ARCO LISBOA 2023

In ‘Safe Space’, Fidel Évora (b. 1984, Cidade da Praia, Cape Verde) transports us through the meanders of a present, but hidden, world: the one behind the glitter of the stores, the glamor of the shop windows and the spectacle of society consumption. Évora reflects on the ‘Other’ side of things: the workers who, through their invisibility, sustain the consumers’ amusement park. Since the system continues to refuse the meeting be-tween wealth/work and elite/rabble, Évora provokes in this exhibition ins-talled at ARCO Lisboa2023, its meeting. The visitor is forced to see both sides of the issue, to feel the constant presence of these workers, mostly women. The artist reminds us of the oblivion that dominates contempo-rary Western society, where everything is consumed without knowing who, where and how the comfortable world we live in is produced.

Fidel Évora began by reflecting on how little the world has changed sin-ce the appearance of the Crystal Palaces, which housed the univer-sal exhibitions in London and Paris, during the second half of the 19th century, until today. These meccas of consumption and modernity have maintained a particular aesthetic in which glass is the protagonist. Here, the glass serves to alert the consumer that there is a world that he does not see – because he is not allowed to do so – but that, in reality, he pre-fers not to see. A symbol of transparency and, therefore, an indicator of honesty and integrity, glass is now used by institutions most closely linked to wild capitalism: banks, airports and shopping centers. If at the uni-versal exhibitions of the 1800s these two worlds were found side by side in a ‘human zoo’ (Harskamp 2020), today they are still segregated, but they are not physically together. For Évora, 150 years have passed, and little has changed for both. The artist navigates and questions the com-mercial spaces of today – including ARCO in Lisbon, an art fair aimed at cosmopolitan and wealthy society – where one can find, in a privileged way, what is currently being produced in terms of art.