Almodovar Mirror Site: Henrique Pavão

Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Henrique Pavão, Sergio Fazenda Rodrigues
Mulberry Tree Press, London, 2019
Design by Vera Velez
Printed by Maiadouro
96 Pages
Edition of 300 copies
ISBN: 978-1-9160949-0-1

Henrique Pavão’s Almodôvar Mirror Site publication coincided with his eponymous exhibition, which shows a synchronized pair of slide projections of seemingly identical motorway service stations located on opposite sides of the route between Lisbon and the Algarve, each serving a different destination. The artist and a collaborator, facing in opposite directions, had examined the 11 petrol stations along the road while in mobile phone contact to ascertain the similarities between the pairs; they concluded that only a single pairing was in fact identical, offering itself as a ‘mirror-site’ chiming with American artist Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969) close to half a century earlier. It includes texts by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley, Sergio Fazenda Rodrigues, and the artist.