Matinha – the plant cyborg is an audio and graphic short novel made from field registers of the research project NoVOID – Ruins and vacant lands in the Portuguese cities: exploring hidden life in urban derelicts and alternative planning proposals for the perforated city (PTDC/ATP-EUR/1180/2014).

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The research project NoVOID focuses on understanding the life of abandoned spaces within the city, through a multidisciplinary approach that comprises different methods such as remote sensing, floristic inventories, archival research, and ethnoarchaeology.

 

Matinha was chosen as a case study due to its importance in the history of Lisbon and the vastness of the site, which includes abandoned gasometers, ruined buildings, and a great diversity of vegetation. In the last three years, the NoVOID team members have conducted extensive fieldwork in Matinha, with the purpose of understanding the different forms of life and inhabiting that take place in the site, namely the different types of human appropriation, and plant biodiversity. These fieldwork trips were done by biogeographers, cultural geographers, GIS experts, and architects. Each of these scholars created different field registers with data that was treated and analyzed in specific studies that have been published or are under review in scientific journals.

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Despite the diversity of methodological approaches in project NoVOID, it is interesting that photography was a common tool among the team members, and therefore photographs were common field registers. We also conducted sound recordings to create a sound map of Lisbon’s vacant lands as a way to convey the vibrancy of all the forms of life that were being studied by the project’s team.

 

We assembled these materials into a single medium in this audio and graphic short novel on Matinha, which we hope can convey the experience and the different knowledges that stem from our fieldwork.

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Daniel Paiva

Lisboa, 2019