PANÓPLIA

An Archive as an Ecosystem

(Bruno Pelletier Sequeira)

The Panóplia series is built from his archive of more than 2000 dwellings, documented from 2012 to the present. The images were (and continue to be) taken on a daily basis in the context of a photographic record of housing for the purpose of real estate promotion on digital platforms.

The extent of the register, in terms of the number of dwellings and time intervals, gives it a sociological and typological dimension. The collection of images is evidence of the appearance of the interiors of housing for rent, in the Lisbon metropolitan area, at the beginning of the 21st century.

How many of us have had the opportunity to enter more than 2000 private homes, see and photograph all their rooms, observe the view from the windows, the entrance of the building, and the landing of the stairs? As a whole, the image archive photographed but also carefully observed, acquires a sociological dimension that brings it closer to works such as Domestic Landscapes by Bert Teunissen and a typological dimension that relates it to the work No Man’s Land by Lynne Cohen.

Panoplia is the first series extracted from the archive, and it features around sixty bathrooms, organized in order to establish a chromatic fluidity. This playful fluidity aims to deliberately disguise an undeniable fact of this series and of the present time: the trivialization of the commodification of intimacy.

Ricardo Junqueira uses the term biodiversity-he could also use the term ecosystems-when referring to his collection of images from him. Does it make sense to insist on thinking of humanity as not belonging to the natural world? In this series of images, we have evidence of physiology and consequent proof of our connection to the natural world!