Galeria Municipal do Porto

The concept of ‘New babylonians’ was developed by Guy Debord, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Har Oudejans and Pinot‑Gallizio on the basis of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ situationist project, New Babylon, and is related to some of the fundamental ideas that underpinned this movement, such as psychogeography, wandering and unitary urbanism. Inspired by these concepts, the artist and curator, Pedro G. Romero, proposes an exercise to the Galeria Municipal do Porto that aims to question our perception of different nomadic groups, gypsy ethnicity, flamencos, political exiles and libertarians.

The exhibition offers an analysis of the sensitive field of these different approaches to life with a special focus on their displacement across the physical and political borders of Spain and Portugal, including several resonances of their relationship with the Atlantic territories of America and Africa. The city of Porto acts as the starting geography for an enquiry into the paths, flows and wanderings of these ‘new Babylonians’, from the Portuguese context and its trans-border zones.

PANDEMIC – I Don’t Know Karate But I Know Ka-razor takes us to a ground zero state to confront issues such as the fragility and finitude of bodies, the disease-sanity binomial and the struggles rooted in the world and in nature. This exhibition, which results from an invitation made by the Galeria Municipal do Porto to the artist in 2019, to question viral concepts that permeate his work, acquires an evident relevance in the context of today’s current global pandemic crisis.

The exhibition project reflects the poetic and apocalyptic complexity imprinted in Filipe Marques’ language, through which the spectators are led to a potential realization of the impotence of the human condition, our impossibility of controlling invisible contaminations and balancing forces and resistances.

Based on concepts from Modern Philosophy and texts from the Classical Antiquity, we are challenged to understand the constant contradictions of humanity. Through stimuli, signs and metaphors about failure and self-destruction, which the artist in his frailty does not want to escape, arises an invitation to participate in a speculative exercise unfolding in a contemporary reflection that becomes urgent, collective and political.