BALDIO – The wasteland archive - Flora Paim
Flora Paim ( Brazil )
“Baldio” is a Portuguese word that designates both communal rural land and seemingly useless, abandoned urban plots. This contradictory overlap of definitions points to the weakening of communal ideals and the strengthening of private property and productivity values, while also serving as a gateway to artistic speculation. BALDIO is the artistic research proposal that Flora Paim will develop during her residency at ZK/U, focusing on Berlin’s urban wastelands. She aims to develop artistic methods based on the characteristics of selected urban voids, creating tools for intervening in these spaces, accompanying them, and documenting their existence in relation to the city’s daily life. Often resulting from disinvestment or deindustrialization, these seemingly empty and disturbed spaces conceal a multitude of contested processes, stories, and dynamics of use. Viewed as opportunities for unlearning, they challenge conventional notions of nature, landscape and urbanity, inviting alternative ways of experiencing time and space within the city.
The residency is part of Flora Paim’s PhD research project in Artistic Studies – Arts and Mediations at NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities, supported by Portuguese national funds provided by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), I.P. (reference 2021.05836.BD).