#voltoja

The initial brief for this residency was to expand the artistic exploration of This Was Tomorrow within a local context, shifting away from the Brutalist setting—less common in Matosinhos—to extract its essence. The goal was to explore the decay of old utopias and understand how this phenomenon manifests in public space.A key realization emerged: This Was Tomorrow was fundamentally about dreaming of the future and how those aspirations materialized—or failed to do so. This theme resonated with Brito Capelo Street, where Enrico undertook an immersive residency, later extending the project to peripheral areas of the greater Porto region.

Brito Capelo Street was once the civic and commercial heart of Matosinhos, bustling with people commuting to work, shopping at local businesses, and enjoying the café culture. However, with the administrative shift to a new municipal center and significant changes in social life, the street has become a shadow of its past. Today, it holds remnants of Portugal in the early 1990s, where businesses and property owners remain committed to the idea of building a better future through commerce. The frequent sight of Volto Já ("Be Right Back") signs on storefronts symbolises both a promise to return and the precarious reality of economic decline—businesses on the brink of closure or already abandoned.

This tension, between the belief in an impending economic revival and the stark reality of stagnation, became the conceptual foundation of the residency’s visual exploration. The project evolved into This Was “Já”, capturing the paradox of a future endlessly deferred while the present remains in a state of decay.

The photographic series produced during the residency serves as both an aesthetic and critical document of these spaces. The images capture the architectural plasticity of cooperative housing, its quiet resilience, and its overlooked significance in contemporary urban discourse. More than just a record of the past, this work reintroduces these environments into the present conversation, raising questions about how individuals take action when formal structures for progress are absent.

The format of the images themselves plays a key role in the work’s conceptual fluidity. Printed double-sided and left unfolded, they invite interaction—viewers are free to fold, rearrange, or repurpose them as they choose. They may form patterns, construct origami, clean their shoes, or build paper boats and planes. This engagement underscores the project’s core idea: everything remains malleable, interpretable, temporary, and never set in stone. The phrase Volto Já may or may not emerge through the folds, revealing itself only by chance—just as the high-rise facades of Matosinhos, Porto, and beyond may appear or dissolve into abstraction. This element of unpredictability mirrors the way urban narratives are shaped—not by fixed truths but by shifting perspectives, fragments of memory, and lived experiences.

This documentation does not claim historical accuracy or objective truth; rather, it embraces flâneurism, voyeurism, curiosity, and speculation. It is not a definitive representation of reality but one version among countless others—one of many yesterdays, one of many tomorrows.