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.
The Colectivos Pláka are part of the Pláka Platform.
The Colectivos Pláka are part of the Pláka Platform.
October 15, from 5 to 9pm
Public Session: The Climate, The Worry, The Dance, by Mårten Spångberg with Hana Lee Erdman
Between people and matter, breath and wind, feelings and remembrance, The Climate, The Worry, The Dance, guided by choreographer Mårten Spångberg, reimagines the human in a more- and no-more-than-human world. It’s a group that falls apart and a gathering holding it together, dancing under images, living up to energies shared for no particular reason. The implicated are caught together in entangled forms of life, building on bodily intersections between fungal horizons, kinship, interspecies communication, a failed collective, and an empty building devoted to education. In connecting multiple layers of being mystical, fantasmical, ordinary, caring, wealthy and indifferent, existences emerge becoming ever more enmeshed in questions concerning what it is to be human.
After spending eight days together, the group surrender their forms of belonging, letting their landscapes resonate with worlding, unworlding and disconnecting in order to imagine, without procedures, answers to which there are no relevant questions. This situation, occasion, dance show, or perhaps collective mourning lasts for approximately three and a half hours and is the result of a collective working process concerned with relations between climate anxiety, dance, the so-called affect, and the possibility to imagine different forms of ecological mentalities.
October 13, from 7 to 9pm
Public Session: Companion, Kinship, Alongside, by Hana Lee Erdman
What is a relation? Are they symmetrical or necessarily unbalanced? Can relations be fruitful even though communication seems impossible? Or can we learn from others - animals, things, spirits - through other means - intimacy, touch, entanglement, time or letting go.
The American dancer and choreographer Hana Erdman has through her artistic practices journeyed into interspecies relations, forms of companionship and kinship and will in this presentation guide us into worlds that are hiding in plain sight, that can’t be seen but sensed, experienced but not named.
29.09 - The Climate, The Worry, The Dance
Public Session: Fantasmical Anatomies, by Anne Juren
Where does dance go, persevere, remain or keep going? Does it need bodies or can it also travel into imaginary places, take hold of fantasy and allow us to discover unknown dynamics of ourselves and the world? Anne Juren’s practice is grounded in dance but enters the spectator's mind and being through sound, voice and atmosphere. Through seance-like sessions between meditation, hypnosis and psychedelic augmentation the spectators are guided onto journeys to destinations beyond knowledge, feeling and established forms of subjectivity.
This presentation gives background to Juren’s practice and invites us to be part of a journey into the unknown.
Colectivos Pláka
The climate, the worry, the dance
Considering that the Western forms of knowledge, reason and discourse have largely brought humanity to its current predicament the course wishes to offer non-standard paths towards forms of knowledge that dissolve conventional binaries such as nature–culture, human–non-human, mind and body, animated–inert, experience and reason.
How these ecologies, these forms of relations and processes, will crystalize is not something we can know, but instead we can create opportunities that are gathered through sensation, affect, intimacy, care, and empathy. The course focuses on “engaging with” rather than “learning about”, and our instrument and place of care is the body, its movements and relations. We will embark on journeys to undo worlds and through so-called prefigurative practices, we will initiate processes of world-making, shifting the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; and the connection between bodies and the Earth.
The course is part of the Pláka Collectives and will consist of eight occasions during which we will practice together possibilities for alternative ecologies. It takes the form of a guided research process emphasizing relations and doing, where the spirit, mind and body are regarded as foundational in the struggle against the pressing climate crisis.
How these ecologies, these forms of relations and processes, will crystalize is not something we can know, but instead we can create opportunities that are gathered through sensation, affect, intimacy, care, and empathy. The course focuses on “engaging with” rather than “learning about”, and our instrument and place of care is the body, its movements and relations. We will embark on journeys to undo worlds and through so-called prefigurative practices, we will initiate processes of world-making, shifting the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; and the connection between bodies and the Earth.
The course is part of the Pláka Collectives and will consist of eight occasions during which we will practice together possibilities for alternative ecologies. It takes the form of a guided research process emphasizing relations and doing, where the spirit, mind and body are regarded as foundational in the struggle against the pressing climate crisis.
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).
ALLYSHIP
6 PM
Lithium Dreams, by Godofredo Pereira
(video available)
7 PM
Nature but Not Only, by Marisol de la Cadena
(video available)
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.
ALLYSHIP
6 PM
Lithium Dreams, by Godofredo Pereira
(video available)
7 PM
Nature but Not Only, by Marisol de la Cadena
(video available)
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).
Sunday, 8.05
MANIC BEHAVIOURS
5:30 PM
Bathing and Mining Grounds, by Anastasia Kubrak
(video available)
The Right to Madness, by Susana Caló
(video available)
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
(video available)
The Right to Madness, by Susana Caló
(video available)
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).
Saturday, 7.05
ENERGY DREAMS
5:30 PM
Epistemologies of Energy, by Michael Marder
(video availabe)
7 PM
States of Exhaustion, by Marina Otero Verzier
(video availabe)
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
(video availabe)
7 PM
States of Exhaustion, by Marina Otero Verzier
(video availabe)
Public sessions with free entrance, subject to room capacity. More information at plaka.porto.pt.
06.05
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.