dimensional extension of her publishing programme; as a publishing business become space. It is a tangible, physical and locatable hub, where genres, ideas and people are able to encounter each other.
Carvalho is concerned above all else (and that means: above the solidity of the “objects” so fetishized in the art business) with a specific attitude from the public that makes interfaces and transfers possible. For "Orla", for example, she exhibited a number of elegant little glass bells together with book pages mounted on the wall, filled with regular drawings of wave formations (based on a reading of Robert Musil’s "Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika", 1908). The imaginary sphere of sound that appears only as a possibility here (until someone comes and records the sound) encounters overlapping waves; waves whipping themselves up, resembling sinus curves in their endless variations, and the echoes and loose ends of other books. Yes, water can also create mountains. And paper can have depth. Behind every space a new one opens up, above every thought there lies another. “In-between” is spelt T O G E T H E R, or: outside in front of myself, in the place where I meet the others.
Carvalho comes from text, from writing, from reading, from making and publishing books. Since 2007, she and designer Pedro Nora have been running a small publishing business called Braço de Ferro in Porto. And only by stepping out from here does she enter concrete space, a space with four walls in which things and people can meet, like authors and ideas in a text. Her project space Navio Vazio, which she ran until autumn of last year, can be described as a direct three-dimensional extension of her publishing programme; as a publishing business become space. It is a tangible, physical and locatable hub, where genres, ideas and people are able to encounter each other.
Carvalho is concerned above all else (and that means: above the solidity of the “objects” so fetishized in the art business) with a specific attitude from the public that makes interfaces and transfers possible. For "Orla", for example, she exhibited a number of elegant little glass bells together with book pages mounted on the wall, filled with regular drawings of wave formations (based on a reading of Robert Musil’s "Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika", 1908). The imaginary sphere of sound that appears only as a possibility here (until someone comes and records the sound) encounters overlapping waves; waves whipping themselves up, resembling sinus curves in their endless variations, and the echoes and loose ends of other books. Yes, water can also create mountains. And paper can have depth. Behind every space a new one opens up, above every thought there lies another. “In-between” is spelt T O G E T H E R, or: outside in front of myself, in the place where I meet the others.