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

Exodus 2022

Exodus reveals the local artistic fabric of Porto through guided visits to galleries, exhibition spaces and artists' studios.

Aimed at secondary school and higher education classes, it includes a contextualization session at school and a guided tour by artists, art critics, gallery owners or curators.

ping! / schools / June 7

Walk with Lola Rodrigues

The Exodus route guided by Lola Rodrigues (SoundPreta) had the intention of visiting multicultural and plural spaces of resistance that count with the participation of multidisciplinary artists and where people from different backgrounds gather, from music to graffiti.

Most of the spaces and ateliers selected to take parte in this Exodus are run by immigrants, and the common thread between them is the space for speech, self-management, and collective construction.

Lola Rodrigues was born in Brazil in Curitiba, she studies and works in Porto. Currently she dedicates her time to the curatorship master degree at Universidade de Belas Artes do Porto and to works related to curatorship and music, having also a musical project called SoundPreta. As a curator, Lola has an eye and interest for the visual arts of African Diaspora artists and their representativeness, as a DJ, Lola incorporates the role of storyteller and for each set she prioritizes music from women, black artists and the LGBTQ+ community. She is a political activist and belongs to UNA - União NEGRA das Artes an initiative, which emerges in the scope of the anti-racist fight and the affirmation of negritude in Portugal.

Aimed at the school public.

Each workshop is intended for a single class.

ping! / schools

Walk with Pablo Berástegui

Aiming to show the northern side of Bonfim to the pings!, the Exodus route showed a neighbourhood that has become a place of residence and work for a growing number of artists. This urban flow, which crosses streets such as Alegria, Anselmo de Braamcamp or Santos Pousada, is accompanied by the opening of new independent cultural projects and spaces. The visit showed a group of creators and their projects, which materialise in different scales and structures, complementing and contributing to the neighbourhood.

Cultural producer, Pablo Berástegui is director of the documentary photography project Salut au monde!, based in Porto. He was director of the International Photography and Visual Arts Festival PhotoEspaña. He was also General Director of San Sebastián 2016 European Capital of Culture, Director of La noche en blanco de Madrid and responsible for the cultural spaces Matadero Madrid and Centro Conde Duque (2013). He currently teaches in cultural management and curatorial courses in different faculties in Spain.

Aimed at the school public.

Each workshop is intended for a single class.