Deborah Schamoni

In September 2018, Gerry Bibby was the last artist to stay at the Maumaus Residency apartment on Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, it was his first visit to Lisbon. He is also the first to reside in its provisional location on Rua dos Anjos.

1.
Recalling a probably over-used anecdote about a modernist architect and his client's disquiet with the work's subsequent implications on her private life, PUBLIC agitates the interface that caused the client so much distress. Some cinema has taken advantage of the psychic pressures the glass facade has inherited from such anecdotes.

Believe me, I could understand her, December into January & even further wasn’t only the coldest time of year, it was the darkest, and when night fell the lit interior played beacon for the unseen exterior, all the while redoubling itself in reflections.

2.
A (gallery) shop front addresses the street with languages known from commerce, and echoes a perversion that these dynamics play out today, where, albeit from behind the glass interfaces of our devices, the PUBLIC is saturated with the personal: from shopping lists to inventories of private behaviours.

Piled up, I could see my own discomforts in relief. I didn’t want to play into dramas fuelled by disclosure, but I was witness to and could empathise with uncertainty.

3.
All the while the physicalities of architectures and objects stand by, ready to be enlisted by whomever is willing or has the capital with which to engage them. Inequities in scale produce antagonisms and alliances that play out in PUBLIC.

I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. It seemed to me that crises were taking place at the very base levels of sustenance and space, spiralling outward, and so, in an attempt to get a grip, that’s where I began.

Without wanting to simply reiterate the symptomatic, from whichever position we begin to consider it, PUBLIC is an arena of contestation and contradiction.

Photos: Daniel Malhao