Sossego City is a disorderly, disproportionate, and noisy territory. Its urban fabric is a patchwork, torn by motorways and railways, where the frailty of small, improvised constructions and the heavy solidity of the infra-structures that dominate the landscape, involuntarily connect. It is a scenery made of contrasts, built in different scales, modes and times.
This series is about a mode of inhabiting this strange and unpredictable territory, about the ways through which its inhabitants domesticate it and make it their own. Surprisingly, the word “sossego” [quiet] often comes up when they talk about the places where they live. Thus, in these images, urban speed and violence are a backdrop against which a sense of calm and time can nevertheless be perceived. These are small spaces where rural and urban, public and private blend together, signs of a mode of living that doesn’t correspond to the contemporary concept of urbanity.
Degradation is obvious, and these places, located in eastern Porto, are likely to disappear. But something about this way of life, with obvious roots in a rural past, seems to question the future. “Sossego City” is a perspective on a moment of the history of this territory, and a reflection on the hints it may provide for a reinvented way of inhabiting urban space.
Sossego City was first exhibited at Centro Português de Fotografia, in 2012.
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