In Espaços Vacilantes, the artist exhibits photographs produced between 2018 and 2019 that explore the built space of Cidadela, an aspirational urban project in Praia whose buildings hover between unfinished and occupied.
In his large-format photos, Schofield Cardoso trains his eye on a series of contradictions in Cidadela, a neighborhood originally designed for the middle and upper classes. With the privatization of the Cape Verdean economy in the early nineties, investment in urban development projects shifted to the shoulders of the private sector, with the state maintaining a regulatory role, thus opening the door for private real estate developments like Cidadela. Situated in a desirable swath of land by the sea, Cidadela broke ground in 2004 with the promise to unveil a new urban space with "gardens and public squares, cultural activities, health-related activities, sporting activities and even room for commerce and services. Yet fifteen years on, Schofield Cardoso's subjects-incomplete concrete buildings and plots of land yet to be occupied (or ambiguously occupied)-stand in an indeterminant space, remnants of the "City of the Future".
While Espaços Vacilantes is a tour of houses seemingly in the middle of nowhere-with satellite dishes pointing skyward, clothes swaying in the wind, all against a backdrop a landscape devoid of vegetation-it is more than a catalog the casualties of global economic crises and flawed vision. In his videos, the artist presents the invisible effort beneath the relentless sun: the constructing bodies flecked with sweat and dust. If still images of half-built, oddly conceived, structures can become aestheticized in their abstraction, the looping scenes of manual labor offer another lens. We are left to consider the manufacture of luxury and the selling of dreams, both in its kinetic human form and its potentially silent architectonic outcome.
César Schofield Cardoso was born in Mindelo, Cape Verde in 1973. His work has been exhibited in Cape Verde and internationally, including in "Islands Crossings: Between Myth and Hallucinatory Realities, African Mobilities - This Is Not a Refugee Camp Project" with Patti Anahory, curator Mpho Matsipa" at Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Munich (2018); "RUST: A Glimmer of Freedom Project, Ex-Concentration Camp of Tarrafal, Cape Verde", a video/installation at apexart, New York (2017); "Arte Invisible Project" (collective photography exhibition), at ARCO'07 International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid.
