An exhibition of photography by Filipe da Palma is on display at the Municipal Museum of Olhão, until 15 September. Pictured on the walls of the rooms on the first floor of this cultural space, there are facades, platbands, doors and windows photographed in the municipality.
The exhibition entitled “Sous les pavés la plage sous la plage un autre Algarve or the non-reproducibility of a certain Algarvean architecture”, shows beautiful platbands of houses located in the city and parishes of the municipality of Olhão, but also tiles, bright paints around doors, textures of walls and windows or chimneys with history… these are images that take us back to the past and to the richness reproduced there.
Photographer Filipe da Palma also brought to Olhão other images of windows and doors in the region that are originally displayed on tables covered by glass and sand; the sand of the Algarve that has to be removed to see what is underneath. Therefore, this exhibition is not lacking in originality, which deserves a long visit!
Parallel to an Algarve that was gradually transmuted into a product of a holiday destination, there was the erosion of another Algarve. In fact, beginning in the late 60s of the last century, tourism, having the beach destination as its cornerstone, soon expanded, tentacularly and particularly, along a fringe of the Algarve, burying all the diversifying under a thick layer of sand. traits whose existence allowed a uniqueness in relation to other regions of Portugal, namely in a popular and vernacular architecture, which, due to its organic character, highly permeable and subject to strong fracturing tensions, explained the author in his presentation.
“Olhão appears to me, along with a few other locations, in the aridity of the set of solutions created, maintained and developed over decades in most of the region, as a port where I always arrive with renewed expectations… Olhão, without the need for walls , contains within itself still pulsating vestiges of that other Algarve, having in its people and its signs a fusion of the rural interior and the fishing coast, a fusion between classical architecture, at times sumptuous, and popular architecture… Olhão, having passed until today to side of the interest of the hordes of tourists in the demand of the Sun and the warm sands bathed by warm waters, forgotten by the démarches of time in the sense of progress and development so immediate, so touted and sold as if it were an instant wonder, it constitutes, in me, a truly unique land that has always known how to welcome me in the wandering of life, felt, through the lands of the South. Olhão is a land to be widely lived in each one of its atoms”. The words are from Filipe da Palma and can be experienced in a different way during the visit to this exhibition, showing an original and felt way of living this land. Until September 15, at the Museum of the City of Olhão.
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