The Paper Factory

We visited the Paper Factory on the morning of our day off. It proved to be a major inspiration for many people on the residency. The Paper Factory is a series of massive buildings in a nearby town that have been abandoned since the early 1990s. While the spaces have been for the most part stripped of machines and materials, there are still striking traces of the past - rooms full of freshly printed paper, shelves full of color samples, stacks of cardboard, walls packed with rolls of paper, tape and rubber stuffed away in the mechanics cupboard, and more. The director's personal apartments on the top floor were still full of trade magazine dating back to the 1950s, while wallet photos and private poems written by hand could still be discovered in the secretary's office. It was easy to get lost in the space, as there are so many floors, so many passageways, and so many nooks and crannies.

There is a certain melancholy to a building in transition like this. Nature is busy making incursions - water rushing through underground passageways, collapsed ceilings, trees reaching their hungry branches in through windows. And animals making their homes inside what was once only the purview of humans. I was fascinated by the birds sweeping through the cavernous buildings, and by the bats flitting through the darker storage rooms. We encountered a mother cat rearing its wild babies in the rubble, as well as frogs hopping through the damp earth of a collapsed floor. But along with these signs of life reclaiming this dead space, we also came across a dead bird, undulating ever so slightly in such a life-like manner, due to the infestation of maggots in its back.

Nostalgic, romantic, and yet also sinister. It was no wonder we found so much resonance with our earlier work around cycles of life and death in response to the fires in the surrounding hills. Many of the final pieces were filmed at the factory, or used materials collected there. As Beatriz pointed out several times, visual artists must often respond to their environment, suggesting that sometimes their work can only be as strong as their surroundings. In Gois and its neighboring villages, we certainly had a vivid canvas to work with.