The flyscreen featured on Aesthetica Magazine – A Sense of Place
“Pedro de Freitas Silva is a Portuguese photographer based in the UK, whose work explores the blurred lines between fact and fiction in human belief systems. His recent project, The Flyscreen, focuses on a village community in the Gardunha mountain range in Portugal, including snaps of barren scrubby hillsides and haunting night-portraits. Silva’s own shots are spliced with found and collaged pictures and text: annotated maps, sepias of smoke plumes rising from mountainsides, old group camping snaps. Silva pieces together a patchwork narrative of unspecified events implied to have happened in the region several decades ago: perhaps supernatural, extraterrestrial, or politically dubious in nature. The spur for the project, according to Silva, was an archive of “observations and texts written by A. dos S.D … between 1970 and 1990,” illustrating the strange occurrences he had witnessed in the area. A cursory online search for this mysterious archivist yields no results—indeed, it is likely that his identity is part of the mystery.”
Words: Greg Thomas