Our Land is the Sea
Last week I decided to finally visit the brilliant exhibition currently being shown at the centro cultura de Belém, “Our Land is the Sea” (the Portuguese is “O Mar é a Nossa Terra”, which, more appropriately, places the subject, “the Sea / o Mar”, as the driving force of the exhibition’s narrative). The exhibit is held in galleries usually dedicated to displaying architecture as it is more conventionally understood, consisting of drawings and models and maybe a render, or an “artists’ impression”. However, on this occasion, the curators André Tavares and Miguel Figueira decided to show how architecture and the built environment responds to geophysical, temporal and ecological structures; the exhibition shows us how there is an urgent need for a sensitive and research-driven response to ever-changing natural phenomena. In this way, the exhibition serves as a lucid and clear manifesto for a profound understanding of the natural world, and calls for a respectful constructive ambition.
The exhibition weaves together technical information and beautiful imagery. The central galley space is dominated by what at first appear to be backlit photographs of the sea, laid out on the floor. Upon approaching these shimmering images, it’s a shock and a thrill to understand that what we’re looking at are videos on flatscreen TVs: top-view drone footage of several sea-edge-conditions displayed on these screens creates high-definition animated plan drawings. Here a religious procession to and from Praia do Senhor da Pedra, there a surfer riding the foam in Nazaré, and beyond the tide slowly coming over the rock pools in Granja. People are simultaneously tiny and insignificant when seen as mere dots subjected to the impact of waves and tides - and yet they are shown operating in, around, and for, durable, man-made structures and systems: the pontoon, the lighthouse, the port and also the religious festival, the surfing championship, the summer holidays.
There is a didactic ambition to the exhibit, but this is worn lightly, with graphics and texts that invite curious lingering, ultimately asking the viewer to consider the forms that seaside structures can and should take. The vast beach at Figueira da Foz for example, is actually the consequence of interrupting the natural phenomenon of long-shore-drift with the extension of the mole that protects the nearby Mondego river bar - at the expense of a continuously retreating seafront further along the coast. Proposals to reverse this trend are presented, backed by evidence of a similar case in Australia; architectural and engineering proposals are shown in light of legal texts drawn up as a consequence of this coastal condition.
The study of the geomorphology of the Atlantic seabed off Portugal’s coast also provides a fascinating insight into the country’s seaside architecture. The seabed off the coast of Portugal deepens dramatically quite close to shore, meaning the waters here are cold and rough, ideal habitats for shoals of sardines, a key element of Portugal’s gastronomic culture. The fishing of sardines tends to be done by net casting, which is markedly less destructive than seabed-trawling. The exhibition shows us the ways fishermen in Portugal ventured out onto the waters to launch their nets and pull them again to shore: moon-shaped fishing vessels were specifically designed to pierce the powerful incoming waves; animals were used to help bring in the laden nets; fish were salted and nets mended in purpose-built wooden shelters along the Portuguese coast, in structures known as palheiros, some of which dot the seaside today. These wooden structures are typically two-to-tree storeys high, sometimes raised on stilts, and include a mix of residential and commercial accommodation within. Contrastingly, codfish (bacalhau, another staple of the Portuguese diet) was caught on relatively shallow waters of faraway Newfoundland, where it was preserved in salt before making the long journey back to ports in Portugal; returning vessels required larger physical structures for the packaging and distribution of catch, hence the construction of fishing ports and their attendant environmental impact. Fascinatingly, the buildings assembled on land are shown here to be the logical product of the shape of the Atlantic seabed, responding culturally and materially to the morphology of the ocean floor.
The vast Atlantic ocean touches the coast on rocks and sand - a line is typically drawn to delineate this interface, but in reality, such a line is a fabrication and a representation, because the interface between land and sea is constantly shifting. Gazing through microscopes at different grades of sand invites us to ask ourselves about the nature of this interface, and of our role in constructing it. This exhibition deftly convinces us to shift our perspective when considering the sea as being not a separate space to the land, an entity to be feared and controlled, but instead as an entity that is intimately tied to how we live, that has always shaped how we live, and that will continue to do so for a long time yet.
Film still from “Our Land is the Sea”, exhibition curated André Tavares and Miguel Figueira