Aproximações

Produced over a period of 12 months with the Portuguese Airport Administration Authorities, Aproximações (Approaches) is a survey of the modern airport. Immured in temporality and suffering from a sense of historical discontinuity, the airport is the elementary expression of abstract space. It renders everyone weightless. It is the space of the uprooted and, as if to confirm the term terrain vague, in Martins’ images sky and ground collide, overlap and blur. The cloudy ambiguity of these images pulls us into a deep absence, a sliding, fleeting and powerful somewhere, where everything is indeterminate and difficult to decode, with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orientate us.  The juxtaposition of sign and shape echoes the overlapping of time and space, disturbing language and meaning itself.