Gente da Casa – monitoring an architectural work em português The project Gente da Casa (people of the house) was born from the determination to give expression and visibility to a group of professions and skilled workers that only make the headlines by accident or by incidents related to labor and legal issues. These people, however, are the builders of our urban landscape: our houses, our cities, the places we live in and live with. They build the real settings we inhabit and the quality of our lives somewhat depends on the quality of their work. Always working for the usage of others, they make of their building activity a way to build something for themselves; and they end up creating a very detached relationship to what they construct. But this is only apparently so, since in many cases, if questioned, they feel and express pride in what they do, in the ability learnt by hard work, having started at a very young age and having achieved their capacity step by step through experience. They are therefore people with sturdy faces, showing the effort of hard labour, exposed both to bad weather and the strain always present in the relationships they establish with each other at the construction site. Starting from a professional context and specifically the accompaniment of the architectural project as its technical director, the architect Carlos Gomes - also the artistic director of the project Gente da Casa - aims to reveal, connect and question all the participants, assessing their technical and professional role, as well as their ethics and aesthetics when doing the particular job of building a house (for someone else), bearing in mind the activity and cultural background of each one of them. The monitoring of the building work through photography and video until the work is concluded (scheduled for February 2008), will end up in an exhibition of selected material (photos, video interviews, soundscape and other objects) and a video documentary. Apart from the accompaniment of the sequential work phases through the video recording of the work itself and its participants, eight exterior fixed plans and 4 interior ones (according to the house-plan) will allow the viewers to follow the transformation of the house during the course of work, step by step. The record of the different work contributions throughout that transformation process will operate as a parallel building progression by successive image layers. By aiming to document the reality of a working context in its human and technical specificity, the project Gente da Casa also aims to present itself as an object of collective memory, acting at the level of awareness and professional self-esteem of each worker and of the perception we have of each other as members in the same sector of economic activity as well as the perception people in general have of this sector and its “actors”. When at the end the building work becomes the house as the outcome of the work of a team of professionals, the visibility of that team should be the final product of this project.