WILD LOVE
ROGUE KNOWLEDGE
HANDCRAFTED
At play in the
Fields of the Lord
What if we could actually play in the fields of the Lord? Would we play hopscotch over beautiful Italian gardens? Would we freely swim in a river sized like an ocean? Would we be counting starts intertwined with the shadows of the leaves of açaí palm trees? Would we write canticles and tales with annatto ink? Would we paint ourselves with beautiful words in various colors? In dreams and child games, we don’t always seek for answers: the questions are the ones always funnier to come up with. Questions made at the narrow aisles of the architecture of the city, during the “why” phase as a kid. How can we talk about the depth of us when we’ve been apart from it for so long? How to face an everlasting ghost that have never left us, abruptly detached, but also haven’t been totally acknowledged, tamed?
ASome say we only truly see the island when we leave the island... That idyllic and surviving image of the city haunts solemnly, like facing a nymph in flying white robes that you can’t ever truly grasp it through the eyes. Maybe we start to idealize, like the Belle Époque, that while we were away from homeland, the dreams really came true. The magical tales really happened, never written — always spoken, or drawn. How to deal with an undying melancholy, with a spiritual debt? Wouldn’t we all be swallowed by a huge snake, how the prophets said? I don’t actually think that, in the fields of the Lord, we would be seduced by the boa constrictor to eat the forbidden mango. Maybe we’d do it ourselves, or even introduce it to the serpent, going all the way around, turning it upside down. Sailing the gigantic ship upon the forest hill. In the end, we would build an enormous mausoleum, to thank God for all the child games, to landmark on the highest spot of the city where we would finally sleep the eternal and peaceful sleep — and leaving behind the mystery that if we’re in fact buried there. A ghost museum. A saint mausoleum. Let’s build a play-city.
Mit-ô-landia is an ongoing project, with the first seed planted in the end of 2015. It's an architecture laboratory that orbits around building a 35 square-meters model of the historical center of Belém, Brazil, in balsa wood. It's been continued, sheltered and taken care of by Fórum Landi, an institute linked to the Federal University of Pará, through a strong and affective relationship with students and professors.