Children play in a spring-like landscape. Together they follow paths through the countryside, they discover abandoned houses that they use to play hide-and-seek, they eat blackberries that blackberry bushes leave at their mercy. But the joviality of these children contrasts with men and women who tell stories of a tough past and of a future they imagined would be different. The marks on their bodies, symbolized by the hands of a very old woman, are wrinkled, marked by a time that was harsh and long. Even the working tools – hoes thrown in the middle of the ground – are worn out and useless. In "Barbs, Wasteland" Marta Mateus invents a kind of time without time, a fable of ancestral Portugal in a poetry of the landscape and of men that crosses the worlds of António Reis and Pedro Costa.
~Daniel Ribas