02/09/10Carla Filipe
Carla Filipe will do an artistic project in Murcia till the 5th of September in which she will reflect on the
current situation of immigration in Southern Europe and Spain.
The installation Carla Filipe proposes for the 8th Manifesta European Contemporary Art Biennale studies
the dialogue between Europe and Northern Africa from a social point of view, analyzing the irregularity
and regularity situations in which people who cross the frontier are in. The idea of establishing links
between the two borders through Art will materialize in a work built with local and organic materials,
and materials and objects gathered during her recent stay in Murcia last June.
For the documentation of this work she has counted on the collaboration of "Murcia acoge", a solidarity
association with the immigrants whose major aim is to endeavor the welcoming and promotion of
migrants, and to raise in the receiving society awareness transmitting an actual image of immigration,
far from the stereotypes and topics, with the will to transform the society into a major equality, justice,
and peace.
Exiled
The work Carla Filipe has created for Manifesta 8 will consist of the building of a pavement made with
organic and local materials, such as sea water, sand, dust, gravel, and rubble. This pavement will be a
sort of path in which the visitor will be able to do a symbolic visit between the two borders which split
the Mediterranean Sea, the same path many immigrants do to come to our country from Africa. This
"path" symbolizes as well the streets which connect the urban spaces inside a city and the connections
and frontiers existing between the north and the south and which determine the regularity or
irregularity situation of those who live in both sides of the frontier. That's why Exiled, a certain way, is a
performing character work, because it acquires its sense when the spectator takes part in it.
The work, placed in one of the corridors of the pavilion 2 of the Antiguo Cuartel de Artilleria will be
completed with an audio piece which, during the path, will explain the regularization process of the
immigrants, proposing to the visitor a reflection on the possibilities which the immigrant faces: making
himself/herself invisible for the system or to take part in it.
The installation will count as well with
diverse images, materials and objects gathered in the street by the artist during her stay in Murcia, and
which make reference different ways to all these themes.
Exiled is a project curated by the collective transit.org, in which assistants from Austria, Czech Republic,
Hungary and Slovakia, and will be opened to the visitors from the 9th October till the 9th January in the
Pavilion 2 of the Antiguo Cuartel de Artilleria.
Carla Filipe
Carla Filipe studied Fine Arts, Sculpture, and contemporary artistic practices at the University of Fine
Arts of Oporto. She lives currently between Oporto and London, and has become one of the most
singular artists of the Portuguese artistic panorama. Her Art moves in the area where the limits between
high culture and folk expressions merge, getting away from the formalism which affect to most of the
contemporary art production nowadays.
Although Filipe has worked as well with tridimensional works like the one featured in Manifesta 8, most
of her artistic activity has been focused on drawings, with creations based on different themes, such as
the past of her own family or research about the Portuguese social and political idiosyncrasy. They are
works influenced by comics, youth diaries and infant handwriting which are apparently innocent and
that stresses the tragicomic nature of her proposals.
