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A Silent City

Late year, local artist and architect Alexandre Marreiros presented his latest exhibition The Whispering Rooms at Macao Forum as part of the 12th Cultural Week of China and Portuguese-speaking Countries.
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Late year, local artist and architect Alexandre Marreiros presented his latest exhibition The Whispering Rooms at Macao Forum as part of the 12th Cultural Week of China and Portuguese-speaking Countries.

 

When the city went into lockdown early last year, and the four walls of our living spaces suddenly became more visible and tangible, beyond those walls, the changes we were forced to witness served as a dramatic backdrop for ponderous reflection. The Whispering Rooms by Alexandre Marreiros was about registering our city at that time, which was “like many others, uninhabited, haunted by silence and emptiness”, leaving open questions for people who visited it.

“This was my reading when I wandered around the empty city alone, as if the city were a hiding place where every space became an empty shelter. The city was in total silence, with no cars or people walking on the streets. In the newspapers and social networks, there were thousands of images of the Ruins of St. Paul's without a single person, Leal Senado without cars and tourists – those were desolate images,” says Alexandre of the premise for his ideas, “but on the other hand quite attractive, exotic even …”

“I had a city completely to myself, empty of what makes sense to cities: people. I had never had the opportunity to see something like this before,” he notes. “I was interested in the representation of unoccupied spaces, which was the key point to developing this body of work.”

 Alexandre believes his wandering around empty casinos sufficiently represented the fragility of Macau’s economy and culture.

“What is the real meaning of empty space in this city? What thoughts can we raise with this emptiness?” The exhibition’s title The Whispering Rooms came after Alexandre finished his first set of work, from which he found “the emptiness of a space can be associated with whispers and voicelessness,” Alexandre explains.

“Just like I observed in many empty mass gaming rooms or public spaces.” From the spark of an embryonic idea to developing a way to translate it, Alexandre’s works were born from drawings, distinctive in the way that art and architecture blend closely together.

“Many hand drawings all transformed into technical architectural drawings,” says Alexandre. “From the plans, sections and elevations, I built 3D models, then colours were associated with each of the planes that create the represented spaces. Once I found the desired images and perspectives, there was a kind of deconstruction of these same images to treat them as paintings.”

As in his work Call for a Void (2020), observing planes fade before the mind can complete the space and one’s sense of balance falters. He is quick to stress the composition in his works, “In the 33 pieces, there is nowhere that I have used a brush. The absence of figures in spaces is one of the guiding lines to which this work proposes; to record what I was observing during the year in Macau, to build an interrogative territory about what these empty spaces represent.”

Alexandre particularly likes to hear feedback from students and younger audiences. “They bring pertinent questions, without biases in the senses or preconceived ideas that we naturally lose as we become adults,” he shares.

“A group of high school students who saw the work Completely Cornered (2020) asked me if I was naughty when I was a child. I said yes!” Alexandre laughs. “I found it curious because the idea of that work is associated with being “stuck” or “cornered” in Macau during the lockdown, but also with my childhood memories of spending some moments punished in the corner of the classroom!”

The 20 sketched pieces that make up his Macau Daily Breakfast series (2020) take up a section of a wall at the exhibition and align across the perpendicular as if depicting a sequence of moments across the room as a story. Walking along the wall past the pieces, viewers introduce a kind of time-lapse that produces an effect similar to a cinematique experience, but with reversed roles, as the audience moves rather than the images.

“I like this idea of needing someone to finish the work. That work only makes sense when movement and time are introduced,” Alexandre says.

When one takes a closer look at each sketch, Alexandre brings characters from different chronologies together, including Hiro Omoda, Wan Kuok Koi, Luís de Camões and ‘anyone of you’. He notes that this surrealistic work gives him a sense that he can manipulate time: “For centuries, Macau has great stories as a melting pot. The characters (in the sketches) gather around a roulette table, representing Macau, and its unique culture and history.”

 

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