Ellie Ga and Karin Monteiro

What should be done with the stones extracted from quarries? They can be used to erect massive monuments to power and glory, like the one Salazar erected along the Tagus River to celebrate the conquerors of the Portuguese Empire. Or they can be arranged horizontally in small black and white fragments to draw all kinds of shapes and figures. Ellie Ga puts this opposition at the heart of her film, and she clearly chooses her side: that of the pavement workers in Lisbon and their disappearing craft. Pedreiras/Quarries forms a diptych with Gyres (shown in ZDB in 2021), it uses the same method: the screen is like a three-part light table, the artist’s hands and voice are her tools for a performance of choreographed thought. (..) While Gyres sailed on high seas, carried by ocean currents, Pedreiras/Quarries focuses on people’s hands and people’s use of stones across the ages. (…)
Based on a text by Cyril Neyrat

Ellie about Karin
When I first arrived in Lisbon for a residency 2019, I had already spent several years gathering material about the hand’s relationship to stone.(…) I was carrying around an out of print, enormous book, really much too heavy to be used as a field guide and yet offering up detailed itineraries of 1983 Lisbon (Empedrados artísticos de Lisboa). I wondered about photographer Karin Monteiro, who was she, what had she been thinking about, head down photographing the ground making her way through the city. Through an extraordinary series of coincidences, I befriended Karin Monteiro. We started a correspondence which became one of the stories woven through my film Quarries.(…) When I finally had a chance to visit her (…), I was overjoyed to see shelves in her office filled with canisters of negatives, including the negatives for the Empedrados book. One conversation lead to another and in December 2024, Karin donated much of her ‘espolio’ to the Arquivo Municipal. This is the first exhibition in Lisbon based on this work.(…)

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