Galeria Municipal do Porto

Compulsive Desires:
On Lithium Extractiuon and Rebellious Mountains
25.03 - 28.05.2023

Compulsive Desires — The Extraction of Lithium and Rebellious Mountains addresses the entanglement between extractivism and exhaustion, productivity and burn-out, across scales. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier, the exhibition takes as its starting point the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the North of Portugal and the struggles sustained by local communities for their lives and rights. Battles that emphasize how, in what has been described as "green colonialism", the development of the "renewable energy futures", too often involves the dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems.

Whereas the mining industry — and capitalism cravings — subjugates and exploits the mountain and its inhabitants treating them as resources to be extracted, the violence is turned into a force for survival for these communities through collective infrastructures and embodied rituals. If mining results in social, ecological, and mental breakdown, these practices, alongside artistic expressions, break social order to create counter worlds merging the individual and the collective, the ancestral realm and future generations, the human and more-than-human, and unleashing alternative understanding of energy.

Curated by Marina Otero Verzier

With

Amável Antão, Anastasia Kubrak, Carlos Irijalba, Giuliana Rosso, Grupo de Investigação Territorial (Antonio del Giudice, Godofredo Enes Pereira, Jacob Bolton, Mingxin Li, Tiago Patatas), Heitor Cramez, Isidro Rodrigues, Jonas Staal & Radha D’Souza, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Lara Almarcegui, Leanne Wijnsma, Lithium Triangle Research Studio + Nicolas Jaar, Maarten Vanden Eynde & Edmond Musasa, Medios Libres con la Gira Zapatista, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Natalia de la Rubia Kozlowska, Orlando Vieira Francisco, Povo de Covas do Barroso & Paulo Carneiro, Susana Caló, Susana Soares Pinto, Tanguy Pitavy, Tomás Saraceno & Aerocene Foundation.

Music Between Companion Species
May - November 2023

Music between Companion Species is a series of concerts conceived and performed for and with dogs, their human companions and other more-than-human presences who may join these sessions. Inspired by Donna J. Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto and by cientific studies about dog’s preferences for sound and music, the concerts will take into account these animals’ unique sensibilities and hearing capabilities. Curated by Lovers & Lollypops.

Curated by Lovers & Lollypops

Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize
17.06-20.08.2023

Created by the City Council as a tribute to the late Councillor for Culture Paulo Cunha e Silva (1962 – 2015), a central figure for the city’s artistic life, the award, held every two years in Porto, recognises the talent of new generations of national and international artists. This year’s edition underlines the Prize’s commitment to fostering creation and cultural exchange by establishing a partnership with three world-recognised residency programmes: Arquipélago Centro de Artes in S. Miguel, Azores, Cove Park, on Scotland’s west coast, and Pivô, in São Paulo, will all host one of the nominated artists, appointed by a jury of three members.

The Nominators for the 2023 edition of the Art Prize are:
Artist Ângela Ferreira, Jan van Eyck Academie Director Hicham Khalidi, and cultural programmer Tabitha Thorlu-Bandura.

With
Euridice Kala, Márilu Namoda and Luis Santos (nominated by Ângela Ferreira); Rouzbeh Akhbari, Kent Chan and Hira Nabi (nominated by Hicham Khalidi) and Maren Karlson, Malik Nashad Sharpe aka Marikiscrycrycry, and Eve Stainton (nominated by Tabitha Thorlu-Bandura).

Duet
Maria Paz and Joan Jonas
16.09 – 19.11.2023

Duet is an invitation for two artists to share an exhibition space. It started as a proposal for a young artist from Porto to think of an artist they would like to share an exhibition with. Recalling the impact of her survey show at the Serralves Museum, Maria Paz invited Joan Jonas to share the exhibition space of the Galeria Municipal do Porto. In this transatlantic exchange of generations, the two artists will reveal their common investigations of forms, colours and materials.

Curadoria de Filipa Ramos

The Sylvan and Harsh North
09.12.2023 – 10.03.2024

What are the meteorological patterns, the myths and stories, the rhythms, colours and shapes, the human and nonhuman inhabitants that make up the Iberian Northwest, in its reality and fiction?
Wondering about the rituals and expressive modes of people, animals, plants, elements and minerals, we went looking for the roots, terminations and tentacles of the Iberian Northwest, trying to locate the places where they might reside. In doing so, we considered the past but above all faced the present-future of these concrete and imagined spaces between seas, woods and settlements. The Sylvan and Harsh North is an exhibition that follows roads and lines of intensity, centrifugal forces that take us beyond Porto, towards those supposed margins where permutations erupt, to discover and share the references, stories, words and connections to these places with a long past and an even longer future.

Curated by Filipa Ramos and Juan Luis Toboso

ping!
Gineceu+Estigma

With roots in the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal, Gineceu+Estigma addresses the fantastic world of botany, crossing scientific, artistic, philosophical, spiritual and ecological thought with approaches in which academic, artistic and empirical knowledge intersect and complement each other.

Gineceu+Estigma offers talks, workshops and interpretative tours of the garden by invited educators, researchers and artists.

Friday, February 23rd, from 10 am to 12 pm

Closing of ESCOLA TERRA: Presentation of workshop results with Landra

Escola Terra was a workshop outside the gates of the gardens of Palácio de Cristal, which took place in the playgrounds of the Canelas school complex. During the four seasons of the year, Landra invited students and teachers, from pre-school to high-school, to get out of the classroom and discover the surrounding living habitats.

A variety of collective actions were carried out, including collecting samples and looking through a microscope, followed by drawings and listening sessions. We talked about biological succession, biomes and the different scales of the school landscape, from the tree to the lichen, from the darkness of the soil to the light of the ground.

The closing session of this educational project will include a visit to the exhibition at the Galeria Municipal do Porto and a talk with the participating students and the Landra duo, open to anyone with an interest in pedagogy or mediation in Art and Ecology.

Landra is the name given to the land and to the practice of Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo B. Camacho, paying homage to acorns, called Landras in the Iberian Northwest. The duo sees in them a culture of autonomy, sovereignty and self-sufficiency that they seek to recover, aligning themselves with a practice of living and doing in tune with natural rhythms and cycles.
www.landra.pt

Tuesday, April 23rd, from 3 to 5:30pm

Ressonâncias de um Jardim: Developing workshop for schools with Casa da Imagem

The process of imagining this workshop began with a collection of organic elements such as leaves, seeds and branches from the Palácio de Cristal Gardens, but also with a selection of photographs from the Teófilo Rego archive, which depict times lived in this garden in the city of Porto and show dog shows or stands for a Wine Fair. The practical part will take place at Casa da Imagem, an art and knowledge-sharing space where students will be able to get to grips with different developing processes - more experimental and ecological - that use some of the plants collected earlier.

Botanical collecting and scientific representations of plant and animal species will be replaced by a representation of nature that is not so humanized, but more experiential and personal.

Casa da Imagem is a place of art and mediation, transdisciplinary learning and museology, acting for equity and social justice. It is a project of the Manuel Leão Foundation in Santo Ovídio, Gaia. Inês Azevedo and Joana Mateus, the coordinators, and other artists, mediators and researchers organize exhibitions, develop studies and run workshops. Casa da Imagem works on: the use of digital technologies for the representation and critical involvement of young people on social networks (#NarcissusMeetsPandora); images that represent industry; the Foto-Comercial Teófilo Rego and Rocha Artes Gráficas archives; and the creation of images through ecological processes.

[REGISTRATIONS CLOSED]Saturday, May 18, from 3 to 5pm

International Fascination of Plants Day - Walk through the Gardens with Evgenia Emets

As has become customary in the Public Programs of the Galeria Municipal do Porto, International Museum Day has been celebrated as International Fascination of Plants Day, in a close relationship with those who inhabit the Palácio de Cristal Gardens - its fauna and flora - and also those who visit them, in a joint celebration of the different forms of life.

This year's guide will be the artist Evgenia Emets, who runs the Eternal Forest project, focused on careful research into the connection between communities and the forest and the urgency of reflecting on these relationships, which are often based on extractive logics.

For this event, Evgenia has followed the four seasons of the year in the Gardens, letting herself be intuitively guided by the plants and trees of the place. The proposal is to go on a journey where we will talk about the species of trees that exist, adding a collective experience of writing from what the plants tell us, while establishing relationships and stories behind each one of them.

REGISTRATIONS CLOSED

All routes are carried out on foot.

Meeting point to be defined.

Limited capacity.

Registrations via email: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt

Evgenia Emets (1979, Poltava, Ukraine, USSR) is an artist and poet who lives and works in Portugal. She studied for a master's degree in Fine Arts at Saint Martin's, London and five years ago decided to rebuild a house and rehabilitate an agricultural plot in Torres Vedras, Portugal. Her practice focuses on ecological issues, which she transposes into visual art, sound and calligraphic poetry, installation, performance and site-specific art in natural contexts.

Her Eternal Forest project marks a transition in the integration of ecological thinking into her art, with the mission of sharing more knowledge about biodiversity, connecting people to nature and the forest landscape through participatory art.

She has exhibited individually or collectively in exhibitions such as CI.CLO / Bienal Fotografia do Porto - Sustentar; Roots & Seeds in Spain; Multispecies Salon in Mexico and at the Cerveira Biennial; Encontro Pela Terra and Galeria Diferença; She has taken part in meetings on Art and Ecology, guiding "artistic experience" courses that have taken place at Estufa Fria Parque Florestal de Monsanto in Lisbon, or at Encontro Pela Terra in Idanha-a-Velha.

Images: Evgenia Emets

Schools - Friday, May 31st, from 10am to 1pm and from 2pm to 4pm

Amulets for magical beings inhabiting gardens - Amulet-making workshop with Oficina Sibila

What can we uncover in these gardens full of life, visible or invisible?

How can we inhabit them, without them ceasing to dazzle us, without damaging or transforming them? In groups, we'll build amulets for magical beings.

Do you ever feel them lurking around? During the day they hide while we're out walking, but at night, in the silence, they come to check that we've protected their place while they were resting.

With the art of protecting, you twist a string three times, hug the tree and hang it up, saying the magic words: "this is your place too, and we're going to care for it". With leaves, twigs, branches, stones, sticks, earth, clay, water and natural pigments, we put together a secret binder. What will it be?

And tomorrow, will the magical beings that inhabit the gardens return?

Will you come along?

Local
Jardins do Palácio de Cristal/Jardim das Cidades Geminadas (Next to Avenida das Tílias)

Admission is free.

Oficina Sibila is an art education project rooted in contemporary art, with a studio in Maia, near Porto.

A place where generations meet, Sibila's aim is to extend the research field of Joana Mendonça - teacher, educator and artist - to the community where she lives, through partnerships with other educators, artists or craftspeople, and where a collective path is built.

Oficina Sibila believes that contemporary art provides answers to today's greatest conflicts and dilemmas and its actions demystify the artistic aura that distances art from those who really want it.