ANTWERP, BELGIUM.- Objectif_exhibitions presents “Pedro Cabrita Reis,” on view through January 31, 2004.  Pedro Cabrita Reis’ oeuvre moves back and forth between notions of ’the house’ and ’the city’ as shifting metaphors mediating between the ’known’ and ’unknown’. The melancholia resulting from the loss of a natural fate translates into a poetic numbness that that takes every existential ambition back to its sheer material referent. The lose fragmentary elements that constitute Reis’ installations, leftovers of building and breaking-down activities, brought together in constellations referring to architectural typologies, function as vehicles for memory. They create space as they occupy it. They are site-specific and still moveable, taking the viewer back to the places he has been or those where he has never been. Their affirmative presence and public intention reveals the intimate fragility of the building, the phenomenological experience of human creation bound in space and time. The fragment pushes forward its very presence, only to represent what is absent and can only be remembered. The inaccessibility of this domain, the demarcation and sealing of this intimate territory and the absence of the hands of the builder are as many rhetoric answers to the question "where are we going?" - "Down the hole". The survival and joy of life precisely resides in the ability to constantly reformulate this melancholic question in a personal and poetic manner.  

For his exhibition at objectif_exhibitions, Pedro Cabrita Reis created a new work. objectif_exhibitions also commissioned an in situ project that will be realised in collaboration with Air in Spring 2004. Pedro Cabrita’s work was the Portuguese entry to the last Venice Biennial, and he had recently important solo exhibitions at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and Konsthall Stockholm.