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

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.

July 20, 21, 22 and 23

Workshop INTO THE WILD – A guide for bodies and the city they create, with María Auxiliadora Gálvez

The flux of data traversing our bodies is bigger than our awareness can process. Words are not the main way of communication once we are in the wild. Our bodies instead learn to react to the environment by becoming more aware of an ecology of the sensual paying attention to what is in contact with our skin.

Our systems of non-conscious cognition establish a continuous flow of exchanges and reactions with the environment and with our fellow cognizers like animals and plants. Somatic markers and processes can reveal an alternative body awareness and its associated body images able to change our perception but also the meaning we give to our experiences. The result is a reformulation of borders and of the definition of bodies and environments. Wilderness emerges in this workshop from a different perspective over our urban bodies, and these bodies build another city.

The workshop will act in three stages that will be developed in the Gardens of the Cristal Palace and their surroundings where the Galeria is located: Nocturnal Garden, Animal Body and (E)Merging Bodies.

In the context of this project, Maria Auxiliadora Gálvez will also present an artist talk with a date to be announced shortly.

This workshop is free of charge and is aimed at students or professionals whose practice is concerned with the territory of intersection between the body and art, space, architecture or politics, but also more broadly with socio-cultural or ecological environments.

OPEN CALL

To participate, a statement of interest on the above-mentioned topics should be submitted, in one of the following formats:

- Text (max. 300 words);

- An image (max. 5 mb);

- A video (max. 20 sec);

- A drawing (max. 5 mb).

Entries should be sent to the email galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt and the deadline for submission is July 2nd.

The workshop will be held in Spanish and English.

Participation implies attendance at all workshop sessions.

- 20, Thu. from 5pm to 7pm

- 21, Fri. from 5pm to 12am (midnight)

- 22, Sat. from 10am to 6pm

- 23, Sun. from 10am to 6pm

María Auxiliadora Gálvez is PhD in Architecture, Landscaper, Teacher of the Feldenkrais method and Professor at the USP-CEU in Madrid. Since 2016, she directs the “Platform of Somatics for Architecture and Landscape” (PSAAP) and its associated laboratory (LSAAP). She has been distinguished in national and international urban and architectural contests, highlighting the VI, VII and IX editions of EUROPAN. Her work has been published and exhibited worldwide featuring her presence in the 8th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. As a researcher she has been co-director of “We Are All able Bodies. From Sensory Deprivation to Sensory Augmentation” (2018) and she is author of the books: “Espacio Somático. Cuerpos Múltiples” (2019) and “Descampados. Caminar los paisajes revolucionarios en la ciudad somática” (2022).

Nowadays she works in landscape, art and architecture from an embodied point of view and explores the possibilities of “Somatic Architecture”. She is member of the “International Ambiances Network” (France); is part of the research directory of the “Centre for Sensory Studies” (Canada) and participates in the international Blue Sky Research for the Arts project “Navigating Dizziness Together” based in Vienna.