Lisbon Design Week is an annual cultural event held in Lisbon, showcasing contemporary design and high craft while celebrating the talents of the local creative community. It takes place each year in May alongside the ARCO Lisbon art fair, and the first editions focused on different neighborhoods of the city.
The 2017 edition of Lisbon Design Week was dedicated to the neighborhood of Lumiar. I was invited to participate in this edition, and my project sought to reveal a space where two cities quietly coexist.
Lumiar, one of Lisbon’s oldest quarters, carries medieval roots, once a rural parish of farms and fields, later transformed into a haven for the nobility, with palaces and grand estates like the Palácio do Marquês de Alegrete and Quinta dos Azulejos.
In the 20th century, waves of urban development brought new infrastructures, residential blocks, and social housing, reshaping the landscape while layering new lives over old ground.
My work aimed to hold both realities in view, past and present, elegance and struggle, dwelling side by side in a subtle, persistent duality.
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The good observer meets the well observed. Highs meet lows. Facts meet fiction. In each city there are (at least) two cities, one for nobility and other for poverty. These cities rarely talk. Fortunately Luís Mileu likes dialogues. Light and shadow to begin with. The photographer and his photosensitivity made the introductions between old farmhouses and the people from nowadays. But the conversation doesn’t stop there. Rural meets urban. Fauna meets flora. Concrete meets emotion. The world outside meets the parish within. The good observer meets the well observed. Highs meet lows. Facts meet fiction.
It is said that, near Campo Grande, about three centuries ago, before the complaint of an unfortunate – I freeze and asphyxiate. King João V answered jokingly: Lume e ar (fire and air). Fortunately, for the oldest parish in the city, this Lumi takes the conversation further, an accomplishment that illuminates (at least) twice.
Ricardo Henriques
