Geographies of Memory: A Stone in the Middle of the Road

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DATE

09 Oct 2026

AUTHOR

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi

Geographies of Memory: A Stone in the Middle of the Road

AUTHOR

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi

“In Stefanie Pullin’s exhibition Geographies of Memory, curated by Federica Elena at Galeria São Mamede, nature takes shape across the large-scale canvases, expressed through a pastel palette. Notes from the artist’s notebooks, plants she has photographed in close-up or recorded through sketches, as well as the roots, trunks and tips of trees, appear alongside these images. Pullin says that her works are an invitation to look more closely and to see beyond the surface. Interestingly, the closer we look, the wider the field of vision seems to become.”

What is reality to the artist, if not a pretext? Through the endless reworking of reality, Nature emerges as a kind of meta-language: a structure we come to grasp the deeper we enter it, allowing us to dissolve our own structure within it.

In Stefanie Pullin’s exhibition Geographies of Memory, curated by Federica Elena at Galeria São Mamede, nature takes shape across the large-scale canvases, expressed through a pastel palette. Notes from the artist’s notebooks, plants she has photographed in close-up or recorded through sketches, as well as the roots, trunks and tips of trees, appear alongside these images. Pullin says that her works are an invitation to look more closely and to see beyond the surface. Interestingly, the closer we look, the wider the field of vision seems to become.

I am reminded of Nietzsche’s famous observation about nature: “The reason we feel so comfortable and at ease when we are alone with nature is that nature has no opinion of us.”

In the philosopher’s conception, nature draws much of its power to enchant us from this indifference. Yet the nature Pullin depicts seems to care about the viewer.

Stefanie Pullin seduces us into straying, inviting us to step away from the speed, haste and intensity of modern life. The fact that most of her works are painted on large-scale canvases further enhances the sense of walking: as a way of learning when not to.

There are different ways of walking. You can have your head full of thoughts, your eyes fixed on your destination, simply passing through everything around you. Or you can look around. Neither is better than the other, nor does the second necessarily imply a more virtuous way of being. But Stefanie Pullin chooses to pay attention to what surrounds her as she walks, conveying this attentiveness through layers of reflection. She brings us into those unexpected spaces that the Surrealists described as the unconscious of the city.

Geographies of Memory reflects the traces of steps taken towards the unknown. My mind inevitably drifts towards magical realism. The impossibility of repeating even the smallest step in the same way makes walking both “magical” and “realistic.” Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it.” Reality flares up once, and then vanishes only by remembering it can we give it a solid form. Even when we walk the same route again and again and everything appears unchanged, one day, a small, simple, shapeless stone by the roadside suddenly catches our attention. And, interestingly, the whole meaning of life may be compressed into that stone. Just as in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s No Meio do Caminho, which Pullin recorded in her notebooks:

No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra. Tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho Tinha uma pedra No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra Nunca me esquecerei desse acontecimento Na vida de minhas retinas tão fatigadas Nunca me esquecerei que no meio do caminho Tinha uma pedra Tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra.

Nature makes no special claim to being surprising. Everything is as simple and ordinary as it is in this poem. There is a stone in the middle of the road, and I will never forget it.

The simplicity may seem beautiful, but it can also be difficult to accept. Nature throws the creative impulse back to us. From this point on, it is up to us to look, to see, and to do something. The artist’s impulse to act attests to nature’s own power to reveal itself: in flowers, mountains, colours, reflections, in the spontaneous proliferation of life and also in dreams, which are almost as necessary to us as our arms, our legs, even our eyes, the organs through which we offer ourselves to another’s gaze and become captivated by the image that gaze encounters.

Here, a secondary linear layer emerges.

Pullin’s vertical lines invite us to look at the landscapes she draws us into from an architectural perspective.

Although her paintings move through lush vegetation, their limitless upward movement inevitably recalls the cities built by humans: ever-rising skyscrapers, towers, and even the myth of the Tower of Babel.

When Stefanie Pullin first told me about Francesco Careri’s Walkscapes, a book that connects the human impulse to leave traces through vertical structures with the desire to take root, I immediately bought it and read it. Careri writes about songlines, which walking makes visible by setting these lines in motion across Aboriginal territories. They are perspective lines that cut through the visual surface of the landscape as it is traditionally represented. In Deleuze’s terms, they are lines that carry thought along with the movement of things.

The vertical lines Pullin introduces into the texture of the forest make this reciprocal gaze possible. They establish a line of communication within the painting, open in both directions and extending towards infinity.

This is also where Pullin’s particular interest in roots begins to make sense. Before trees can grow upwards, they must first move downwards, breaking into the soil and taking root.

Perhaps this is where it truly begins: to slow down, to look, to stray, to take root, and then to rise again. To move without knowing where the path will take us: within nature, and with it.

The exhibition can be seen at Galeria São Mamede until October 20.

BIOGRAPHY

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi is an Istanbul-based writer, living in Lisbon since September 2022. She studied at Istanbul University and is the author of two published works of literary fiction. A regular contributor to Cumhuriyet, a major Turkish newspaper, where she focuses on Portuguese culture. Her essays and critical texts on theatre, literature, and contemporary art have also been featured in various art magazines.

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