Counter Earth

2023 — photographs Bairro do Talude, Lisbon

Bairro do Talude is a self-made neighboorhood, where individual and families originating from Cabo Verde land themselves into, or find shelter when faced with precarious circumstances. Often unsee or misrepresented, this former military zone becomes a space of both refuge and slow resistance. Thrown away material is collaged with new, creating living and working spaces. A space between blurriness and rawness, seemingly hidden but always transforming.

Through spatial observation, and guided by Elisandro and Leandro, two local children that in September 2023 lived in Bairro do Talude, I explored the narrow pathaways of the neighboorhood. These images aim to showcase a layered landscape of makeshift structures and marginal urbanism —a hidden architecture of adaption, and a momentary glimpse of shifting nowness, as seen by an outsider.