"Mecropolis" proposes, through a display of photographs in diptych, a reflection on the symbolic and structural similarities of the metropolis and necropolis.

Population pressure and hygiene issues in a context of the Enlightenment ideology, were the main factors that lead to a questioning, from the eighteenth century, of the habit dating back to early Christianity to use the interior of the churches or churchyards for bury the dead. In 1835 the Portuguese public cemeteries were officially created. The nineteenth-century Catholic cemetery is then designed based on a geometrized , architectural scheme, a monumental expression analogous to the city. And if the city was the ideal place to mount the social show and represent status, the cemetery offered the ideal space for perpetuating it: from the perspective of building the provenance, the importance accorded to the individual passes by osmosis into the household, and the family tomb extends the family home. In bourgeois city and graveyard, house and tomb are located in the territory they compete, in a sector and a road suitable to their condition. In the city of the living and in the city of the dead is guaranteed the social status and memory. The nineteenth century cemetery is developed as a reflection of bourgeois city planning: the definition of rich and poor areas, the representation of the social position of the individual or family and the statement of the dominant stylistic trends. The urban environment and public tour of the streets, lined with chapels along its boundaries, and the fact that the burial site is aggregate in a single family building further reinforces the sense of the city, neighborhood and property. The cemetery is then the "city of the dead," an analogy to the "city of the living" in its structure and in its character as a place of social representation and civic memory.

"The necropolis is the inverse of the metropolis ... the cemetery, the double idealized of the city." (RAGON, Michel, "L'espace de la mort : essai sur l'architecture, la décoration et l'urbanisme funéraires")

"The city of the living and the city of the dead are symmetrical and complementary areas and mutually recognized as founders of urban spaces, establishing genealogies and continuities, assuming mutual protection." (OLIVEIRA, Maria Manuel Lobo Pinto de, "In memoriam, na cidade")

Project developed in the "Documentary Photography Workshop", in February and March 2012.