Moon Gate, Oleiros

2020

Moon Gate

Oleiros River, Oleiros

Oleiros water stream stands out in the region environment as a unity framed by its aesthetics qualities shaped over time in a humanized rural landscape.

The right balance between the scarce human interventions, mainly of water and riverbank control, and the honest choice of tree species, qualify coherently different perspectives along the stream. Today this landscape unity is adapted to the urban way of living of people from Oleiros with several pedestrian routes for walks and sport practices.

Following the sequence of Works of Art in the Landscape which define the beginning of the Cortiçada Route, Moon Gate is set on an unequivocal geographical location: the water stream in a rural environment.

In this landscape of transition, between the village and the agricultural fields, the “Torna” place stands out for its coherent and balanced unity simultaneously natural and humane. In this sense, a place that promotes repose and contemplation at a humanized scale.
The identity of Oleiros water stream is, therefore, a synthesis of a humanized
landscape and a transition between the human settlement and open territories with monumental perspectives as the crest of the Zebro valley.

The physical approach towards Oleiros water stream, a real and tangible phenomenon, perceived as a place of fascination and pleasure, is the conceptual starting point for Moon Gate. This exceptional place evokes the fascination of a shaped environment in which human control, as in an oriental garden, invites to delight and mystery.

Finally, the very context of the commission of the 3 Works of Art in the Landscape – a sign pointing to desertification from the inland and a need for human appropriation – structures, in each case, the process of finding the integration of human landscape.

This particular case means to integrate the humane action of shaping the landscape. Placing the art work Moon Gate enhances the contemplative character of a human landscape, adding the representation of a “natural environment.

This search of understanding of “natural landscape” and “human landscape” may converge to the perception of “contemplation and mistery” and the recollections of António de Andrade and his encounter with the landscape in the Orient. An encounter with divergence: while the Jesuit is struck by human desertification (“much too few people”) and with agricultural scarcity, he is also impressed by beautiful places such as the Srinagar waterfall, suggesting a re-encounter with Portugal´s inland in the Orient.

The expectance is that form, colour and different textures – an amber circle
intentionally framed and strategically placed – will evoke the entrance to a distant exotic garden. Hence, Moon Gate means to lead to a reappropriation of the locus and of its memories by inhabitants and by those who explore the region, particularly at staging points along the pedestrian routes that are increasingly sought.