This is a site-specific installation. The building that housed the exhibition has an history of its own, nearly a century-old. It was built as an apartment building for the upper class at the Avenida da Liberdade, and the city’s subsequent development turned this neighbourhood into the most favoured area by the tertiary sector in Lisbon, and as a consequence of this the apartment buildings were turned into office space and rented to companies. At present, the building is uninhabited, but the space retains signs of its previous occupancies.

For this installation, a room was chosen that had been used in the past as storage or archiving space. When handing over the premises, the lease-holder firm took away all its belongings from the room, leaving behind only the empty metallic shelving. The artist’s intervention consisted of making use of the existing fittings to store in his own foodstuff, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, plastic and cardboard boxes, bags, shoes and other household items. The intention here is to subvert the original archiving purpose – a requisite of organized work – through a personal appropriation of the space that would retrieve a traditionally domestic function: the pantry.

The reclaiming of the archive room was achieved by resorting to the artist’s personalia taken from the house where he was then living in and was about to leave. The packed stuff, lacking any specific destination, was deposited there by the artist to be stored in the shelves of the former office. In addition to the strong personal memories associated to those objects, it can be noted that the artist, in one of his first temporary jobs - a probationer in a business – had mostly spent his working time shut away in an archive room.

Taking these experiences has his starting point the artist seeks to overlap the story of his own life with the story of that particular space - the office that once was a home. The installation appeals to the originally domestic character of the place, individuates it, and links a specific space that was formerly devoted to utilitarian and organizational purposes back to an individual identity. As a result, private space (of the order of the individual and the homely) and public space (of the order of the collective and remunerated work) can be said to meet here.

The concept of Deposit is the link that connects all this crossing of meanings and of functional changes. A Deposit can be a place for stocking things, as well as a place of memory. A place for storing stuff with no immediate utility, and that people generally have reasons for wanting to keep out of view, but nevertheless are reluctant to let go.