I’ve noticed them the day I arrived

Lying down, still, on the pavements and the corners of the streets, as if they were at home.

They look like sculptures to me, blending into the colours of the places where they are sleeping

As if they wished to camouflage their presence, dogs-chameleons.

Catarina Botelho

During the artistic residency enjoyed by Catarina Botelho in Mindelo/Cape Verde, the artist wandered round the town, camera in hand.

Over these outings, her camera acted like a transforming tool thanks to which liminal spaces emerged between the real spatial planning and its conceptual spatial experience. It was a process of structural reconstruction of our urban imaginary developed through the filter created by her camera lens. That way, Catarina Botelho converted her experience into her gaze, generating reflection through the observation of daily life.

By staring several spaces thoroughly, the artist noticed the continuous and silent presence of some creatures that inhabited the pavements, corners and nooks of the streets of Mindelo… anonymous dogs who, in their quietness, became part of the urban environment; dogs that merged into their background and even lost their entity upon being perceived as a part of the urban landscape. Through her camera, Catarina Botelho distinguished them.

Quoting the reflection that Nuno Crespo wrote in “Between Us and the Words” about Catarina Botelho’s work,  we can say that “this artist’s photographs make no claim to the status of objectivity, frontality and rigour of the photographic document, just as they do not search for representational veracity.(…) What is at stake here is not some kind of moralism or photographic ethics, but rather the knowledge that the image is a synthesis of the various possible (visual, auditory, tactile, emotional, rational) approaches to reality. That implies the immediate identification, in the image, of the power to bring about all sensitive and intellectual syntheses, as well as of the image’s evocative power. An image, like a word, is evocative of sounds, smells, textures and depths; such is the level of imagetic intensity that Catarina Botelho looks for in each new work. (…)“

In “Cidade Partida”, the artist has focused her attention on the stray dogs she found while she wandered the streets of Mindelo. This action automatically triggered a transformation promoted by her gaze’s projection over the environment: following the steps already taken in her previous series, the artist has repositioned herself by trying to reflect on the latent and organic urban’s essence. By doing this, she rethinks our perception of the social imaginary’s influence on the way we feel, inhabit, coexist and design the space (physically and conceptually speaking).