Galeria Municipal do Porto

The trees, the roots, the flowers, the shells, the statues, the fountains, the walks, the silenced ones, the grass, the weeds, the peacock, the garden, the nature, the experience, the change, the justice, the renovation. The CLP's propose an animated reading of words, images, music, sounds, and other additives, which take root in the Acoustic Shell, but take us along the garden through three narratives, three different routes, which end up meeting and crossing paths. The common link is to bring down the statue-muses without a voice, stirring the bottom of the lake, and revealing the stories of women creators, literates, botanists, artists, singers. In the end, the dance is at the bottom of the sea around the shell.

The group Círculo das Leitoras Peripatéticas is comprised by Sofia Gonçalves, Susana Gaudêncio and Susana Pomba. In 2014, the artists attended a residency at the Moinho da Fonte Santa, in an isolated geographical area in the municipality of Alandroal, Alentejo, where they worked with materials from the Biberstein ‑ Gusmão Library to write a script that was read during a walk around the Moinho (water mill). This residency, entitled Elogio ao tempo lento, resulted in the first edition of the collective, composed of three ‘librettos’ presented as access routes to the library and its surrounding landscape.

Yayo Herrero is a Spanish anthropologist, engineer, professor and activist known for her expertise in ecofeminism and ecosocialism at European level. She was the state coordinator of Ecologists in Action and has extensive experience in numerous social initiatives on human rights and social ecology. She is currently a professor at the National University of Distance Education and the general director of FUHEM.


Marta Lança is a Phd student on Artistic Studies at FCSH - Universidade Nova de Lisboa where she holds a postgraduate degree in Portuguese Literature. She has been working as a journalist, translator, editor and producer. In 2010, she created the BUALA portal. Recently she organised the meetings Sou esparça and massive liquidity: gestures of freedom (MAAT, Portugal, 2020) and Terra Batida: a network of art and science on socio-environmental conflicts (Festival Alkantara, Portugal, 2020), with Rita Natálio.

The artist Uriel Orlow will talk about some of his recent art projects which look to the botanical world as a stage for politics and history: trees as witnesses, the migration of flowers, botanical nationalism, gardens as tools of resistance, and medicinal plants testifying to neo-colonialism – these are some of the themes that Uriel Orlow has been engaging within his research-based art practice. The artist takes specific places and micro-histories as starting points for conversations about human plant entanglements and creates artworks in which plants are both narrators and protagonists. 

With a degree in Fine Arts and a Master in Contemporary Artistic Practices from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, Carla Filipe started exhibiting in the early 2000s. She is a co-founder of the Salão Olímpico and Apêndice projects. In 2009, she received a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Through an attentive look and a deep involvement with her surroundings, Carla Filipe seeks the basic elements that give meaning to the life of a specific community, building her work from the permeable relationship between art objects, popular culture and activism. Recently, she joined The 32nd Bienal – Live Uncertainty (São Paulo, Brazil, 2016), co-curated O ontem morreu hoje, o hoje morre amanhã (Galeria Municipal do Porto, Portugal, 2018) and held the solo exhibition Amanhã não há arte (MAAT, Portugal, 2019).

This workshop is the result of a research residency that the artist carried out in the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal, to give rise to an interpretation of the political, healing and historical implications of the relationship between humans and plants. It will consist of two connected moments.

The session also counted with the participation of Fernanda Botelho and the Landra project, composed by Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo B. Camacho.

The practice of the multidisciplinary researcher and artist Uriel Orlow integrates film, photography, drawing and sound and has focused especially on themes such as the residues of colonialism, the spatial manifestations of memory, and the botanical world as a political stage. His work has been exhibited in several internationally recognized institutions, such as Tate Modern (United Kingdom), Palais de Tokyo (France), Kunsthaus Zürich and Center d’Art Contemporain Genève (Switzerland). He has published three monographs — Conversing with Leaves (2020), Soil Affinities (2019) and Theatrum Botanicum (2018) — and currently teaches at the University of Westminster, the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom) and the Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland).

ping! — Programa de Incursão à Galeria
Gineceu & Estigma / Especulações Botânicas

Von Calhau! is the name that conceals all musical and visual projects of Portuguese duo Marta  ngela and João Alves, worked out together since 2006. Their recent public presentations include performances, concerts, movie projections, exhibitions, radio programs and workshops at different venues such as Atelier MTK (France), ZDB Gallery and Museu de Serralves (Portugal) and more recently Residency Unlimited (USA).