Carla Linhares
Photography
2014

Description of the Project:

This project is called “Matão”, it is a proposal which combine photography in loco with photographic editing in order to create a fictional/futuristic environment; Where plants completely enclose art museums, on an old map of New York city. Thus, through the interweaving of two extremely opposite images, I seek to create a“Heterotopia”(Foucault), to describe the principles, features and relationship between social, institutional and discursive new spaces of thought and representation.
This work was created from the perception of the recently formulated theory of the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene represents not just human dominance over our biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth, but rather a path to its own end.
The photographs of museums in “Matão” are embedded in a landscape, that alludes to the changing state of things. In these photographs, what was built by man(as the conventional cartographic representations and the concept of a representation of a museum) did not collapse to give way to the plants, as Gustav Mahler conjectured. Instead they are integrated with them. In this hypothetical essay, the buildings merged into a wild and organic way with the landscape and developed a new paradigm of the conventional structures.

The way the Project would be applied is through fostering social change through postage postcards. The postcards would portray the connection between museums and individuals in a time of pandemics and ramping environmental destruction, elaborating a new sense of social responsibility and connectivity, creating a new functional reality for museums.
The project seeks to integrate museums from different cities around the world. Since the postcard corresponding to that specific museum will be sent to it to be sold as a postcard of the museum building.
Museums as institutions of change must commit to fostering the necessary new dialectic that our post-postmodern society demands, creating a map of connections between proposals for a new world.