R9F6PBRANCO exhibited from June 22nd to September 1st 2013 at Pavilhão Branco, Lisboa, was a collaboration between the artist Fernanda Fragateiro and the architect Rui Mendes.

The project is a conversation about whiteness. It started on the white space of a sheet of paper, through which the artist and the architect exchanged texts, allowing it to expand into the architectural space.

The choice of the white pavilion at the city museum installed a notion of place: an assessment of the building’s measurements and construction elements, a clarification of the organisation and geometry of a space contained by floors and ceilings, openings and walls in order to create a precise and transitory new occupation about whiteness. Signs and conditions of the space, like the original data relating to its construction, which characterizes its physical fragility, triggered the creation of an index.

Then a glossary and map of continuous creation based on reference works: the memory of the place, the “weight” of the whiteness, inscriptions and topographical drawings, systems for measuring and understanding behaviour from object to object, group to group, movement to movement, through drawing and manipulating existing materials and found pieces, between the sculpture studio and the architecture studio, the bookshop, the second-hand bookstore, the pavilion-museum, the carpenter’s and the blacksmith’s workshops, the printer’s and warehouses.

The works are a series of material, spiritual and aesthetic exercises, upon which white is inscribed or from where it emerges, creating a suggestion of its existence or its impossibility.