This project reflects on urbanisation in Cape Verde, focusing on Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente. It questions the conventional image of the city and the dichotomy between "local" and "global", arguing that urbanisation is now a planetary, multi-scalar process. It looks at how development narratives and large-scale housing programmes overlook the existing organisation of places: solidarity between neighbours, extended families, emigrant remittances and the small local economy. At its heart is the casa de tambôr, the first stage of the housing process on the island, which stands for the daily resistance of residents and their right to "Estar" in the territory.
José Pedro Cortes’s second solo exhibition at Galeria Francisco Fino opens the gallery’s 2021 season. Centred on the human figure, nature and architecture, CORPO CAPITAL brings together new work in which still lifes, suspended bodies and fragile or abandoned buildings create an atmosphere both beautiful and unsettled, shaped by the artist’s desire to engage with the time we live in.
The show presents for the first time Make this your Home, a series created by digitally manipulating real estate advertisements from 2020 newspapers. Made in the midst of the pandemic and a booming luxury property market, the images expose the tension between the home as shelter for the body and the commercial language of capitalism.
Alongside them, photographs of branches and trees laid on the ground, composed like still lifes, transform fragility into a possibility for observation, a way, in the artist’s words, “to grasp the banal and make it beautiful.”
