Curator: Petri [with “y”] collective

Site-specific installation with hand-painted copper tiles, and hand-painted advertisements on windows.

For Sale

Text by Andreia Garcia

This exhibition is an unrestrained exploration of the consequences of gentrification, but the reflection that seduces Tiago Casanova in this exhibition, For Sale, is situated well beyond what one can read in between the lines underlying this issue. The show presents an organic and transitive gaze that links architecture, tourism, urban policy, and human condition.

In a time defined by the an exponential increase in the offer of local accommodation, following a cascade of forlorn doubts on condo rules, on the absence of taxation, on social policy, on the role of city councils in these processes, and free access to information requests in a opaque market, the debate must begin with a call for questioning urban planning and the future of our cities.

Imbalances are evident, and therefore involve matters in which there is no consensus. In the meanwhile, we measure the voices of interest and those of their stakeholders.

Conceptually, Tiago Casanova’s project focuses on this debate, or on its absence. Because of this, he takes these questions further along a set of metaphors that are fed by his curiosity about luxury condos, about the real estate’s golden egg goose — the Golden Visa program — and about the human condition in this new urban context, between what has been lost and what has been abandoned, what has been transformed and what has been violated, the material and the immaterial, the corruptible and the corrupted.  

These are exposed realities (or semi-fictions), symbolically conveyed by the exhibition’s design, which appropriates the windows to face the street and the audience, which in this case is all and each one of the passersby: locals and tourists alike. Simulating a space of a city in transformation, the artist proposes the virtual possibility of acquiring the venue of the exhibition, underscoring this view on the city as a business opportunity.  

This is an exhibition whose critical dimension asks us for a timely reflection that is as pertinent as an analysis of our system, or our values. An analysis of real estate speculation and its social, urban, cultural, and commercial impact. But this is an optimistic gaze that points towards a need for a strategy for the development of a healthy and long-term urban policy. The problem is that, in the face of a dragging of feet and our laziness to address these issues, no strategy conveys more vigor than that which makes use of irony. And there, Tiago Casanova is a rigorous, creative, and effective master.

Translated by José Roseira