Field Notes - The Architecture of the Lane II
Field Notes — The Architecture Of The Lane Part II is the continuation of Field Notes - The Architecture of the Lane.
After writing about the architecture of the lane, I returned there. Or better, I went there once again. I have been going to that lane for a long time.
Sometimes it requires returning to the same paths, looking again, noticing what was always there but remained unseen. Even from someone like me who has crossed that lane, those lanes, many times before.
Further away I could see another presence. The large weeping willow I had found the other day. It's a tree that seems to belong to another world.
Standing beneath its canopy felt like stepping away from the city, even though the tree was inside a small urban green space surrounded by streets and buildings.
The willow suggested something hidden.
Porto has always been a city of water. Much of its history is written over rivers, streams and underground waterways. The city was built upon water, and many of those waters were eventually covered, redirected or forgotten.
Here, the memory of water remained.
A conversation with a lady that lived close to the weeping willow confirmed what the landscape had already suggested. When she was a child, there was a river there, visible and open, where women went to wash clothes.
The river, of course, is still there. Buried beneath the modern city. Its memory surviving in those that remember it under open skies.
The same conversation moved between landscapes and generations.
We spoke about the sea, about taking the bus as children to reach the Atlantic, about the respect the sea demands. We spoke about picking wild blackberries when we were young.
I was actually picking wild blackberries when the lady, smiling, approached me saying "I used to do that when I was 10". I replied "Me too."
We also talked about looking differently at familiar places. I had taken a couple of photos of trees and green beings for colour reference for my paintings and art.
The lady said she had never noticed how many different greens existed there despite living at that place for decades. She said she would now look at her familiar landscape differently.
The lane is not just a passage between places. It is a passage between times. It's a place of memories, of the odd conversation.
A city is not a finished object. It is a layered structure, continuously rewritten while carrying traces of what came before.
Observation is a form of archaeology. It's psychogeography. It looking at the colours that change with the light.
Seeing how the same green can contain different greens. Noticing the textures of rust, leaves, walls and stone. Seeing that a landscape is never only what is immediately visible.
The architecture of the lane is, of course, also the architecture of memory.
[[painting: Claude Monet - The Weeping Willow, 1918 - 1919]
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