| Title | Stultifera Navis |
| Year | 2006 |
| Location | Carcavelos, Portugal |
| Brief | Collective housing |
| Notes | Exhibited at the Centro Cultural de Cascais, as part of the exhibition Cidade Dual, 2006 |
Within the internet there exists a sub-world: aliases, parallel existences, dreams, fantasies. Within the city this sub-world also takes shape in the physical domain but in a more private, less exposed manner. These sub-worlds are merely groups of people with similar interests at the same point in time, coming together to realise their dreams and visions. Whether these are racist groups (KKK, Islamic fundamentalists), political, (Neonazis, anarchists), sexual (fetishists, transsexuals), physical (piercing, self/group violence) or others, they are all part of our city. But our city no longer accommodates for them, to the point that they have found their finest and most successful means of congregation within the virtual domain of computer servers and the internet. Whereas undoubtedly certain congregations, due to their own characteristics, need to be carried out within private domains blocked from public view, our cities run the risk of becoming inhuman locations that deny the very primal right of human beings to be free, to be mad. That deny our own heritage as animals of flesh and blood.
¶ As we walk further into the 21st Century our cities and homes have become more digitized, robotisised, and functioning according to ever more scientific and binary rules of noughts and ones, yeas and nays. Whereas some of these advances can bring us more comfort and benefit the human race, in other cases – especially in communal environments where the cities are its highest form – they can only reap disadvantages and a slow decomposition and death through the informatisation of habits, living conditions, beliefs, wants and needs.
¶ What is proposed is a return to human roots; not in terms of tradition, conditions or conventions, but a return to our most primal instincts; unspoilt by the rule of law and social conventions. A realisation that we are all animals driven by elements, internal or external, conscious or unconscious, that we cannot understand.
¶ The Ship of Fools was a 15th Century invention – strange boats carrying madmen in a perpetual voyage across the rivers and canals of northern Europe. It was the first active ritual to expel unwanted figures and protect moral values. It was, in many ways, the precursor of social hospitals, prisons, and eventually, 20th Century modernist urbanisation. Spaces of confinement have normally been studied from an external point of view – they were little more than spaces of exclusion. But they can also be spaces where “souls succumb to the temptations of the world”. This is the premise of an urban confinement structure built on the outskirts of Lisbon.
¶ Like the Hermitage in Sokurov’s ‘Russian Ark’, it is a willful prison sailing endlessly through a sea of urban decay.