Colectivos Pláka
The GMP’s Public Programmes are associated to the Colectivos Pláka courses – reflection and discussion groups on themes relevant to contemporary art and artistic practice. The project’s main goal is to provide discussion opportunities, in Porto’s cultural context, by encouraging Portuguese and international artists and researchers to share knowledge in the disciplinary fields in which they operate.

10.05
ALLYSHIP – Compulsive Desires: Public Session #3
The first course of this year's Colectivos Pláka program – Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation – integrates a series of public sessions with free admission at Hotelier (R. de Anselmo Braancamp 324), which will also be streamed online, through the Galeria Municipal do Porto’s Facebook and HERE.
Tuesday, 10.5
ALLYSHIP
6 PM
Lithium Dreams, by Godofredo Pereira
7 PM
Nature but Not Only, by Marisol de la Cadena
Discussion with Marina Otero Verzier, Marisol de La Cadena and Godofredo Pereira
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.
Tuesday, 10.5
ALLYSHIP
6 PM
Lithium Dreams, by Godofredo Pereira
7 PM
Nature but Not Only, by Marisol de la Cadena
Discussion with Marina Otero Verzier, Marisol de La Cadena and Godofredo Pereira
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.

08.05
MANIC BEHAVIOURS – Compulsive Desires: Public Session #2
The first course of this year's Colectivos Pláka program – Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation – integrates a series of public sessions with free admission at Hotelier (R. de Anselmo Braancamp 324), which will also be streamed online, through the Galeria Municipal do Porto’s Facebook and HERE.
Sunday, 8.05
MANIC BEHAVIOURS
5:30 PM
Bathing and Mining Grounds, by Anastasia Kubrak
The Right to Madness, by Susana Caló
Discussion with Susana Caló, Anastasia Kubrak and Marina Otero Verzier
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.
Sunday, 8.05
MANIC BEHAVIOURS
5:30 PM
Bathing and Mining Grounds, by Anastasia Kubrak
The Right to Madness, by Susana Caló
Discussion with Susana Caló, Anastasia Kubrak and Marina Otero Verzier
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.

07.05
ENERGY DREAMS – Compulsive Desires: Public Session #1
The first course of this year's Colectivos Pláka program – Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation – integrates a series of public sessions with free admission at Hotelier (R. de Anselmo Braancamp 324), which will also be streamed online, through the Galeria Municipal do Porto’s Facebook and HERE.
Saturday, 7.05
ENERGY DREAMS
5:30 PM
Epistemologies of Energy, by Michael Marder
7 PM
States of Exhaustion, by Marina Otero Verzier
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.
Saturday, 7.05
ENERGY DREAMS
5:30 PM
Epistemologies of Energy, by Michael Marder
7 PM
States of Exhaustion, by Marina Otero Verzier
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.

May 7 to 11, 2022
Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation
Proposing an alternative understanding of the notions of energy, progress and full life, architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier proposes the course "Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation", focusing on lithium and its multiple role as a mood stabilizer and fuel in the so-called transition to a green energy. Lasting five days, participants will have the opportunity to learn about the ongoing plans to start lithium extraction in Northern Portugal and its implications on the degradation of entire ecosystems, through visits to mines and public thermal baths of therapeutic mineralized waters. Throughout this period, they will come into contact with several activists and representatives of national and international movements contesting mining and defending places — including the "Movimento Não às Minas" from Montalegre, "Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso" and "SOS Serra d'Arga" —, who will relate their struggles and experiences in legal and environmental disputes and their forms of action.
Together with local and foreign guests, with work in different disciplines, the group will engage in collaborative and open practices.

December 5 – 8, 2019
Love and Garbage
Contemporary architecture, among many other things, is a prolonged and precise logistical exercise in value re-arrangement to maximise profit. The processes that produce our built environment are typically systematised, formal and strictly hierarchical, structures well-suited to social division. Working cooperatively offers an alternative, where there is a real possibility for mutual solidarity and engagement with people’s knowledge and experience. But how to work cooperatively on the city, when the structures which generate and govern it are based on an almost diametrically opposed logic?
Assemble and a small set of their friends, collaborators and accomplices invite the participantsto join them for four days of working together. Basing each day on a set of short readings and sustained bodily and material processes, working together will be used as a space for opening up discussion on the shared ideas, preoccupations and concerns that have been coursing through the undercurrents of Assemble’s working practice over the last ten years.
Assemble and a small set of their friends, collaborators and accomplices invite the participantsto join them for four days of working together. Basing each day on a set of short readings and sustained bodily and material processes, working together will be used as a space for opening up discussion on the shared ideas, preoccupations and concerns that have been coursing through the undercurrents of Assemble’s working practice over the last ten years.

September 28 – October 4, 2019
Post-Nostalgic Knowings
Post-Nostalgic Knowings is a course on culture and critical thinking which aims to look at different places in Europe which contain collective stories in disappearance, scanning the potency of recent curatorial and artistic research and intervention. The course presents a variety of “post-nostalgic” approaches by authors addressing places in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Spain, to understand how contemporary knowings allow for reading, intervening and may contribute to re-signify those places, whether in its relation to past memories and, most specially, as redefining new contemporary narratives. Trying to overcome the strictly preservationist and conservative approaches, the course will focus on a specific location in Porto, the Freixo hillside, characterized by the simultaneity of industrial history and the current pressure of real estate interests on the buildings and the land. The program includes conferences, debate sessions, along derives, workshops and other spatial strategies to understand and dialogue with the complexity at stake.

July 10 – 13, 2019
The Time(s) of Contemporaneity 2: Decolonizing Culture
The Time(s) of Contemporaneity 2: Decolonizing Culture brings together artists and intellectuals to discuss the relationship between art, race, institutions and the legacy of colonialism. It addresses decolonization in the broadest sense of the term: as an acknowledgment of colonial legacies in the present, as an ongoing system of oppression, and as a practice of affirming different forms of repressed knowledge. The invited speakers will explore decolonial methodologies in the museum and gallery, ways to critically interact with the colonial past, and how third world feminisms have used revolutionary socialism.