Musonautas, Visões & Avarias

Throughout its history, the city of Porto has built a reputation as a place of musical freedom, abounding with avant‑garde approaches that have led to affirmation and recognition of key figures of contemporary Portuguese culture. The Galeria Municipal invited the music programmer and publisher Paulo Vinhas to develop a retrospective of five decades of strength and restlessness in Porto’s musical production, spanning different sound universes and expressions, ranging from classical music to protest music, and also including experimental music and electronic music – mapping the different musical practices that have emerged in Porto between 1960 and 2010.

This exhibition focuses on the ruptures pioneered by artists, disseminators and musical movements that have transformed the divergence of Porto’s peripheral context into a catalyst of new energies. The exhibition’s primary intention is to document a diversified musical history that has made a decisive contribution to shaping the world of Portuguese music, opening up new horizons that, in many cases, have moved beyond their original frontiers, projecting themselves onto the art scene of their epoch.

Photography: Filipa Brito e Susana Neves