The Castle, the Story, the Journey

Evangelia Tsilika, The Castle, the Story, the Journey, 2018.

This film is the product of a research project on the medieval castle of Porto de Mós, a small town located in the region of Leiria, Portugal. The research was conducted in two phases. The first took place during my semester-long Erasmus fellowship at the University of Porto, in 1996, where I conducted a broad-scoped literature review regarding the castle’s history. At the same time, I gathered all the necessary documentation for planning and designing a number of projected architectural interventions that included illustrations and drawings (plans, sections, and elevations) of the existing state of the monument, video and sound field recordings, and photographs. It is noteworthy that the research expanded beyond the castle walls and the city of Porto de Mós, as I, a foreigner to Portuguese culture and history, attempted to uncover the ways in which the site was embedded in its narratives.

The main objective was to explore new ways for an architect to approach a historical monument. In this framework, the concept of reuse/rehabilitation, in the sense of applying a new functional value to the monument in order to render it sustainable, was seriously questioned. The proposed architectural approach did not aim to rehabilitate the castle through a functional program, or to turn it into a museum of itself. The idea, instead, was that through the interventions, the observer should be able to recognize and treat the castle as a living organism in constant development. The practical outcome was the design of architectural interventions, presented in the form of drawings and collages, with a view to constructing a new balance, capable of revealing the nature of the monument, its history and its role in the wider region, while highlighting human presence as the site’s on-going life force. In this way, people, objects and sediments were related back to their context and nothing was singled out of the flow of the castle’s history.

The second phase of the research took place in 2013, when I re-visited both the area of Porto de Mós and my previous work on the castle. The main purpose this time was to find a way to reconstruct my personal experience together with the proposed architectural interventions, creating a continuity that could resemble that of an observer’s experience. Here, the methodology was based on Le Corbusier’s concept of ‘promenade architecturale’, the architectural promenade, or the observer’s experience of walking through architecture. Apart from the aspect of space, this method also uses the aspect of time as an architectural value, introducing a four-dimensional way of thinking about architecture. The narrative structure of the architectural promenade employs senses, memories, and reactions in a carefully choreographed sequence of images that unravels before the observers’ eyes, re-sensitizing them to their surroundings.

The creation of a film that could gather all the previous work on the castle (drawings, collages, still images, photographs, video, and sound field recordings) under a script or a narration, presented itself as the ideal tool to simulate the experience of the architectural promenade. The main idea for structuring the narration was to follow someone else’s footsteps, creating a journey within a journey: a long-lost diary published in the local press intrigues a contemporary tourist, who decides to follow the itinerary described in its pages. It is the itinerary of a pilgrim from the mid-20th century who did not follow his initial intention to visit Fátima, a major center of pilgrimage for the Catholic Church, but deviated instead, concluding his journey at the castle of Porto de Mós. In the narration, the two paths combine in a journey of exploration and self-awareness that engages all senses in a playful way, designed to stress the castle’s artistic and symbolic significance, to awaken the viewer’s consciousness of space, and to support their understanding of the castle’s history and architecture.

In the film, the question about the concept of monumentality in architecture – foundational for this research – is examined not only through the issues of scale, proportion, and massive appearance, but also through the principle of interrelationship, by means of exploring the idea of a centrifugal or radiant architecture, able to impose its influence upon the surroundings and function as a landmark. Apart from monumentality, this mixed media production seeks to address various other architectural concepts, employing the basic analytical structure of antithetical pairs: the frontal (static, partial) view, as opposed to an all-sided (integrated) perspective which the observer perceives while approaching the castle, the distinction of the old and the new through the materials employed, the encouragement of movement in contrast with that of pausing, along with the polarities between the past and the present, the vertical and the horizontal, lightness and darkness, the sacred and the secular, the public and the private, the accessible and the inaccessible, the eternal and the ephemeral.

More importantly, this work is clearly differentiated from the logic of what Robert Hewison describes as the ‘heritage industry’, the contemporary practice that thrives on the conservation of the past as an isolated, dead relic, disconnected from the present, hence disrupting the continuity of collective memory.1 What this film attempts instead is to establish a crucial link between the past and the present, transforming the medieval castle of Porto de Mós from a once-lived experience to an on-going adventure.

1.  Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).