Practices for dismantling the city

I’ve always been amazed by artists who work with objects found on the streets. How do they manage to find such diversity on the ground? I, who come up with the most unlikely walks and
consider myself a seasoned observer of cities, have never found anything noteworthy. Nothing at all. Perhaps the answer to this lies in the images that constitute this book. It’s just that I walk looking up. I walk searching for the horizon that insists on hiding. I walk connecting one building to another, which, added to the next and subtracted from the previous one, ends up forming an unexpected design. And then another. And another. Maybe that’s also why I’ve lost count of the many times I twisted my ankle.

“You really like an old wall”, my grandmother once told me after visiting one of my exhibitions. It’s hard to explain that, actually, I don’t like them that much. I capture them to show that I should be seeing something that I am not, that my view is blocked, that the city has grown out of proportion. I shoot them to try to understand why the city has become this way. To dismantle what I see, I dig through the images, eliminating parts, cropping here and there, trying to get things out of
the way to see what’s behind them. I don’t find answers, but I come across another building, a gable, shapes and colors, and my curiosity only increases to find out what comes next.

The horizon remains elusive… but what if I remove that other piece of the path? I am sure that sooner or later it will emerge.

— Letícia Lampert