“LAYER FROM BACKGROUND: REFLECTIONS ON INTERMITENCIES AND TEMPORARY SPACES”, Essay

TEXT FOR THE ART CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION “LAYER FROM BACKGROUND” BY ARTIST LEYLA GEDIZ, 2023 / INDEPENDENT EDITION WITH THE SUPPORT OF FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN AND SAHA, LISBON

“Layer From Background” / Leyla Gediz / Independent Edition / Lisbon, 2023 / ISBN: 9789893336724 / Texts by Luísa Sol, Övül Durmuşoğlu and an interview to the Architect Bartolomeu da Costa Cabral

“SCREEN CARE: GREAT DOMESTIC REPRESENTATIONS AND VULNERABLE VISIBILITIES IN PANDEMIC LANDSCAPES”, Essay

in I, Like Many Things / Ed. Diana Smiljković, Gustav Nielsen, Rachael Tsai, Jack Rusk. / Yale School of Architecture / New Haven, 2023 / ISBN: 9781638400745

“MENTAL SPACES I REAL SPACES: A DIGITAL ARCHIVE”, Curatorship and Edition

DIGITAL PUBLICATION, 2023 / EFABULA / 910FOGOS / BAIRROS SAUDÁVEIS

A community research project arose from the @910Fogos Project, launched during the pandemic. It involved the local community of the Alto dos Barronhos, the largest social housing estate in the municipality of Oeiras, in a set of participatory actions around the connection between Architecture and Mental Health, helding a cycle of on-site public debates with the local community. How does architecture delineate the emotional appropriation that humanises space? And how does it potentiate difficulties, resistances, efforts and struggles? How does it foster comfort and happiness? And how does it stigmatise?

As a compilation and documentation of these and other subjects, this Digital Archive seeks to enable a specific set of social, political and cultural arguments to be easily disseminated through a link: https://efabula.pt/projects/arquivodigital/

“ARCHITECTURES OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION”, Installation

Research Project under the Mentorship of Tatiana Bilbao, 2022 / Forecast Festival, in RadialSystem, Berlin

Screen-based images of domestic architecture are omnipresent, and constitute a historical legacy of how the field is represented over time: the dreams and fantasies, but also the stereotypes, discrepancies, inequalities, and segregations. Considering the onscreen image as a space of fiction that’s also a testament to what is omitted, an atlas of the audiovisual imaginary of domestic architecture was built, literally inside of an archetypal house. Through a comparative archiving method, relations were established and an attempt to detect underrepresented realities, while also formulating a demand for a wider narration of architecture.

FICTION PRACTICE – “ASSEMBLY FOR THE EXTRA REAL”, Workshop

Selected Participant in the Young Curators LAB, 2019 / Porto Design Biennial

A re-enactment of the historic room where The Berlin Conference (1884–85) was convened, served as our headquarters. Inside, disguised as curators, we engaged in the design and practice of research, transmedia narratives, and forms of activism. Armed with diasporic imaginations, our aim was no other than creating a committee for the scramble for our collective present, starting from the territory of Europe. With Mariana Pestana as Chief Curator, the workshop was lead by Marina Otero Verzier, Malique Mohamud and Ibye Camp, with Clara Meliande, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita, Desirée Desmarattes, Luísa Sol and Francisco Moura Veiga. This workshop resulted in an exhibition and a chapter in the book “FICTION PRACTICE – prototyping the otherworldly”, edited by Onomatopee.

“LEGAL ALIEN, EXILE AND INTERMITTENT HOMES IN «ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK» (Sting, 1987)”, Essay

Luísa Sol / “Legal Alien, Exile and Intermittent Homes in «Englishman in New York» (Sting, 1987)” / In Imagined-Architectures: Architectural Graphic Representation and Other Images / Drawing (…) City (…) Body, Dwelling on Earth / Ed. Pedro Janeiro / Taylor & Francis / ISBN 978-0-367-02602-8 / London, 2019. (pp.131-135)

Book Chapter, in “Imagined-Architectures: Architectural Graphic Representation and Other Images”, 2019

In his book “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said points out that seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” enables one to a particular originality in the gaze in that most people are aware of a culture, a place and a home. For Said, the notion of exile is mainly intellectual, which makes it possible to be exiled in his own country.

New York has always been a city of arrivals and departures, in which a foreigner has always arrived with the aim to start over. It is precisely on the look of the foreigner that the music video of “Englishman In New York” (David Fincher, 1987) focuses on.

An exiled individual has at least two homelands allowing plural visions, simultaneous dimensions, and an awareness of what Edward Said has called “counterpoint.” By “counterpoint” Said means the permanent conflict between the habits, expressions and activities of a place where one arrives and the memory of those same habits of the place that one has left: “I Don’t drink coffee I take Tea my dear/ I like my toast done on one side”. Taking into account this notion of Exile by Edward Said (Reflexions on Exile) and that of Emanuel Levinas’s Dwelling (Totality and Infinity), the city of New York will be examined through “Englishman’s in New York” gaze.

“Englishman in New York”, Sting, 1987

“THE IMAGE OF THE CITY AND ITS REPRESENTED-SPACE IN MUSIC VIDEOS FROM THE 1980’s: North American Interferences in Western Architectural Culture”, PhD

“Pappa don’t Preach”, Madonna, 1986

PhD in Theory and History of Architecture, Lisbon School of Architecture, University of Lisbon, 2018

Postmodernity and the post-industrial city’s evolution are accompanied by an increase in social diversity along with new patterns of consumption, based on the search for the “more” and the “newer”. The city analyzed here is the North American city because it is specifically illustrated in the light of the MTV music videos that first appeared in America in 1981. This was the moment when the video was instituted and was assumed as a device associated to a submersion in a pop and capitalizable formula that includes fashion, brand, sound, image, marketing, cinema and lifestyle. The mass media boom along with the proliferation of the image and of a specific type of hedonism typical of this decade have fostered a new form of representation of the city. Meaning, the city and the video were contaminated reciprocally. These contaminations shall be named interferences here.

The same way that the city immersed itself in the visuality of the music video implementing and conveying, from this moment onwards, a punk city, a queer city, a pop city, a city rap or hip-hop, to mention just a few, so will the music video interfere, afterwards, in the city. The consequences of these interferences in Western Architectural Culture will be addressed here.

The intention will be to ascertain and understand the consequences of these contaminations, influences and interferences. In what way did the City lend itself to the video? And how did the video assimilate, digest and return it to the public? And, simultaneously and later on, how did the music video lend itself to the City and Architecture? Taking into account the specific characteristics of this device, we will investigate its consequences in the City, its Image and its Space-Represented after its contact with the music videos of the eighties.

“FILMED CITY: MAPPING TOPIAS IN MOTION”, Workshop

Authorship and supervision of a workshop in the Seminar “Drawing (…) City (…) Body, Dwelling on Earth”, 2018  /  Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Drawing and Composition of an Atlas of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, with images taken from advertisement, TV series, soap operas, films, news and music videos. There was an individual research followed by a collective screening and group selection of the most emblematic images, considering the overlapping of the filmed city with the geographic city. Mapping the city with the television image allowed us to better understand the reciprocity between city and audiovisual.

“A CASA E O MUNDO”, The Book

Organization, Edition and Content of the Book “A Casa e o Mundo” (“The Home and the World”), 2018

This book is the result of the conversation between Architect Manuel Aires Mateus, Psychoanalyst Vasco Santos and the artistic project Musa Paradisiaca. It consists in the compilation of the perspectives and reflections of the guest speakers on the issues debated, namely, on the blurred relations between proximity/distance, domestic/foreign, inside/outside, Home and World.

Includes also the unprecedent portuguese translation of Homi K. Bhabha’s essay “The World and the Home”.

A CASA e o MUNDO / Ed. Luísa Sol (edition and content) / Ana Teresa Ascensão (edition and design) / LATA edições / Lisbon, 2018 / 80 pages / 15,5x22cm / Soft cover / 1st edition: 500 copies / ISBN: 978-989-20-9083-2

“A CASA E O MUNDO”, The Talk

Organization, Moderation and Content of the Talk “A Casa e o Mundo” (“The Home and the World”), OpenHouse Lisboa 2017 / Lisbon Architecture Triennial

A Talk between Architect Manuel Aires Mateus, Psychoanalyst Vasco Santos and the artistic project Musa Paradisiaca for OpenHouse Lisboa 2017 in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennial. This debate was conducted bearing in mind the Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of Unhomely and the consequent disengagement between the Home and the World that has arised from the Modern and Postmodern dynamics.

In the photo, from left to right: Luísa Sol, Manuel Aires Mateus, Vasco Santos and Musa paradisíaca (Miguel Ferrão and Eduardo Guerra).