by Delfim Sardo
A Cidade Incompleta
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas
Curadoria: Delfim Sardo
26 june 2021 to 16 january 2022
Fernanda Fragateiro's work always starts from a friction between the uncertainty and fragility of historical processes, the failures of modernity confronted with the strength of utopia and the strict form of her sculptures.
This tension has been focusing on moments when the historical process of the construction of modernism is confronted with social inequity. In this context, the history of gender inequalities, or the failure of projects in spite of their social generosity and political utopia, composes the material from which the artist feeds her worldview, or from which she builds her ambiences and objects.
This exhibition by Fernanda Fragateiro was specifically designed for MACE space, trying that each room has a specific ambience through a different element of our relationship with space. Throughout the exhibition, a set of objects (generically entitled Materials Lab) emerges, as a lexicon of the artist's references, helping us to understand her connections to specific places, political struggles, and the poetics of social transformation.
Cities, as Herberto Helder wrote, are incomplete. Necessarily incomplete, because we always miss the place where we’ve met someone, where we’ve lived something, where we've seen someone we'll never see again.
That's why this exhibition is titled The Incomplete City