Fernanda Fragateiro: Opening windows to stone

Abrir janelas à pedrada (2025), by Fernanda Fragateiro, is part of the cycle of commissions for the bridge linking the main building of the Serralves Museum to the Álvaro Siza Wing, inaugurated in October 2023. After Luisa Cunha's sound work, which opened this program, Fragateiro presents a wall of light cement blocks that radically alters the perception of space.

Suspended from the wall, irregular and asymmetrical, the wall appears as a body foreign to the architectural order of the place, establishing a tension between weight and suspension, density and permeability. Built from fragments of demolished buildings in the center of Lisbon, collected by the artist over several years, the work is a critique of recent transformations in the city where she lives and works. They show the effects of gentrification, real estate speculation and tourist pressure - processes that have altered the landscape, changed ways of living and community relations. Fragateiro tells us the story of an urban space subordinated to financial logics that are alien to the needs of the people who inhabit it, where each demolition adds a new layer of absence to the city's palimpsest, leaving marks that reveal the fragility of collective memory and the silent violence of this radical redesign of our cities.

In the long corridor, Abrir janelas à pedrada stands as an obstacle: a physical barrier that also carries a symbolic meaning. The blocks, with no apparent connection, seem on the verge of collapsing, but they support each other, leaving gaps through which light and the gaze pass. Up close, each stone reveals signs of where it came from - pieces of plaster, cement, plaster, brick, chipped pieces - evidence of an ongoing collapse. The artist doesn't try to reconstruct what was lost, but rather organizes fragments into a body that preserves the marks of destruction and exposes the contradictions of the present, questioning the way the city manages its own memory. The installation thus functions as a kind of critical archaeology device, in which the precariousness of the ensemble is not limited to its formal dimension, but proposes a reflection on everything that is lost with the disappearance of buildings, whether historic or self-constructed - the matter, but also the histories, collective practices and ways of life that contemporaneity, in the name of progress, erases.

Since the 1990s, Fernanda Fragateiro has been working on the relationship between architecture, ruin and urban memory, using construction materials and archives outside institutional circuits. A central aspect of her research is the recovery of the work of female authors silenced by dominant narratives. Collecting debris from the city's buildings and rescuing forgotten legacies are gestures that stem from the same awareness: history is constructed as much by what remains as by what is erased. Through operations of collecting, archiving, assembling and quoting, Fragateiro articulates memory and matter, creating critical readings of what is preserved and what is systematically suppressed. In the case of Abrir janelas à pedrada, it is worth remembering the reference to the windows of SESC Pompeia, an old disused factory that the architect Lina Bo Bardi rehabilitated, like Fragateiro, working on the ruin and the unfinished and valuing vernacular practices and popular culture, against the hegemony of official history.

The presence of the work on Álvaro Siza's already iconic bridge thus acquires a particular scope. In a space marked by the authority of modern architecture, the artist introduces precarious and worn-out material, collected outside the institutional circuits, confronting the formal order of the place with what history has excluded. And this is also where her political dimension comes in, in that while many walls stand as borders and exclusions, this one opens up into cracks that allow passages and detours. All you have to do is adjust your body, look for the opening, find the way.

The title calls for an abrupt, urgent gesture - political, but also poetic. To open because it is necessary to open. With the strength available. The stone breaks, but reveals; it opens a gap through which you can see and pass. Not a regular window, but a tear: imprecise, unfinished, necessary; a gesture that insists on opening, despite everything.

Text: Inês Grosso