A landscape called home

João Gigante

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LAMAS DE MOURO

Lamas de Mouro is a territory of several dimensions, different dynamics. This photographic project questions itself before a community that has the act of caring as part of their day-to-day lives.

When we arrive, there is a door, open. A metaphorical passage to a National Park traversed by those who inhabit it and those who visit it. A duality of relationships, of those who live here and feel this territory as an extension of the body, and those that arrive and understand that the mountains are the frame of an undiscovered landscape.

On one side, the Park, on the other the main place where the church is located, where the cluster of houses defines some intense social relationships. It is true that there are people from Lamas living inside the National Park, but there is also another side, crossing the road, in a place that was decided over time, long before the institutional creation of this National Park. I intend to underline this relationship of care, of how a community decides its own territory, in the protection of the gestures of the past and the search for an active present.

One of the issues that has always fascinated me during my presence in the north of Portugal, as a photographer, was the relationship with the word Border. The beauty of drawing a line that separates actions and decisions. We've already talked about the road that separates the Park from the other part of Lamas, and we need to talk about the incursion into Alcobaça, a place next door, which shares territory with Lamas de Mouro and Fiães. A place with two parishes, with landmarks scattered between the houses, which denounce who is from one particular place or another. The territory has these ambivalences when it is first discovered, when the map is divided into parts: when the distance between a house and the path that passes by its door can speak of this intense relationship with the trodden and worked land.

Photography, for me, is increasingly a process of discovery in the post-narrative, it is a decipher of consciousness after fieldwork. As I walk along the paths and eidos I discover that I can represent these fascinations of the human being who takes care of his street as much as his house, who takes care of the mountain as much as his backyard. The landscape as a single, democratic place from everyone and for everyone.

João Gigante

• Date: 4^th August / 16^th October 2022
• Local: Junta de Freguesia de Lamas de Mouro