Let’s imagine that we look at a photograph from our country and, without hesitation, we say: this is my country, my country is also this. Images always want to be figures of speech: synecdoches and metaphors that synthesize and condense the time and places of the world we live in. Portugal Portefolio began as an academic experiment by the class of History and Theory of the Image (FBAUP 2010/2011), to find the country in an image, find the images that we have from Portugal, documents that can be symbols, while explaining, in a short text, the options and choices we made.

Portugal Portefolio’s version 2.0 is happening in FuturePlaces. While continuing to explore the photographic image’s semantics, it will explore a different dimension: the city of Porto is now the space whose symbolism and synthesis we will search for. However, this search will not be made in the form of a stroll or a leisurely walk. Instead, it’s related to Guy Debord’s idea of Psychogeographic Dérive (1958): the route, the pre-defined way and the commonplace are excluded; we propose the peripatetic turn, in search of the hazardous syntheses in the undefined geographic space of the city of Porto. In the end, the images in Portefolio will be new ways of defining and symbolizing a city, of saying that Porto is also this.

http://www.portugal.portefolio.org/v2