QUASE UMA ILHA
The current "punta" of Porto Alegre's historic center was once a peninsula—from the Latin pen (almost), insula (island)—surrounded by water, connected to the rest of the city only by Rua da Praia. In the provincial life of the turn of the 20th century, buildings were concentrated along the hillside to present-day Duque de Caxias, and Porto Alegre sprawled along the shores of the large bay of Lake Guaíba. At this time, the city witnessed the filling of the floodplain located in front of the current Península gallery, in addition to the proliferation of subdivisions, avenues, and skyscrapers, the emergence of new forms of housing, transportation, common spaces, services, and multiple challenges. Under intense urbanization, speculation, and the improvement of civil construction, engineers and architects transformed the urban landscape through elaborate projects and plans for a metropolis of the future. This is also how the Península gallery building emerged, a private initiative to revitalize an area with high traffic and peaceful proximity to the waterfront. This area, once the edge of the city, once stood a landmark of shame and colonial violence. Right across from the current Península gallery, there stood a pillory and a gallows, an indelible reminder of a past buried by developmentalist impulses.
In this affective proposition by artists Andressa Cantergiani and Denis Rodriguez, the Península gallery transforms into a hospitality zone, welcoming artists Adauany Zimovski Adrián Montenegro, Avatar Moraes, Gustavo Freitas, Leonardo Remor, the duo Matheus Walter & Virginia Simone, Rommulo Vieira Conceição, Thiago Gonçalves, and Túlio Pinto for practices that connect with architecture, urbanism, urban geography, landscape, and the archaeology of cities. A thick sheet of tempered glass hanging from the gallery's mezzanine indicates its imminent collision with the graffiti sculpture emerging from the floor. This tense situation is the result of the dialogue between the new Nadir, created especially for the exhibition by artist Túlio Pinto, and the recently restored sculpture, featuring intense geometry, an offshoot of the project "o solo criar" (the created soil), produced by Avatar Moraes in the late 1970s.