Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, has one of the most beautiful – and creepy – love stories ever to be heard. It is the story of Pedro and Inês, a Portuguese heir to the throne and a Spanish aristocrat’s maid. It has a tragic ending, much more gruesome than Romeo and Juliet (Pedro’s own father, king Afonso IV, fears a political scandal and has Inês assissined), and contains what is one of the most extraordinary episodes in royal history: Pedro, besides declaring war on his father, declares he had wed his lover in secret shortly before her death, has her body exhumed and placed on a throne, and has the entire court kiss the dead girl’s hand as a sign of loyalty to their sovereign.
Inês spent her last years in a Monastery in Coimbra, and the city is to this day associated with romance.
Now, what is particularly enjoyable in the story you are about to read, is that it happened in the same town, and yet, none of it ever meant to deal with the legend. It is but a simple story of two people. One of them happens to be the architect and artist Juan de la Mora.

“These hearts were painted by my girlfriend and I in Coimbra, Portugal a couple of years back. She is from Coimbra and I am from Chicago and we’ve been able to maintain a long distance relationship for the past 2.5 years. Since then, we continue to paint some of these hearts every time we are together in Coimbra. What is interesting about Portugal’s Calçada (sidewalk), is that you can take a combination of a minimum of three stones and find the shape of an abstract heart form. The heart can grow by adding more stones to the original three.”

One of my points of interest recently has been the social identity and its various levels (going from such a broad thing as being a citizen to being a “part of a relation”).
This is what the author, cirka, says about the work, on the Wooster Collective site where I discovered the work:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about public information vs. private information and why it’s so fascinating to read about the mundane details of someone else’s private life (like finding their grocery list that they dropped in the parking lot, for example). So, I decided to reverse this by choosing “declassify” some of my own personal documents: letters that, at a different time in my life, I would have been mortified for anyone else to see. All are letters that were written to me (except for one, which shows a short email correspondence). They span from a letter written by my pen pal when I was about 10 to a letter that I received last summer. I silk-screened all the letters in the original color that they were written in. The only things that I altered were the names of people mentioned in the letters, which I censored in black ink.”

I love when an artist plays with the idea of a genuine self, flirts with exhibitionism, and yet the work remains a presentation, a mise-en-scene.