Inês d’Orey
Beograd Concrete
In addition to exhibiting at Belgrade Photo Month 2021, Inês d’Orey participated in an artist residency in the Serbian capital at the Footnote Centre for Image and Text, where she developed the series “Beograd Concrete” based around the modernist and brutalist architecture present in this region of the world. The residence was supported by the Embassy of Portugal in Serbia. “Beograd Concrete” book is published by Galeria das Salgadeiras, with the support of “Garantir Cultura” programme by the Ministery of Culture from Portugal and “PORTO” city hall programme. The book was designed by Leonel Duarte and the editorial coordination of Cláudio Garrudo.
The research proposed for this residency, which is deeply in line with Inês d’Orey’s artistic work, is related to architecture and the identity that this gives to the territory where it operates, as had already happened in other cities such as Lisbon, Porto, Copenhagen and Tokyo. In the case of Belgrade, she was particularly interested in the mixture of styles and architectural references she found in the city, where public buildings built between 1946 and 1980 and other housing or office buildings dating from the First World War, when Yugoslavia was formed, intersect.
In the book of the same name, curator Andreia Garcia says: “In this journey through images, let us understand ourselves as passive subjects, just like the architects of the past, without losing the sense of the gaze, but reinforcing it over the gaze from the photograph that takes away the current and factual point of view about the definition of time, one that does not start from the tabula rasa, that does not go back to zero to understand or write what happens, but rather announces the changes that allow for advancement.” By crossing recent events in the history of this country, which now has Serbia as its name, it is also possible to understand, or try to understand, the impact that political programmes have, or can have, on the identity and architecture of its cities.
This conversation will be conducted in English.
