Oficina Impossível

Scene 1. Fly me to the moon, fly me to Mars, fly me to another galaxy — but please take me out of this planet!
Scene 2. So much plastic! What’s going on? It’s plastic, bitch!
Scene 3. “Ground Control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.”

This is how the storyboard of the present exhibition begins. Portraits of several female figures, always on the verge — or already beyond — a nervous breakdown. No doubt, “girls just wanna have fun.” But for that to be possible, in a single take, pure and carefree, it would be far better to live in a world not polluted by plastics, by feral ideologies, or by oppressive machismo.

Cláudia Clemente’s self‑portraits are precisely that: an ode to women, to their freedom and creative force. Fearless, unbound, unconstrained. Yet in her photographs, access to this full and exuberant feminine expression is given in the negative — through the stark contrast with the profusion of situations of confinement. And that is where her mastery lies. Cláudia Clemente creates scenarios of oppression only to subvert them, calmly, one by one, dismantling power games with a sensual and at the same time sarcastic slowness. Her self‑portraits are therefore cinematic images that stand as a figuration of the universal woman and as a feminist manifesto for the twenty‑first century.

Catarina Pombo Nabais