Enjoy Yourself: It’s Later Than You Think

The Communication and Culture Cooperative – Center for Contemporary Culture of Torres Vedras will inaugurate the exhibition *Enjoy Yourself – It’s Later Than You Think*, by Miguel Palma, on May 11th at 5 PM.

Miguel Palma has exhibited regularly since the late 1980s, and his expression materializes in drawing, sculpture, installation, artist's books, performance, and multimedia. In *Enjoy Yourself – It’s Later Than You Think*, the artist proposes a panoramic view of some studies, models, and drawings, revealing a privileged perspective on his processes and ways of "doing."

Through a declared fascination with engineering and technological devices, his work explores a recurring set of themes, addressing issues such as speed, technological evolution, ecology, image, political power, and the machine. Modeling a strong playful component, often resorting to humor, Miguel Palma's works seek to evoke a direct confrontation between the artwork and the observer's horizon of expectations, subverting an immediate or simplistic interpretation, always imposing a reconfiguration of experience. The exhibition will be on display until June 22nd at the Center for Contemporary Culture of the Torres Vedras Communication and Culture Cooperative. From the City. We occupy the space as a consequence. We are there. We imagine a Utopia and the Perfect City. We design gardens for the leftover earthen embankments on the access roads to the City, and reality leaves us with urban gardens. We occupy the space as a consequence and with Will. Utopia is not designed. Utopia is made of dreams of self-sufficiency, of memories of our origins, of the memories of our grandparents and our parents. We imagine the Perfect City, but such a thing is impossible. For every square meter of street, for every square meter of public space, the City has a much larger area that is never known,

Restricted.

In the apartment block, behind the gates of the gated community, in all the offices that exist right after the uniformed security guard sitting at the desk, and in the countless backyards that we will never be able to know. The city is composed mainly of restricted, private spaces. Nobody knows a city. You can only think you know it. The city grows as a consequence, a reflection of the culture, it grows fast and brutal, imagined as an efficient machine of Utopia, made for fast-paced life, it grows for the urban man – a component of that machine.