The virtual exhibition entitled A PALIMPSEST OF THE CITYSCAPE, made by Mihaela Moțăianu (PhD Candidate) presents images with urban fragments captured in a poetic way, a subjective perspective on the urban landscape. The exhibition was presented on the main page of the Romanian Cultural Institute website Wednesday, 29th June 2022, and on the social networks pages of ICR Lisbon: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
In 2019, during four months spent in Portugal, Mihaela Moțăianu discovered the charm of the Portuguese City through the work of the great poet Fernando Pessoa. In the imaginative poems of Pessoa, Mihaela notices the melancholy specific to the Portuguese people. Thus, she was stimulated to photograph only those images that trigger an emotion that she associates with the Saudade concept (a Portuguese word that describes a deep state of melancholy) and seeks to intensify this type of melancholy in photographic images.
The experience of the Portuguese city has materialised in a series of visual narratives presented in the form of digital collages correlated with verses from Fernando Pessoa’s poems.
Through the exhibition A PALIMPSEST OF THE CITYSCAPE, Mihaela Moțăianu presents a whole range of emotions and feelings of both the poet and personal that she transfers to the viewer through the created images. The photographic material that resulted from capturing the details of the urban landscape was made in three Portuguese cities: Lisbon, Tomar and Mação.
Mihaela exhibits the series of collages in a virtual exhibition space in which the concept of palimpsest overlaps elements such as urban images that illustrate architectural details or everyday moments, verses from Pessoa’s poetic creation and sounds that complete the visual narratives. This overlap creates a unique experience in the virtual space, which places the artist’s urban experience in a paradigm of the imaginary. The artist has composed titles for each artwork, but some of them retain the original title of Pessoa’s poems, along with their interpretation in English.
The virtual exhibition has been available for two years on the Mozzila Hubs platform, a reference space for educators, teams and organisations. The platform was closed on 31 May 2024.
In order for visitors to access the virtual environment, they will select an avatar to immerse themselves in the virtual space, thus becoming visitors to the exhibition. The Hubs platform is optimise for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but the exhibition can also accessed from Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Safari or other browsers. Accessed through the Firefox browser, the Hubs platform allows faster navigation through the virtual environment and also easily runs the dynamic images and ambient sound specially created to exhibition atmosphere, thus completing the exhibited artworks.
Parts of this project were published in O Ideário Patrimonial / Nº 15, from October 2021, a biannual digital publication made by the Center of Archeology of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal and in the international journal Design|Arts|Culture / Vol. 2 of December 2021, published by Design, Interior Architecture and Audiovisual Documentation lab of the Faculty of Applied Arts and Culture of the University of West Attica Greece.
