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!
pings!

PINGS! are young students between 16 and 22 years old who get to know and follow GMP's activities, dialoguing with curatorial teams, artists and other guests, participating actively in the daily life of an artistic institution.

PINGS! invent formats and methodologies of meeting, dialogue and sharing of ideas as they discover the way an art centre works, its agendas and operational logic.

PINGS! will continue the project in their classes and educational contexts through guided visits, moderating talks, making audio-visual materials or other modalities they want to propose and implement.

PINGS! will dialogue and collaborate with researchers and creator like Irina Pereira, but also with the Quotidiano de uma Negra project (Mafalda Fernandes), among others, through workshops, conversations and interviews in the scope of the three programming axes Gineceu+Estigma, Memória de Elefante and Exodus.

pings! / February 17

0.1 Exodus walk for pings! with Mafalda Fernandes — Quotidiano de Uma Negra

Mafalda Fernandes designed a route where colonial narratives that are perpetuated in the city's streets and public spaces were debated, while visiting cultural and commercial places run by a black, Portuguese and migrant community from different African countries.

"Quotidiano de uma negra" is the project of this young psychologist who teaches and reflects on the anti-racist struggle and which will take shape and space throughout this Exodus walk aimed at the ping! collective.

Born and raised in Porto, Mafalda Fernandes is the daughter of white parents and sister of black women. A psychologist and anti-racist activist, studying and thinking about social problems related to racism is her greatest passion. Founder of Tour Africana Porto, she uses ecotourism as a way of creating a common consciousness. She founded the @quotidianodeumanegra, where she expresses her concerns in favor of anti-racist education.

Photography: Dinis Santos

pings! / March 23, from 10:30 am to 4:30 pm | Gineceu+Estigma

0.2 Ressonâncias de um Jardim: Developing workshop for pings! 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 took place at Casa da Imagem, an art and knowledge-sharing space where students were 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 were 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.

Photography: Renato Cruz Santos

Saturday, May 11, from 3 to 6pm

0.3 Exodus walk for pings!, with Flor and Daniel Sá

In 2021, a public petition was launched, which has now been deactivated, questioning the Porto City Council's Municipal Master Plan and debating new uses for some land in the Paranhos - Arca d'Água area. One of these urban vacant spaces, on the other hand, was full of non-human life and became known as "A Charca de Salgueiros". Microorganisms and a wide variety of plant and animal species live here, in a limbo that is very interesting to visit and discuss.

A stadium, a shopping mall or water polo pools were some of the wishes put forward by the centenary Sport Clube Salgueiros.

On this walk, led by Flor and Daniel Sá, we will discuss the role of art in the discussion of public space and learn about bureaucracy, community, disobedience and intervention, reflecting on process and error when trying to navigate the political temperaments of a city.

Flor is an artist currently living in Porto. Her academic studies cross art, technology and the culture of the senses, with which she creates immersive and multi-sensory environments in different collectives. She developed a dissertation and performance on smell and its culture, stimulating curiosity at various events. She synthesizes video and light for shows. She expresses herself politically through writing and art, focusing on the themes of ecology and loneliness from a queer perspective.

Daniel Sá began his studies in Architecture in Porto with a decisive detour to Mexico City, which he concluded with a dissertation-essay on the fall of the wall. His practice of artistic exploration carries traces of that place and is based on his return as a member of the Broca 501 studio, where he exhibits installation cycles whose pieces focus on the fracture. He is an integral member of Túnel, a self-managed collective space, where he works in the areas of installation, drawing, writing and tattooing, under the name Aguardente. He scratches compulsively in the expectation that something will crack. aguardente.rip

pings! / Saturday, June 29, from 3 to 6pm | Memória de Elefante

0.4 Corpographies Reimagined: dialogue with/against the archive of the 1st Portuguese Colonial Exhibition - Fanzine workshop with Marcela Pedersen and Rafael Campos

Corpographies can be cartographies with/of the body in/of spaces. It's a concept created to establish connections between the scales of the body and the city, which can manifest themselves in various formats.

The Gardens of Palácio de Cristal reveal a memory space that bears the marks and reminiscences of Portuguese colonial history. In this workshop, we propose to analyse this relationship - that of space-memory - by tensing our bodies with the archive of the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, with the aim of examining the presences and absences that permeate both the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal and the city's public space, constantly updating colonial thinking.

We invite participants to compose Reimagined Corpographies through the production of a fanzine, encouraging reflection on the past and questioning reparative gestures that imagine possibilities for fairer, more plural and horizontal futures.

Venue
Jardins do Palácio de Cristal

Marcela Pedersen (she/her), born in Rio Claro, in the interior of São Paulo (Brazil), currently lives in Porto. An educator and researcher in Art Education, she is a member of the Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS). She is currently studying for a PhD in Art Education at FBAUP. Her research interests and practices question the possibilities of mediation and education practices allied to anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, anti-colonial and critical struggles against whiteness.

Rafael Campos (he/him) has a master's degree in architecture and is a Brazilian performer and researcher who, in his professional life, moves between artistic and academic circles. He currently lives in Porto, where he is doing a PhD in art education at FBAUP and a PhD in architecture at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). He has an FCT scholarship in Portugal, is a collaborating researcher at the Institute for Research in Art and Design (i2ADS) and is a member of the Quiasma Group for interdisciplinary research into Architecture, the Body and the City.

pings! / Thursday, June 11, from 17h30 to 19h30 | Gineceu & Estigma

0.5 Bodies and Language for a garden and a city: Dance workshop with Melissa Pérez Sousa

This workshop is divided into two moments, for two places: the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal and the urban surroundings of Galeria Municipal do Porto.

Through the temporal space of a body in movement, we'll propose new ways of representing the architecture and social language of a city.

How can dance be shown in a public space? If the city is traversed by different speeds, by car, on foot, by bicycle, how can you give a certain velocity to bodies that dance? A square, a garden or a public building have different scales and logics of occupation. In this workshop we will rehearse these variations and contaminate each place with our passage.

Melissa Pérez Sousa was born and raised in Venezuela. She studied Contemporary Dance Performance in Caracas and Social Dances of the African Diaspora (Urban Drumming, Hip Hop, House, Tap and Body Percussion) in New York. As a performer, she has worked with Sandrine Lescourant, Dana Foglia, Ladies of Hip Hop Festival, Alvin Alley School, Jorge Gonçalves, Joclécio Azevedo, Catarina Campos, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Jonas & Lander, Bouziane Bouteldja, Jep Melendez. She is the creator of En el Vacío (2017) and co-creator of BOWND (2019) and PLAYGROUND.

Starting in Matosinhos and Porto, she founded the pedagogical project YOLK - Free Styler Dance Project with Catarina Campos, focusing on improvisation through Street and Club Dances that take place in the urban public space. She is currently developing the solo project TAMBOR in artistic residency at the Paulo Cunha e Silva Campus.

Image: Renato Cruz Santos

pings! / Friday, September 13, from 17h30 to 19h30 | Gineceu & Estigma

0.6 Bodies and Language for a garden and a city: Dance workshop with Melissa Pérez Sousa

This workshop is divided into two moments, for two places: the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal and the urban surroundings of Galeria Municipal do Porto.

Through the temporal space of a body in movement, we'll propose new ways of representing the architecture and social language of a city.

Image: Renato Cruz Santos

Join the colective!

0.0 Be a ping!

If you're between the ages of 16 and 22 and want to take part in the Gallery's activities, visit the art spaces in the city, or attend workshops led by different artists and thinkers, just send an email to galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

The PINGs! collective accepts applications on a continuous basis.