Didier Fiuza Faustino employs the visual language of Modernist architecture to investigate the plight of the individual in society. He sees architecture as a mediation between the body and place, and also something that is linked to the political in its capacity to control the movement and behaviour of people.
Lost Illusions (2007) is based on Faustino's experiences of emigration - the move from Portugal to France in search of a better life.He has taken a white cube, a symbol of Modernist architecture's Utopian aspirations, and has shown it as fragile, either falling to pieces or in the midst of construction, highlighting the failure of Modernist architecture in its aims, and on a personal level raising questions of whether emigration really was for the better. The addition of wooden beams also evokes the idea of the construction site, suggesting that what is considered betterment is constantly in flux.
Stairway to Heaven (2004) is a staircase encased in a concrete hallway, that leads up to a cage in which there is a basketball hoop. Installed in a public park in Portugal, it places emphasis on the individual and their spatial relation to the form in that the configuration of the piece is suited for one person, both in climbing the stairs and playing basketball, taking the participant on a route that seems to serve no practical purpose. It also presents a questioning of the use of public space in Portugal, and an investigation of the relationship between indoors and outdoors; private and public.
Opus Incertum (2008) presents a hypothetical situation - an idea of what would have been left behind by Yves Klien in his work Into the Void had he fallen onto a malleable surface. Exhibited at the Taipei Biennale, visitors were encouraged to physically occupy the same space that Klien would have.
The form functions not only as a record of an ephemeral positioning of a body in space in a way that visually references something considered permanent (architecture), but also makes the viewers aware of their own bodies as a spatial presence.
Body in Transit (2000) is a design for a cargo container, intending to provide a means by which
a human may be transported in the hold of a boat or plane. The "cargo" Faustino refers to specifically is illegal immigrants, referencing the hardships they must often endure in situations beyond their cotnrol, but has wider implications. The status of the object as something for transportation implies, amongst other things, the contemporary individual as often being disconnected, movable and in flux, with their personal space that once may have extended to the home etc. as reduced to what immediately surrounds them.
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