Tamira Boogaard, HKU

16 juni 2016

A landscape filled with stories, mountains dwelling in folklore, an illusive inland ocean. For my project “Twenty-four Created Landscapes and a Mountain that has Always Been” I travelled to Aljezur, my birthplace in Portugal, to revisit my own memories.

While there, I discovered that every corner, every hill and valley had been named. The names that describe the landscape of Aljezur, names such as Great Rock Ravine, Hills of Above and Windy Valley, show an overlay between reality as it is and what we see in it and similarities to how memories form the perspective of our surroundings and overlap with them.
From the moment that a memory is formed, it is transformed and distorted, creating a new representation of reality. Over time, as the line between reality and fiction blurs, they intertwine, leaving the question where one ends and the other begins.
Combining existing landscapes, staged situations and my own constructions the landscape of Aljezur turned into a representation of the relation between memory and reality.