Lizá Ramalho and Artur Rebelo began their presentation with a ‘zoom in’ into their universe, from outer space to Portugal, to Porto, to their neighborhood, and finally to the detached house where their studio is found. They then went on to show some examples of their work, together with their own ‘found images’, showing how much the latter influences the former. From the five computers found discarded in the middle of nowhere which they used for a self-promotion poster, to the handwritten names on fisherman’s boats which they photographed, processed and used on the identity for a short film festival, R2’s work seems to be a play of elements from their own – almost vernacular – surroundings within a tightly controlled and detailed set of rules.

Their case study, the ‘Unfinished Trajectories’ installation for Porto’s Casa da Música is also an example of this play of elements. Commissioned to create a temporary installation for one of the rooms in the Rem Koolhaas designed building, R2 chose an access corridor and a book to translate what they consider an important aspect of the concert hall: the very architectural experience of being and wandering around inside it. First they asked people to answer questionnaires about their feelings towards each of the building’s spaces, and then organised that data according to disparate criteria (alphabetical order, scale, capacity, colour, number of characters, etc), creating unique, sometimes impossible itineraries and explorations of the space. Those trajectories were shown in the corridor and in a small book, which became seamless continuations of each other. From three-dimensional reality to two-dimensional printed page, and back again, like so much of R2’s work.

Text by Frederico Duarte