BOOKS Selection

CLOUDS

The published book *Nuvens* (Clouds), 2023, offers a fresh perspective under the theme "Azorica," bringing together art and science.

Description from "Araucária Edições": *Nuvens* is the first volume in the *Azorica* collection, a series dedicated to exploring themes closely linked to the Azores in an unconventional way. We invited scientists to write about clouds in a manner that is scientific yet accessible, and an artist to photograph the phenomenon. These two perspectives—scientific and artistic—seem worlds apart, yet they complement each other to create a new way of understanding the subject. The book opens with a poetic reflection on this fascinating meteorological phenomenon, written by Eduardo Brito. The scientists—Fernanda Carvalho, Diamantino Henriques, and Patricia Navarro—are affiliated with the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA). The photographer is Alberto Plácido."

ALL IMAGES of the project "Clouds".

ARCHITECTONICA PERCEPTA

Book published in 2016 by "Park Books". Paulo Providência — Architectonica Percepta celebrates Providencia’s influence on contemporary Portuguese architecture by looking closely at seven of his key buildings. The buildings are presented in striking duotone photographs taken by Alberto Plácido, and each building in the book is documented with selected plans and details about its design and construction. Rounding out the book are five essays by Providencia, reflecting on his work and his influences, such as Peter Zumthor.

NADA

A self-published book. NADA gathers photographs of nature, landscapes of Gerês: forms and movements, as fast as water or as slow as stone, sculpted and altered by the forces of nature. It draws on a "classic" language of photography, without tricks, faithful to the idea that a photograph is the objects it represents. Although realistic, in colour and without any specific photographic technique, it appeals to the medium's ability to create autonomous images, with readings that go far beyond the object they reproduce, as if, starting from concrete, existing objects, it created parallel realities with a life of their own. NADA also refers to the capacity of the book to affirm an idea through its structure: it proposes readings that hold and shift with each turn of the page. The project is built on absence, which the title points to, more than on presence, and it proposes simplicity, silence and reflection. It is an effort to explore a frontier between the real and the abstract: in photography, it seems, the closer an image is to the real and the more faithful to the object it records, the more poetic it becomes.