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2015. Fabrics from tumble dryers
Site-specific project in the city of Porto, Portugal

Galeria dos Leões - Reitoria da U.Porto, Portugal

This project was carried out during a stay at the Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto, Portugal.
Starting from a site-specific notion, my research in the city of Porto led me to work with the residues from the industrial clothes dryers of various urban laundries. In these fabrics, I found an ideal example to show the industrialization process that has determined architectural development, urban planning and the forms of collective life that define Porto today. With special attention to the displacement that popular labor has suffered towards a sense of gentrification. Faced with a tourist image of Porto of white clothes hanging on the facades of traditional houses, there is also a constant collapse and interior ruin in this same type of buildings due to lack of resources, institutional support and abandonment. This is where my project connects with this situation, questioning the sustainability of the current urban and social models of development and innovation.
This project also brings together other research-creation interests that I have been exploring related to water (from the Douro River and its bridges), working with ephemeral materials, activating processes and rereading various artists and their works: in this case passages from the book El viaje vertical [The Vertical Journey] by Enrique Vila-Matas and the title of this project as a tribute to the Spanish conceptual artist Nacho Criado.

2025 / info@raulhidalgo.net / IG