Fernanda Fragateiro. Opening Windows With Stones

Opening Windows With Stones (2025), by Fernanda Fragateiro, forms part of the cycle of works commissioned for the bridge that connects the main building of the Serralves Museum to the Álvaro Siza Wing, opened in October 2023. Following on from the sound piece created by Luisa Cunha, which marked the beginning of this programme, Fragateiro now presents a wall of light cement blocks that radically transforms our perception of the space.


Suspended from the inside of the bridge, this irregular and asymmetrical wall appears as a foreign body in the architectural order of the place, establishing a tension between weight and suspension, density and permeability. Built from fragments of buildings demolished in the centre of Lisbon, which the artist had been collecting over several years, the wall stands as a critique of the transformations recently taking place in the city where she lives and works. In these fragments, we can see the effects of gentrification, property speculation and the pressure from tourism – processes that have altered the landscape, changed people’s ways of living and transformed community relations. Fragateiro tells us the story of an urban space subordinated to the demands of a financial logic that is unrelated to the needs of its inhabitants, where each demolition adds a new layer of absence to the palimpsest of the city, leaving marks that highlight the fragility of collective memory and the silent violence of this radical redesign of

our cities.


In the long corridor, Opening Windows With Stones stands as an obstacle: a physical barrier that also carries a symbolic meaning. Without any apparent connection between them, the blocks seem about to crumble, but they mutually support one another, leaving cracks through which the light can pass and our eyes can see. When viewed up close, each stone shows signs of its origin – pieces of plaster, cement, mortar, brick, chipped patches – all testifying to the ongoing process of destruction. The artist does not attempt to reconstruct what has been lost; instead, she organises the fragments into a body which preserves the marks of the destruction that has taken place and shows us the contradictions of the present, questioning how the city manages its own memory. The installation thus functions as a form of archaeological criticism, in which our understanding of the precariousness of the whole is not limited to its formal dimension, causing us instead to reflect on everything that is lost with the disappearance of buildings, be they historical or self-built – the material, but also the stories, the collective practices and the ways of life that are erased by contemporary developments, all undertaken in the name of progress.

Since the 1990s, Fernanda Fragateiro has been exploring the relationship between architecture, ruin and urban memory, using building materials and consulting archives from outside the institutional circuits. A central aspect of her research has involved the recovery of the work of authors that have been silenced by the dominant narratives. Collecting debris from urban buildings and rescuing forgotten legacies are gestures that are rooted in the same awareness: the history of the city is built from both what remains and what is erased. Through operations that involve collection, archiving, assembly and citation, Fragateiro establishes clear links between memory and material, offering us critical interpretations about what is preserved and what is systematically suppressed. In the case of Opening Windows With Stones, it is worth remembering the reference to the windows of SESC Pompeia, an abandoned factory that the architect Lina Bo Bardi rehabilitated, just like Fragateiro, working on ruined and unfinished buildings in order to promote vernacular practices and popular culture, in opposition to the hegemony of official history.


Positioning the work in Álvaro Siza’s already iconic bridge thus takes on particular significance. In a space marked by the authority of modern architecture, the artist introduces precarious and deteriorating material, collected from outside the institutional circuits, contrasting the formal order of the place with what has been excluded by history. And it is also in this way that we can understand its political dimension, for, while many walls are erected as borders and barriers of exclusion, this one opens itself up in cracks that provide us with passages and detours. All we need to do is adjust our body, look for the opening and find our way through.


The title calls for a sudden, urgent, political, but also poetic, gesture. “Opening”, because it is necessary to open. With all the force that we have available. Stones break, but they also reveal; by throwing stones, we open a gap through which we can see and pass. Not a regular window, but a tear: imprecise, unfinished, but necessary; a gesture that insists on opening, despite everything.

Text: Inês Grosso