Fragment of a Landscape

Supported by Culture Moves Europe / European Union

Self-initiated community-based project in Covilhã, Portugal. I spent one month working with the local community in collaboration with New Hand Lab, a local cultural arts centre. Covilhã was once a busy textile-producing town in central eastern Portugal in the Serra da Estrela mountains. The two streams, the Carpinteira and Goldra, that the town was built around were key to the textile industry and the formation of the Covilhã landscape. Through the project, I examined the significance of the Carpinteira stream in the contemporary landscape, now that the textile industry has all but shut down.

Landscapes are fragments of our imagination. They are phenomena that are constructed both collectively and personally from our experiences of the land we exist within. The term landscape is indelibly connected to the image as it was initially used in the late 16th century to describe a painting of the land. Since then, landscape has evolved into an everyday phenomenon. Landscape can exist in many ways; it can be constructed through collective or personal experience, through images, or by physically altering the land. The images presented here bring together fragments of the Covilhã landscape, describing a small area in the Carpinteira valley. Together, the images construct a landscape that describes a place in which we live, remember, forget, enjoy, and endure. If we look closely enough at the landscape, we may find that the landscape is part of our souls, and our souls are in the landscape.