The project entitled “Contingency Zone” consist of 12 flagpoles, measuring 600cm tall by 6.5cm of diameter, and twelve flags, measuring 220 cm by 100cm, stamped with the repeating pattern [in the colors black and yellow] of the “caution” tapes used to designate attention [beware] zones. Distributed evenly forming a 800cm diameter circumference.

The “caution” tapes, or as is it called in Portuguese “containing tapes”, given that it contains the public to enter a zone and vice-versa, is an efficient visual symbol to repel the public from an unsafe or protected area. But also, in the other hand, it calls out the public attention [exactly why it’s always used strong striking colors] with the objective of making the unsafe or protected zone as noticeable as possible.

In this particular installation/site specific, the objective was to create a penetrable unsafe/safe zone in which the public is as much repelled, as it is compelled to investigate the space created. Not only a matter of attention, the developed installation dialogues with the ideas of nationality, given the use of the symbolic black and yellow flags; cartography and politics, generating a inner and outer space and making use of geo-political concepts of boundaries and territory; with the concept of ‘content’, as in containing people to go or reach somewhere, as well as ‘containing’ as content [state of being] or meaning; and with the concepts of political and symbolic ‘bewareness’. Also, as the titled implies, it’s a zone of unpredictability. A volatile area created temporarily to solve an unexpected situation, an improvisation, a space prompted for possibilities instead of factuality.