12€
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Is it a Revolution? …
Or just bad weather!?
XYZ Books is a bookshop and publishing house, based at a ilha in Lisbon, focused on photobooks. Also serves as an artistic research center for artistic publications (XYZ Books Residencies) and printing lab, which provides specialised photographic services related to exhibitions and book making.
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The area now called Alvalade was mainly agricultural land before the 1940s. Alvalade was to be the first neighbourhood in the city that would adhere to modernist criteria of urbanisation. It was to embody together the dream of a modern Lisbon and the idea of order the regime was interested in promoting. The most recent theories in urbanism were there mixed together and translated into a traditionalist aesthetics capable to digest it all. The neighbourhood was meant to house all of the social classes into different kinds of housing around eight different schools.
Alvalade today is a rather peaceful place, although quite a few things have changed. An airport was built next to it, and planes carrying mostly tourists land and depart every 4 or 5 minutes, flying low over people’s homes. The old apartments meant for the poor have increased in value, but are still too small to be interesting for the upper class, still lodged into the larger houses on the other side of Avenida de Roma. Teenagers meet here and there after school, in little clusters. There is green everywhere: trees, flowers, little gardens in between buildings.
Federico Clavarino’s interest lies in how the past and the present overlap and interfere with each other, discrediting the idea of a linear progress; in how objects, images and gestures embody ideology; in how the invisible forces of political imagination shape the visible world and yet cannot fully control the everyday reality that is made by those who in fact inhabit spaces.
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"When I close my eyes, I feel the same love/hate between us that was there at the beginning. I wanted to be seen, but now as an adult what I needed was to leave. It all starts in the womb. In my first cocoon, something must have happened." (Mariana Rocha)
Mariana Rocha's Back and Forth portrays the threshold between love and hate. Family ties, new discoveries, griefs, little burdens and letting go occupy the territory of this not to be underestimated little book. A child's chalk drawing of a house - the archetypal home - rendered in pastels shatter the illusion of an independent woman that was beginning to build in these pages. Childhood longings and familial romanticised ideals are hard to shake off. What do we do when reality hits? Glimmers and drapery, shadow and tone sit awkwardly next to fierce self portraits and crumpled cars in a disorienting array of 'becoming' that is far removed from the traditional coming of age story. This is not a book about a particular linear progress, if we are honest about it whose life ever is? This is a punch in the face to the nuclear family icon. The house is falling on its side, the walls are hollow and the lines don't even match up. It's ramshackle, it's impossible to live with, but it's interesting. As Tolstoy insightfully put it "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina, 1877)
Sharon Young, 2022
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Planet earth at night. Seeing the world from above. Everywhere mankind has transformed the landscape, illustrated by the lights of the cities shining in the dark.
Planet earth seen from its depths. A wild and spontaneous swinging. Instinctive. Organic.
Ce qu’il reste is not about rupture. It’s a change of perspective, a movement of come and go from one side to the other, reminding that the environment shaped and controlled by mankind is also fragile and ephemeral. Some things die, others appear. Transform. Regenerate.
Ce qu’il reste is an invitation to travel – in space, but also in time. A journey through images created with a camera. Photography itself is often considered as the medium of the ephemeral. It shows us a moment that undeniably belongs to the past, reveals our passages in a constantly changing reality, like a scar recalling our memories: a metaphor of the fragility of human existence. But it is that same medium which eventually leads the spectator to a change of perspective, showing what remains when the same spaces are left by those who once inhabited them, with their individual stories and collective memories. Far from the turmoil of men, in the silent depths of the earth, an imperturbable and majestic movement continues its slow trajectory undertaken hundreds of millions of years ago. And maybe for eternity.
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Fruta de Época #3 [Seasonal Fruits], is the third of a series of visual diaries by Pedro Guimarães. This time Pedro focused on what he calls “the architecture of the poor”.
Four issues will be released in total. Together with the release of the fourth issue, a hardcover will also be released thus allowing all issues to be easily bound together in one volume.
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If the equations of physics, which invisibly enable aircrafts to fly, remain unattainable to most of us, the desire to fly itself however seems firmly rooted in the depths of human subconscious. As Le Corbusier once put it “flying lifts us above mediocracy. Flying is, ultimately, a desperate act of faith”.
In ‘How to fly’ photographer Pedro Guimarães (b.1977) takes us on a poetic journey into the subculture of private aviation. The language he employs takes the disguise of the documentary genre yet what initially appears to be a flight manual quickly reveals Guimarães’ true autobiographical intentions through the use of poetic punctuation.
‘How to fly’ is, after all, a reflection on the inevitable traumatic events of life and describes a series of emergency maneuvers designed to keep oneself alive.
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Is it a Revolution? …
Or just bad weather!?
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On the south bank of the Tagus River, near Lisbon, there is a forgotten beach. For some, just a beach lost in time; for others the place where they struggle to survive. Those who inhabit this enclave lead lives on the margins of society. They have learned to live without being able to rely on anything and anyone, only on the tide - which always comes at the scheduled time...
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Matéria, s. f. (do latim matéria). Qualquer substância sólida, líquida ou gasosa que ocupa espaço, que afecta os sentidos e tem massa e peso. Substância de que os corpos são formados. Qualquer substância susceptível de receber certa forma ou em que actua determinado agente. Tudo o que não é espiritual ou em que não predomina o espírito; carnalidade. Substância ou objecto sobre que particularmente se exerce a força de agente determinado. Substância sólida de que se faz qualquer obra (...).
(in "Dicionário de Português" de José Pedro Machado)
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José Cabral is the other master of Mozambican photography, located between the collective dynamic of photojournalism led by Ricardo Rangel and the new generation of photographers seeking international circuits. An original and irreverent master. His topicality is not the civil war, urban violence and hunger – sight is intervenient and free, far off much African photography that swings between victimization and exoticism. «Moçambique» is an anthology and a documentary – It travels through José Cabral work and his Country.
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From 2016-2020, Elizabeth Waterman spent most of her Saturday nights in strip clubs across the U.S., photographing and building rapport with the dancers who make their livelihoods there.
By necessity, exotic dancers are highly competitive athletes and performers. They’re also using the profession as a well-considered income strategy to pay off loans, raise a family, buy a home, or start a business. With the unique perspective and kindred compassion of a young female artist building her own body of work, Waterman celebrates their humanity and commitment to mastering their art in service of larger life goals.
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In a digitalized age, the endless stream of images stored in the cloud fills the gaps of what might be forgotten. In her past projects, Michaela Putz was dealing with these implications of technology and virtual image storage and remembrance. The artist’s own image archive from different phases of her life, stored on computer and smartphone, serves as the raw material for this. In a kind of digital retrospect, these are photographed and documented directly from the screen, whereby fingerprints and remains of dust on them are also recorded, as well as the mouse pointer and digital artifacts that are created by zooming into the images. Sometimes, they are digitally retouched and smudged, other times, they have been taken several times with the camera of the smartphone, making them pixelated, slightly dissolving the original image. By this, the works aim to visually sound out the gaps between human and digital memory, bringing the digital images consisting of raw data closer to the ephemerality and imprecision of human memory. Doing a publication with these images not only draws a connection between them but also to think about the way we deal with analog and digital image material. Even though digital images seem to be only data, they are constantly being touched: We are wiping and swiping, zooming and tapping on them through the screen. The book tries to take into account these different qualities and connecting the digital and analog processes of looking at images from our past.
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Pearl* Hard object that grows around a grain of sand or other foreign matter as a defensive measure of certain molluscules.
Pearl is a book about Madeira Island, nicknamed as “The Pearl of the Atlantic”, a highly touristic place known for its Nature and its unique Laurisilva Forests. Tiago was intrigued by this phenomenon of natural transformation of a living being through the creation of a non-living hard object, that turns out to be a very rare and valuable object, referenced as an example of beauty. So, how subjective can beauty get when a bizarre defensive measure turns out as a model of beauty? This book is about this relation between the subjective senses of beauty and ugliness and how the line between both senses is so thin and insignificant, working on this specific place, the Pearl of the Atlantic.
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“The photographs that I present in the series “Posto de Trabalho” [Work Station] don’t show people, but it is of people that they speak. We have here ephemeral constructions and spaces that shelter and hide underground labour activity.
These images focus upon a form of prostitution, the one that is perhaps the hardest, most dangerous and least dignified for both the workers and their clients. Any discussion of roadside prostitution necessarily implies a reflection on the public/private because it is practised far from the gaze of prying eyes, in the seclusion of the forest inside improvised shacks. This series was photographed in Portugal between 2010 and 2013.” Valter Vinagre
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Drawings: Nuno Engstrøm Guimarães (7 years old)
Monster Pancakes: Emma-Sofie Engstrøm Guimarães (5 years old)
Mask Sculptures: Sara Bichão
“Rato, Tesoura, Pistola gathers together photographs by Pedro Guimarães, produced in collaboration with Nuno Engstrøm Guimarães (drawings, 7 years old) and Emma-Sofie Engstrøm Guimarães (monster pancakes, 5 years old). Sara Bichão kidly offered her masks that becomes part of a familiar entertainment revealing what an author can be, literally “one who causes to grow,” and not only in a parental relationship. Combining the drawings of his children together with portraits of them playfully or simply relating with the father’s camera, this photobook, designed by Dayana Lucas, is a manifold of experiences and artistic attitudes in which photography works as an intertwining element and where design strategies activate it as a device involving the reader himself in the game. As the title of the book suggests, “Mouse, scissors, gun”, and Pedro explains in the book presentation: “This is how we play together, how we pretend there is no such thing as the vast emptiness that keeps us apart during most days of our lives: 2500 km of land and water, to be precise, the sheer vastness of Europe. But most days is not all days of our lives, right?”. And the time we spend flipping through this book, opening the folds that constitute its very semantic structure, has the sweet and captivating flavour of the magic time described in Pedro’s book, shortening distances and creating magic worlds with the interaction of basic, but powerful elements.”
Chiara Capodici, Leporello Books, Rome.
