The installation is based on a real place and a ‘ghostified’ non-place, the Sintra rail corridor and its ‘cities,’ exploring themes such as identity, memory and the right to the imaginary.

In the performance ‘Bandeiras são prédios ke a gente veste aqui’ [Flags are buildings that we are wearing here], Tristany (ad)dresses these places, incorporating and re-staging the buildings, the streets, the meeting places, and the bodies and lives of the people who live there, portraying life on the Sintra rail corridor, which bursts into and occupies the museum space.

One of the key elements of the performance (and the installation) are the ‘flags,’ textile works in vibrant colours, which are simultaneously banners and decorative cloaks, matter on which to inscribe living memories of this/these built city/cities and its/their inhabitants. 

While the flags celebrate a right to the imaginary and the imagination, serving as a visual archive that establishes and records a here and now, they also call upon and challenge a historical and fracturing construct of ‘nation’, that chooses fixed identities and establishes relationships of belonging and non-belonging.