Nuno Cera

The energy and digital transitions that in recent years have marked the territory of Sines, its infrastructures, and consequently its population, have influenced and inspired the work of photographer and video artist Nuno Cera. For this exhibition – both an artistic research looking towards the future – he shares his observations and reflections through a body of work  that was born from Nuno Cera’s relationship with this region.

In 2019 Nuno Cera embarked on a long-term research project about Sines – a city where he spent marking years of his adolescence and took first steps in photography. The result, Distant Lights (2022) consists of a photo series and a synchronised two-channel video installation (38 minutes) that provides the title of this exhibition and a companion book. In seven episodes, the artist takes us to places he has selected as protagonists: the Sines Port Authority, the EDP Power Plant, Terminal XXI, the Galp Energia and Repsol refineries, the Quarry, the lands of the future Data Centre and EllaLink, in juxtaposition with natural landscapes.

With Distant Lights, Nuno Cera offers us an external observation of a gaze that extracts the symbolism, which is invisible to our routine gaze; it reiterates the essence of a body in permanent transformation and the simultaneous disintegration of the old that gives way to the new, giving it no time to grow old.

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