Gabriela ALBERGARIA (1965)

Gabriela Albergaria was born in Vale de Cambra in 1965. In 1990, she completed her studies in Painting at the FBAUP to then become a Gulbenkian Foundation scholar between 1991 and 1993. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Lisbon.

Gabriela Albergaria worked as a lecturer at the Ar.Co school of arts between 1995 and 2000 and was artist in residence of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 2000-01. She has exhibited her work individually since 1990, the year she presented Notas at the Monumental Gallery in Lisbon. Notas (Notes), like Marcas de Água (Watermarks) from 1991, and many of her works in painting up until 1997, creates fictions through banknotes by representing figures of state in ironic or ridiculous situations.

In 1994, Albergaria evaluated the revolution of April 25th in the collective show A Liberdade Está uma Senhora (Liberty as a Lady) with seven human size resin polyester carnations. She ‘planted’ these flowers in a bed of coins, indicating how ideals had been contaminated by economic interests. She also exhibited large iron structures on wheels with panels that presented drawings of fables and festive, magical and fantastic beings.

Since 2001, she has exhibited individually in Berlin and has successfully maintained her exhibition practise in Portugal (Lisbon, Oporto, Coimbra). Additionally she participated in a group exhibition in Budapest (2001).

The photographs that integrate the CAMJAP collection comprise a nucleus that was exhibited in Berlin (at the Kamm Gallery), Budapest (2001), Salamanca and Lisbon (2002). Albergaria photographed a model of a seemingly nocturnal landscape, built in-studio with branches, leaves, small mirrors and other artificial material. The lighting, created with real spotlights, confers the reproduced “locations” with an enigmatic, isolated and potentially dramatic atmosphere, almost like the childhood recollections of dark and labyrinthine, unknown garden. The images suggest the beginning of an intense chapter and scene– a clearing in the woods– and a documental intention that is counter played by the oscillation between nightmare and idyll, between the absurd and a discovery brought on by memory. She initially chose to only show the photographs; further on, she exhibited the models at eye-level to enable circulation around each forest and thus stress the contrast between the dimension of the model and the illusion of the real forest.

The recovery of childhood memories renders the sensorial and fantasised experience of our enjoyment of woods and forests. This experience also exists in works like the one Albergaria presented in Coimbra within the ambit of the Mnemosyne project (2000): Tenho Sete Anos e o Buxo Dá-me pelos Ombros (I am Seven Years Old and the Boxwood is Shoulder-high), one of her models of a garden. The relative proportions of body and space, our attainment and interaction with them and our recreation of their limits are issues that already existed in the series she named after her parent’s street: Rua Manuel Soares Pinheiro (1997-99).

Albergaria presented three yearly exhibitions within this series. The photographs provide images of the interior of an empty house where two animal-like dolls suddenly run into each other. These images of the house, its scary corners and uncanny shadows, are rendered from the doll’s point of view. An equally cinematographic logic also animated the video and photos from the series Rua Manuel Soares Pinheiro.

In her final project at the K. Bethanien in 2001– Studio II – the exercise of her gaze and somewhat eurythmic sensibility turned towards an examination of her relationship with nature, the seasons and the question of surviving the city. Large trees with ostensive grafts and zones of mechanically supported fractures were brought into her studio. Albergaria also placed small model-homes on top of the trunks. The idea of manipulating the genesis of vegetable life seems to punctuate a universe that challenges our appropriation of the natural world. In her work, voluntary and rational reflection about this does not dispense with the less conscious shades of intuitive experience.

The encounter between these two facets depends, at times, on the instant of a non-decision that resides between a set of investigations around a point of interest and the creation of a work. This is the case of A Room of One’s Own, 2002, the result of a trip to Morten Schelde, a natural reserve and a campers’ destination on a lake in West Berlin. Drawn from photographs, the images have been constructed in reciprocal absorption; each drawing progressively contributes to the next. The texts concerning the history of the island were photocopied and written (drawn) with a brush in an act that permanently retrieves images that capture all information.

The appropriation and configuration of public space is of no less importance in the artist’s oeuvre. For instance, Albergaria created a double sided bench for an East German Village on verifying that only two spaces existed for young people to gather: a soccer field and a bus stop. The bench she created faced the country and village and had to be balanced by each user simultaneously.

The objects fulfil a synthesis that redirects artificiality to the studio’s exterior, while the natural material, redirects our attention to metaphors that question our gaze and activities. In 2001, she created her boxed-gardens that could be partially opened or entirely closed. The model adopted by Albergaria was that of French gardens: ordered, but labyrinthine, circumscribed yet vast, domesticated but playful products in the taming of nature.

For the artist, all these models are constructed like “real” spaces. Some photographs appear as documentation of a process of progressive work within and beyond the studio. The intense moments, and those set in the present of each reality’s perimeter are superimposed or interrupt this process.

She participated in the landscape architecture show Do Estádio Nacional ao Jardim Gulbenkian (From the National Stadium to the Gulbenkian Gardens) in 2003 with works spanning from the garden and hall to the exhibition’s entrance.

LEONOR NAZARÉ