Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin
Cidade, which is Portuguese for “city”, is a neon text work that uses the poem Cidade City Cité written in 1958 by the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. As in the original poem, the text comprises a single sentence in Portuguese with all the spaces between words removed. The work looks to reflect the non-translatability of experiencing a different place, yet foregrounds the language itself in the vivid representational form of neon text.