Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Lisbon Blues (2018) began to be an installation composed of about thirty boxes, in nanogaleria, reflecting the marks that Lisbon shows in contemporaneity. Collected by Marilá Dardot over four months, those boxes, which remained for several years in the small windows of shops in Lisbon, and the chromatic alterations that they suffered due to prolonged sun exposure, are a reflection of the contradictions of perenniality and sustainability – inconsistency of the socioeconomic and contemporary political dynamics. Just as the monochromatic tone of the boxes reveals a fade from the colors that make up their identities, so too the recent constant changes in the typical Lisbon neighborhoods eliminate many of their sociocultural anchors and meeting points and community relations, drastically altering the sustainable urban dynamics of these neighborhoods.

Marilá Dardot’s Lisbon Blues, as the title implies with reference to the melancholy black American-origin musical style, as itself a form of resistance, works as a metaphor for spaces – and people – that, with the processes of gentrification, had to reorganize and change in their (or their) environments.

Lisbon Blues began as an installation but, through a process of selection, magazine, and printing on 15x15cm cards, being new and reorganized again, with recurrent methodologies in the artist’s work, gave rise to Lisbon Blues, tiles. In this (re)configuration in multiples, the blue and white of the squares refer to Portuguese tiles, identity elements of Lisbon. In its composition as both a sculpture-installation, the boxes create an ambivalence and a game between exhibition and camouflage, depending on the observer’s point of view, inside or outside the structure, the experiences, and the narratives of the city.

In the sculptural version Lisbon Blues (Façadism), the tile panels, consisting of the materials created in Lisbon Blues, tiles, and the boxes, on fragile plywood plates, refer to the façades of buildings in a limbo between degradation and abandonment, and reconstruction or demolition. They portray a process of standardization, creating a kind of memorial to a more diverse past than the supposedly multicultural present in which we live.

The last project configuration to date is the Lisbon Blues paint set, Lisbon Blues, signs, which arises from the appropriation of real estate plates that Marilá Dardot takes from the street and paints with offset blue paint—the same blue that survives through time in the installation and the multiples.

Despite the total human absence in the sculpture-installation and in the painting series, Lisbon Blues recontextualizes and reconfigures the objects, making them the silent protagonists – or the muted – of nostalgic places that oscillate, like the contemporary places in Lisbon, between the private and public spheres, contrasting the intimate and the alienating.

Just as the last boxes suffered a process of chromatic alteration, the last resistants who still keep their traditional and neighborhood-type stores—which (trans)formed and grew with these neighborhoods—also find themselves in a point of (trans)formation of new socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, leading to an urban (des)configuration process never before experienced by the city.

It remains to be seen—and determined—whether this process will self-regulate through a close dialogue with traditional stories and characteristics, or if it will lead to a point of no return with gentrification and a “Disneylandification” of the city, transforming the identity of the city into not everyday life, but a simulacrum of it, through nostalgic facsimile elements—a Lisbon Blues.

Luisa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Lisbon Blues (2018) began to be an installation composed of about thirty boxes, in nanogaleria, reflecting the marks that Lisbon shows in contemporaneity. Collected by Marilá Dardot over four months, those boxes, which remained for several years in the small windows of shops in Lisbon, and the chromatic alterations that they suffered due to prolonged sun exposure, are a reflection of the contradictions of perenniality and sustainability – inconsistency of the socioeconomic and contemporary political dynamics. Just as the monochromatic tone of the boxes reveals a fade from the colors that make up their identities, so too the recent constant changes in the typical Lisbon neighborhoods eliminate many of their sociocultural anchors and meeting points and community relations, drastically altering the sustainable urban dynamics of these neighborhoods.

Marilá Dardot’s Lisbon Blues, as the title implies with reference to the melancholy black American-origin musical style, as itself a form of resistance, works as a metaphor for spaces – and people – that, with the processes of gentrification, had to reorganize and change in their (or their) environments.

Lisbon Blues began as an installation but, through a process of selection, magazine, and printing on 15x15cm cards, being new and reorganized again, with recurrent methodologies in the artist’s work, gave rise to Lisbon Blues, tiles. In this (re)configuration in multiples, the blue and white of the squares refer to Portuguese tiles, identity elements of Lisbon. In its composition as both a sculpture-installation, the boxes create an ambivalence and a game between exhibition and camouflage, depending on the observer’s point of view, inside or outside the structure, the experiences, and the narratives of the city.

In the sculptural version Lisbon Blues (Façadism), the tile panels, consisting of the materials created in Lisbon Blues, tiles, and the boxes, on fragile plywood plates, refer to the façades of buildings in a limbo between degradation and abandonment, and reconstruction or demolition. They portray a process of standardization, creating a kind of memorial to a more diverse past than the supposedly multicultural present in which we live.

The last project configuration to date is the Lisbon Blues paint set, Lisbon Blues, signs, which arises from the appropriation of real estate plates that Marilá Dardot takes from the street and paints with offset blue paint—the same blue that survives through time in the installation and the multiples.

Despite the total human absence in the sculpture-installation and in the painting series, Lisbon Blues recontextualizes and reconfigures the objects, making them the silent protagonists – or the muted – of nostalgic places that oscillate, like the contemporary places in Lisbon, between the private and public spheres, contrasting the intimate and the alienating.

Just as the last boxes suffered a process of chromatic alteration, the last resistants who still keep their traditional and neighborhood-type stores—which (trans)formed and grew with these neighborhoods—also find themselves in a point of (trans)formation of new socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, leading to an urban (des)configuration process never before experienced by the city.

It remains to be seen—and determined—whether this process will self-regulate through a close dialogue with traditional stories and characteristics, or if it will lead to a point of no return with gentrification and a “Disneylandification” of the city, transforming the identity of the city into not everyday life, but a simulacrum of it, through nostalgic facsimile elements—a Lisbon Blues.

Luisa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.