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.

"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

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.

Is it a Revolution? …
Or just bad weather!?

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.

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.

“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

“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.