Public Project
Hidden and Forgotten
Confined at home with my wife and our four children, I decided to renovate the small patio behind our house in a Lisbon suburb — tearing down the old shed and building a space to gather with family and friends.
But as I dug, I began unearthing more than just debris and roots. From a 4x3 meter patch of ground emerged dozens of forgotten objects: chewing gum wrappers, detergent caps, glass bottles, polystyrene foam, metal lids, tubes, sponges and even a comb. Many of these items dated back over two decades — to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the house and surrounding neighborhood were built. These fragments of the past had been sealed beneath a thin layer of earth and concrete, invisible in everyday life. Their sudden presence raised quiet questions: What do we leave buried — in our landscapes, in our routines, in the way we build and discard?
This unplanned archaeological moment became a reflection on memory, domestic space, and the environmental consequences of how we occupy and transform the places we live in. In a neighbourhood of over 400 similar homes, built largely by the same companies, how many other yards hide similar layers of forgotten debris?
More than two decades later, these discarded materials resurfaced — silent witnesses to a past we rarely think about, and a present that still struggles with the environmental cost of how we build.
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