Ruben Martin de Lucas
“Minimal Republic” Museu Alberto Sampaio

Ruben Martin de Lucas

Minimal Republic

Minimal Republics is a set of actions on the landscape that respond to a performative exercise: 1. Appropriating 100m2 of land 2. Draw a border 3. Inhabit it The results are “ephemeral microstates” such a circle of plaster in a fallow land, a triangle delimited by wood slats that float on a huge reservoir inhabited with the help of a life raft, a square in a parking lot delimited with traffic cones, etc … Republics whose limit always responds to an artificial criterion that is geometry, whose duration never exceeds 24 hours and whose only inhabitant is the artist himself. These are ridiculous and absurd states, whose documentation in the form of aerial photographs, becomes a set of works as simple in the aesthetic as deep in their meaning. Poetic and visually effective gestures whose simplicity and irony invite us to reflect on the artificial and ephemeral nature of every frontier. Minimal Republics belongs to STUPID BORDERS, a set of conceptual projects that questions the idea of “nation” and points at the strange feeling of possession that man exerts towards the Earth, an entity which transcends us in age.