LUMIAR CITÉ

Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, Florian Zeyfang

Y - and half a year later there was a lot of concrete

19.11.2015 - 17.01.2016

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Exhibition View

Institute Above-Ground, 2015, video still / Vittorio Garatti archive

A renowned American artist, on visiting Lumiar Cité in Alta de Lisboa, one of the last entirely new neighbourhoods to be built in Lisbon, commented that “good architecture does not have to be more expensive then what has been built here”.

The exhibition at Lumiar Cité displays sculptures evoking modular forms in concrete that are installed in dialogue with films and texts. The project is a collaboration between the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Florian Zeyfang and Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger, members of the Viennese office schmidt-colinet.schmoeger dedicated to architecture and artistic research.

Besides the subtle references to earlier exhibitions at Lumiar Cité, Schmidt-Colinet, Schmoeger and Zeyfang translate their documentary and analytical project on housing construction initiatives in Cuba during the first years of Fidel Castro’s regime – with an emphasis on the phenomena of ‘microbrigadas’ – to the architectural characteristics and psychological resonances of the Lumiar Cité space itself and the Alta de Lisboa neighbourhood, an urban requalification project that blends social with free-market housing.

The exhibition evokes the ‘microbrigadas’ as a unique solution to address housing construction problems – reminiscent of the Portuguese SAAL project developed in the wake of the 1974 revolution –, and emphasizes the legacy of seeking aesthetically ambitious solutions, manifest in Vittorio Garatti’s ‘Instituto André Voisin’. However, it does not ignore the structural problems that have diluted the utopian promise.

Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger are architects living and working in Vienna. Florian Zeyfang is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. They have collaborated on projects and curated exhibitions that examine architecture and film in Cuba since 2003. They have exhibited spatial installations–incorporating slide and video projections–in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Havana, Gdansk and Berlin, among others places. In the context of the 8th Havana Biennial they published ‘Pabellón Cuba, 4D – 4 Dimensions, 4 Decades’ (b_books, 2008) with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, a compendium on art, architecture and film in Cuba. Recently, their work has also been presented at the Berlinale (2015 and 2013).

Coproduction with the Goethe-Institut Portugal within the framework of the Maumaus Residency Programme.