In the exhibition, Isabel Carvalho thinks about water, in its states and shapes, and as a metaphor of fluidity and solidity, of limit and infinity, giving privilege to the sense of audition. In a broad meaning, the artist reflects about decorating as an attitude of searching a preferential individual order and as an exercise of self-discipline, in the deconstruction an cluttering of definite places and in the attempt of reconstruction and reordination of those same places – spatial and discursive places.
The show is composed by a set of objects made in the glass industries that still remain in the Portuguese region of Marinha Grande and by a publication with drawings, suggested by the reading of texts characterized by the fluidity of language. Among them, The temptation of Quiet Veronica, by Robert Musil, was one of the most relevant.
The title of the exhibition refers to the geographical, coastal location, but it also suggests the way of designating the present. As Isabel Carvalho defines it, Orla is “a place of encounter and confrontation; a dynamic and intense line, with constant shakings; where disputations for the territory exist; cutting and configuration in a permanent updating of its limits; where a diversity of promising alternatives can be found; it is, in a close perspective, a mobile textured mesh...”
