Três Casas para a Humanidade: Casa de Tempo

The HOUSE OF TIME project is the second in a trilogy of installations (HOUSE OF WATER, HOUSE OF TIME and HOUSE OF AIR), seeking the exact opposite of eternity. A building is constructed from organic matter (sugar bricks). A building that will have a life cycle. Subject to the context (the climate, the biodiversity of the surrounding area), this building will transform and eventually destroy itself. This is an assumedly ephemeral house, in its very mutable, adaptive nature. It will be like a sponge, a record of the time it will last in this world.

The CASA DE TEMPO project is the second in a trilogy of installations (CASA DE ÁGUA, CASA DE TEMPO and CASA DE AR), seeking the exact opposite of
CASA DE TEMPO is part of Rui Soares Costa’s SWEET SERIES, which questions the idea of painting as an immutable discourse, immune to the idea of time – and in that sense timeless. Instead of the oil painting that is identical today to what it will be in a thousand years’ time, here we work with the ephemeral. To this end, time is used as a tool that participates in the construction of each piece. Through the use of organic materials (sugar and wood) soaked in varnish, temporal and mutable paintings are constructed, living entities. They are pieces that evolve with the passage of time. Each piece will have a life cycle, from the moment it is conceived to the transformation it will undergo throughout its existence until the moment it is destroyed. The pace of this process is slow, making the life cycle of this series correspond to the scale of human ageing.

CASA DE TEMPO uses sugar without the addition of any stabilisers (e.g. varnish), so its transformation in the public space is accelerated, in a life cycle that is completed in a few weeks.

CASA DE TEMPO is an immersive project in collaboration between visual artist Rui Soares Costa, architect Pedro Campos Costa and multimedia artist, performer and choreographer João Galante, carried out under the GARANTIR CULTURA Programme – Portuguese Republic – Ministry of Culture.