Public Programmes
Studio Visits π
Studio Visits π
Aimed at discovering, revisiting and getting closer to the community of artists of Porto, GMP launches Studio Visits π. In an informal and curious way, our team visit the ateliers and creative spaces of the city.
Studio Visit π
berru
We visited the berru colective studio, currently teamed up by Bernardo Bordalo, Rui Nó and Sérgio Coutinho, in Campanhã. A multidisciplinary workspace with an improvised viewpoint and a wide landscape view over the eastern part of the city. From this place, they have developed an investigation on the spontaneous vegetation of the zone, considering the project development of the constructions are planned for the area.
From this place, they've been developing an investigation on the spontaneous vegetation of the area, facing the development of the constructions that are projected for the area. They called it the Feeling Flora project (in collaboration with Gui Flor, Diogo Coelho, Miguel Mesquita e João Ferreira), where they reflect on the reality, agency, and "private life" of non-human entities -rejecting the anthropocentric vision of thinking and acting over the world- and the urgency of, with them, tightening ties of proximity and intimacy.
The plan includes walks in the area, as is the case of next March 11, which begins at Monte da Bela, ending at Calçada de São Pedro with a musical performance. A publication about the project will also be launched, with the support of Criatório.
Studio Visit π
Jazmin Giordano
From Buenos Aires to Porto, Jazmin Giordano brings with her a diversified background - from exhibitions and art fairs to training and workshops in painting. For that reason, her work does not stop at any particular artistic language, exploring the "conflict" through the combination of mediums and elements that provoke strangeness.
Winged detergent bottles, canvases with animals that tranform into giant flowers, advertisements that seduce the faithful for religious congregations or enterprises; all with the influence of the artistic languages of the outskirts of the cities she has passed through.
She enjoys the Kitsch provocation that, together with humour, serves to maximise the minor themes and practices of the so-called " art history". In her works the social commentary, the absurd, the capitalist and feminist criticism, find a playful space for dialogue.
Soon she will have an exhibition at Pb27 Gallery where some of these works-exercises translated into painting will be on display.
Studio Visit π
Mariana Morais
Mariana Morais has been living in Porto since 2017, the year she started her Master's in Art and Design for Public Space at FBAUP and created the project Headless Women, a cartography that uses the Porto Public Art Map to question the absence of representation of the female artist or honoured woman.
Through collage exercises, word associations and imaginary narratives, Mariana walks through Porto's statuary, explaining why statues lose their heads, or are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Extending this endless investigation to collaborations such as the Associação de Amigos da Praça do Anjo (aapA) or the Presente project by Virgínia Diego, the artist and architect continues to embroider different routes, sculpt small acephalous characters and asking passers-by questions about monuments and vandalism.
If you see a creature with its head on fire in the street, stop and talk to it, maybe it's Mariana Morais.
Studio Visit π
Thomas Szott
A life-size rag doll with a hole in its chest reveals the absence of a supposed heart: "persona non grata". Small canvases stacked in the corner of a cupboard; a red portrait, twice set on fire by the paint and light projected through the window; drawing-cases and notebooks piled up.
A huge landscape interrupts the monotony of the corridor leading to the work table. It smells of incense and paint thinner. Everything seems to refer to the density of the dream. We are in the studio of the artist Thomas Szott.
Born in Brazil, Thomas Szott moved to Porto to do a master's degree at FBAUP. His practice, confessional and autobiographical in tone, moves between writing, drawing, painting and sculpture. Themes such as loneliness, lovelessness, experiences and traumas are recurrent in his work.
Studio Visit π
MΓ³nica Faria
Mónica Faria, when defining herself, does not distinguish her sculptural practice from her role as an educator. They intertwine, like the threads of a loom, which she knows well since childhood: with the teachings of her family, her mother a carpet-maker and her father a foundryman; with the place, through the schools where she developed art-education projects; and, also, with their artistic and creative process.
She says she works at the rhythm of her emotions, according to the relations she builds. She collects objects, stories, and experiences, especially the verbal knowledge transmitted from mother to daughter, as is the case of her own, passed on in the same time as the spinning, dyeing and weaving.
On March 11, she will present the exhibition " Vencer o Medo" at the Cooperativa Árvore space. Until February 28 her exhibition "Cultura Instável", can be seen at the Museu Nogueira da Silva, in Braga.
Studio Visit π
Hilda de Paulo
Hilda de Paulo is an artist, art historian, writer and independent curator, third-world transvestite and decolonial ecotransfeminist. Born in Brazil, she lives in Porto since 2008. Her path, marked by multidisciplinarity, includes sculpture, performance and expanded painting, but also theatre and essayistic writing.
Hilda works mainly from home, highlighting in her works the material and symbolic dimension of the domestic; the small format and the reuse of everyday objects, puts into question the access to resources, equipment and public places. In the intimacy of her atelier, through fabricated landscapes, monuments and invented creatures—artworks still unknown to the public that form her radical imagination—we will encounter her transvestite heart and universe.
Her work is part of the group show "Derivas e Criaturas" currently on view at GMP. Next Thursday, February 2nd, she will open the exhibition EU COMO VOCÊ, together with Tales Frey, at Maus Hábitos.
Studio Visit π
Dalila Gonçalves
In the studio of Dalila Gonçalves we recognize a workplace where, in a totally independent manner, multiple relationships between objects, materials and forms are activated.
It is from the encounter between natural, artificial, industrial and manufactured materials, crossing repetition, accumulation and experimentation that her practice is situated. The performativity of the objects and forms that emerge from this, transmit a clear will to reflect the limits of metamorphosis, in a continuous logic of work where the boundaries of the studio and the exhibition space are diluted and expanded.
Studio Visit π
Nara Rosetto
We visited the studio of Nara Rosetto, an artist from Brazil living in Porto, where she is developing her masters' project "Diário Invisível" [Invisible Diary], at Faculdade de Belas Artes do Porto.
Admittedly self-referential, her work starts from the diagnosis of an autoimmune disease whose main symptom is chronic pain, an experience from which she explores themes such as vulnerability, invisibility, and different types of pain associated with the body.
Her creative process, based on the accumulation of various objects and diaristic writing, refers to a particular temporality also present in the mediums and techniques she uses, including textiles (embroidery, crochet), photography, video, and performance.
Studio Visit π
Ivana Sehic
Ivana Sehic grew up in Croatia, graduated in architecture and performing arts in London and lives in Porto, where the design and construction of scenographies are an important part of her work.
Her daily life is spent at Atelier Caldeiras, where she rehearses on models her spatial installations using "infinite cycle" materials such as clay, plaster or fabrics.
The body, hers and of those she collaborates with, is part of her academic research, which she called "Deviated Rituals". It is in performance, theatre and music that Ivana explores the ritualistic and transformative capacity of artistic practice within themes both hard and human, such as mourning, loss or illness.
Studio Visit π
A Pele
The visit to the Pele collective took the GMP team to Azevedo, in Campanhã, where urban and rural geographies overlap and are torn apart: highways with the Torto river, farmhouse with the neighborhood, the supermarket with the allotment.
It is based on this territorial but also social complexity that the collective represented by Carina Moutinho, Fernando Almeida and Rodrigo Malvar share the last years of their work and the need to search for a different time and place. They have recovered an old wine cellar and built, from scratch, other structures that give a new use to the floors, like a stage, a shelter-archive, a shadow, proposing to establish a dialogue between the resident communities (human and more-than-human) and national and international creators.
Together, they have been establishing affectivities with different generations, awakening changes for a more critical spirit, privileging access to education and culture, and promoting a more sustainable thinking artistic creation.
Studio Visit π
Cru Encarnação
Moving through the fields of performance and writing, Cru Encarnação works on the construction of fictional and speculative imaginaries to question the fragility of the real. Based on his studies in Phenomenology and Feminist Philosophy of Science at the Freie Universität of Berlin, Cru proposes an analysis of the body's gestuality, the manipulation of objects and the sensorial perception of materials and their multiple meanings.
This research that Cru has been developing in a residency at Pedreira space, culminated in the performance "The back of Five", presented at "The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish festival".
Studio Visit π
Rebecca Moradalizadeh
Rebecca Moradalizadeh says she has multiple identities: "woman-Portuguese-Iranian-artist-performer-cook".
In the constant intersection of these various facets, besides her artistic practice, she also develops educational and curatorial projects, many of them in collaboration, as is the case of PING!, the GMP's educational project. She has also played an active role in the civil struggles for women's rights that are being heard in Iran and that are reflected in a community of emigrants in Portugal.
Through her artistic project, she maintains a relationship with her paternal family that lives in Kerman through the creation of an archive that is made of memories, tastes, albums and teachings, such as embroidery, cooking or Persian writing.
Last 25th November, in the Rampa space, Rebecca Moradalizadeh opened "Behind the Veil", an exhibition that combines these universes and puts them in dialogue with the present day, highlighting and reflecting on the tensions between East and West.
Studio Visit π
dose
Created in 2018 by a group of students from @fba.up, @dose_mag is an exhibition project in a printed and online publication format where each issue features the contribution of 12 artists.
With a biannual edition, the dose aims to create a space for art, and not about art, valuing creation as a sensitive experience, beyond theoretical reasoning. Without conceptual premises, each edition is born from the will of each artist where colour acts as a unifying element. There are now nine editions.
In recent years, the collective currently composed by Maria Miguel Von Hafe, Mariana Rebola and Margarida Oliveira has evolved to new experiences, crossing editorial work and exhibition curatorship. The launch of dose magazine nr. 09 was last 19th, at Pada studio, in Barreiro.
Studio Visit π
Gil Delindro
The Sahara desert, the white landscapes of Siberia and the rural Vietnam are some of the places that Gil Delindro has visited as part of his artistic practice, which has been focused on the questions of ecology, geology and anthropology. Materialised in sculptural and sound pieces, they condense the arbitrary effects of time, erosion and atmospheric conditions.
He presented at Espaço Mira the exhibition project "Marégrafo", one of the projects supported by the 2021 Criatório support grant. Over seven months, he captured and monitored the ebb and flow of the tides in the Cantareira Tide Gauge and Barra do Douro, resulting in works that underline the history of the sea and of the attempt to dominate and understand a territory that simultaneously provokes fear and admiration.
Studio Visit π
JosΓ© Vale
We visit the studio of José Vale, an artist of experimental and improvised music. As a guitarist, he explores extended techniques, feedbacks and processed sounds, to travel through psychedelic and noise music.
José Vale is co-founder of the DIY label CARA PODRE, creator and composer of the band Lucifer Pool Party, and plays as side-man in projects like Unsafe Space Garden e Davide Lobão.
José Vale is co-founder of the DIY label CARA PODRE, creator and composer of the band Lucifer Pool Party, and plays as side-man in projects like Unsafe Space Garden e Davide Lobão.
Studio Visit π
Aura da Fonseca
For Aura, slow movement acts as a transformative action.
Visual artist and performer, she has been exploring matters of identity and sustainability, through a careful analysis of herself and the world. From motion, to scenography and sound, to the careful choice of garments, her presentations result in deep sensory experiences. That is the case of the performance 7≈8, presented in October at mala voadora, which transported the spectator to an immersive universe, where the simplest acts unveiled the power and complexity of gesture.
Aura completed a Masters in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, in London, and has been collaborating with artists such as Alessandro Bosetti, in Serralves, or with Raimund Hoghe, in one of her last presentations at Teatro Rivoli, among others.
Studio Visit π
Carlos Pinheiro
Carlos Pinheiro started with sculpture. At FBAUP he acquired the tools to sculpt bodies and create theatre sets. Recently, he started painting, making a series centred on a fictional, evil figure who sees the world without moving from his place. This "total prejudiced individual," as he tells us, suffers diverse poetic justices in a world created and imagined by himself.
Carlos is a storyteller. He prefers to use oil, as the following day "the paint still moves." He always returns to sculpture in order to "change everything". The human-critter bodies he imagines materialize themselves on the flat surface and in layers of paper paste and wood.
He is preparing to present an exhibition in December at Clube de Desenho, in the Rua da Alegria space.
Studio Visit π
Joana MagalhΓ£es
We got to know the creative practice of the artist and performer Joana Magalhães, who has been working as a director and performer in the field of theatre and performing arts and, more recently, has been crossing her practice with the visual arts. Through collaboration with artists and thinkers, her research addresses the concepts of beginning and end in literature, orality, mythology and phantasmagoria.
One of the winning projects of Criatório 2021 can now be visited at Culturgest in Porto, in an exhibition that is an assembly of many readings, essays and references as if abandoned on stage at the end of a play. The playful force of the set allows us to take hold of everything that is there. Is it a mirage?
Studio Visit π
Fernando P Ferreira
We visited the studio of Fernando P Ferreira, an architect and researcher who has been crossing urban thinking and art, through social practices, writing and various collaborations.
Fernando has been working on a century-old textile factory in Pevidém, Guimarães, trying to understand the evolution of an industrial complex marked by modern architecture and politics and its impact on the lives of the female workers who worked there. Identifying destroyed and reconstructed spaces, common, limited or forbidden areas, he imagines the lives that passed through there looking at workrooms and work equipments.
Collaborating with weavers and artists, the architect reveals the sutures and tears that the industrial meshes present. He speaks of "unravelling" as a way of erasing, drawing, the maps of these places, which often hide the vicissitudes of hierarchy.
Studio Visit π
Pisitakun Kuantalaeng
We went to A Leste and talked to Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, a Thailand artist currently living in Porto.
His practice is placed in a close relationship between visual arts and music, refusing pre-established standards or classification systems. The critical awareness of his surroundings, intensely linked to the historical and political events of his country and, by extent, to the current global regression of democratic systems, materialises in the most diverse forms: from synthesizers to tiled murals, imaginaries of daily life intersect, allowing space for speculation, disruption and questioning.
In 2021 Pisitakun participated in the InResidence program, by Colectivos Pláka, in the Rua do Sol space.
Studio Visit π
Colectivo Bergado
At the intersection of two distinct creative realities – visual arts and music – Colectivo Bergado emerged in 2016, focusing much of their work in the areas of painting and musical performance, with different influences and variants. One of them is the musical project Terebentina which, as the original word, dilutes barriers between elements and materials. Here, they combine sound with the landscape of Porto and the work of artists from outside the city.
We visited the studio of Guilherme Oliveira, the group's vocalist, where we learned about Bergado's work and future projects, as well as the creation process of their first studio album titled "Um palmo acima do chão". Recorded at CCOP, the album includes the collaboration of New Zealand musician Michael Morley, member of The Dead C, and production by Jorge Queijo and Francisco Oliveira.
Bergado also created the online label Berga Malhas, which gathers the Collective's eclectic sound repertoire.
Studio Visit π
A Piscina
In recent decades, the urban culture of Porto has demonstrated the strength and will to activate spaces that are forgotten in the city. There have already been exhibitions in abandoned quarters or debates in old billiard halls. Recently, another unlikely place, a swimming pool. Built in the 1930s, it was emptied of its function a few years ago and, once again, filled with a new programme.
In the middle of the pandemic, four friends connected to dance, theatre, and the production of projects with the community, decide to take forward the idea of creating A Piscina. Carolina, Eduarda, Lea and Maria Inês present an schedule with contemporary dance and movement classes for actors; workshops for families, yoga and creative writing. Soon they want to create the first workspace for choreographers and performers.
The call is out: "don't take yourself too seriously, get out of your comfort zone and become aware of the physicality, the energy and the movement of your own bodies".
Studio Visit π
Odair Monteiro
It is among photographic negatives, developers and silver salts that we find much of the photographic practice of Odair Monteiro.
Born in Cape Verde, he studied Illustration and Photography in Lisbon. He moved to Porto 7 years ago and it is in Campanhã, on the slopes of Nova Sintra, that he set up his studio for production and printing. Over the years, she has been part of different projects, such as the GMURDA Collective, which has been exploring performance, sound and video, and presented the exhibition "Trabalho Nenhum", in the Rampa artspace, in 2021.
He photographs, and sometimes films, abandoned architectural structures or industrial ruins, but not only. He is interested in a kind of intermittence in everyday life, without having to look for a purpose for it, or even a poetic or political reason to justify what he creates.
Studio Visit π
Oficina Mescla
In 2019, Alexandra Rafael and Tomás Dias had the same dream, to create a printmaking workshop in Porto. This is how Mescla was born, as a result of the exchange of knowledge and experience between different generations, but with the same drive to create and explore further more.
They found the ideal space in the centre of downtown Porto. Aware of their industrial heritage, they reactivate century-old machines, as printing techniques have accompanied history for centuries. And as knowledge knows no place, here you can learn the most diverse processes: from silkscreen printing, to calcography, going through lithography, wood engraving or linocut. Whoever wants to experiment is welcome, or just whoever needs space to put their projects into practice.
Studio Visit π
Elvira Leite
Elvira Leite studied painting at FBAUP. Since the 1960s she has been fighting for change in a country that at the time was poor and illiterate, believing that school should be complemented by creative practices close to art.
In the first years that followed the revolution of 1974, she accompanied the processes that fostered better living and housing conditions, such as SAAL, implementing creative development projects in Bairro da Sé, in Porto. "Quem te ensinou? — Ninguém", is the name of the exhibition that revisits this project which is also published by Pierrot Le Fou.
In the 1990s, she integrated the first educational services of museums such as the MNSR and the Serralves Foundation. She co-authored books on art education and also playbooks for children, families, and schools.
Today, her contagious energy and will to share remain intact. There is still much to do and teach. "I never taught two classes the same and yet the subjects were the same over many years!".
Studio Visit π
Gui Flor
Gui Flor describes herself as an artist "looking for an existence with the least impact on the planet and the most impact on people", and so it was during our studio visit, where we discovered, at the rhythm of a long late afternoon conversation, her deep knowledge of smells and flavours, textures and temporalities, sounds and poetic manifestations.
Her project "flowering exercises", winner of this year's Criatório grant, intersects ecosexuality, transfemininity and relationships of affect through an exploration, at once personal and intimate as well as profoundly caring about core issues of our present, namely the politics of affection, the consolidation of gender identities and the need to share a harmonious and sustainable life with the beings we share the planet with.
Studio Visit π
JoΓ£o Pedro Trindade
The scale of João Pedro Trindades's studio is that of the city. Outside, the field of stimuli is so much larger, almost infinite, that the four walls of the studio are where the edges are filed and materials are tested and stored. Like a magnet, he is attracted to the most unnoticeable details of the streets, which only the trained eye perceives as a field of possibilities.
He studied painting at FBAUP, but soon concluded that a single medium would not be enough. He also uses pressed cardboard, plaster, aluminium, sawdust. He works in series. He collects red carpets from the street and presents them with the same dignity as a painting. He rescues discarded aluminium foil and candy wrappers and inscribes on them what the eye sees but does not notice: large areas of floor, wall, small details, or any object, all of them pressed by the force of the hammer.
João Pedro Trindade has collaborated with cultural projects such as Painel, Nartece and Sismógrafo, where he recently presented the exhibition "Under the Rug".
Studio Visit π
Teresa ArΓͺde
The practice of Teresa Arêde is developed along two lines: the tools of the arts—such as drawing, photography, engraving, or sculpture—and the power of the voice, instinctive and singular, signed by the study of classical music.
An endless number of images inhabit her workspace. She is interested in plastically rethinking the artifice of baroque operas as those by Händel or Monteverdi and also of later and earlier periods, investigating the multiple readings of history.
She tells us how the voice is a matter that molds itself into different forms, functioning as the "backbone for everything else". Although singing has accompanied humanity, it is up to the imagination to conceive what was not registered, or written, on the walls of Prehistory. And it is at the intersection of what is not known that her multiple fictions, conjectures, and alternative archaeologies emerge, explored in video, audio, or in shards of clay and plaster.
Teresa Arêde studied art at Faculdade de Belas Artes da U. do Porto, and Royal College of Art, and Vocal Studies at Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Studio Visit π
Rita Senra
As we enter Rita Senra's studio, we can smell the ink and orange peels spread on the worktable. Among the colored papers, some with stripes and folds, there are the ones tarnished by time. It is in this intermittence, that of time passing, that her practice moves, accepted as it is: necessary and without a compass, a deadline or the urgency of industry or capital.
She prefers materials that do not seem to have a place these days, be it for their apparent fragility or lack of robustness: napkins, forgotten papers in shut-down stores, useless bags, fruit peels. In due time, she gives them the strength and nature of the strongest, but no less sensible material, through coats of paint in marked rhythms, trims and sutures. It recalls the work of the seamstress, spending hours sewing, in compass, but with no watch on her wrist.
Rita studied painting at FBAUP, in Porto, and is part of Sismógrafo. She recently attended the Visual Arts course promoted by FLAD, at the Arquipélago—Centro de Artes, in Açores.
Studio Visit π
Landra
Landra, acorn, oaknut. Daughter of the oak, holm oak and cork oak. Resistant to industrialisation, globalisation and the so-called modernisation of agriculture, the landra has remained autonomous, feeding animals other than humans and not suffering from genetic impositions.
Landra is also the name that Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo Camacho gave to their part in life and art, made in the company of the many life forms that challenge and teach them to live in a harmonious, complex and balanced way with the natural world.
During our visit to the territory where they live and work, we talked about plants, microorganisms and animals, drought and hunting, and imagined the contribution of art practices and methodologies to the creation of a different way of living.
Studio Visit π
JiΓ΄n Kiim
Jiôn Kiim was born in Busan, South Korea. After attending art schools and residencies in Dresden and Stuttgart, in Germany, she settled in Porto five years ago.
Day-to-day life is spent at Clube de Desenho, a studio shared with other artists, which is also an exhibition space. Painting and drawing come together naturally in her work, using natural pigments, materialised on the scale of notepads and daily notebooks, or of the floor and walls.
The materials range from old, stained paper, bought in reams, to wooden floor panels, which become series "that challenge the antipodes of control, of discipline, of order" and become screens and vertical borders in the studio space. As spectators, we try to recognise symbols and signs, but the ambiguity that comes from these gestures restrains interpretation, giving us back the most real essence of painting.
Studio Visit π
Matias Romano Aleman
Oil paintings on paper, wood and on matchboxes, stacked objects, among them a glass body, notebooks, drawings and papers with written notes: these are some of the fragments that make up the chaotic cosmos that defines the studio of Matias Romano Aleman.
Born in Buenos Aires, he has lived in Porto since 2020. Like a gleaner, it is in the city streets and in the objects he finds that he seeks inspiration for his work, crossing the memories of others with his own, combined with the music he listens to and the books he reads. The pieces he creates, whether flat or three-dimensional, reveal an immanent and eccentric restlessness, resulting in works that are as much real as they are fantasy.
In parallel, he created the platform "Archivo de Listas Notas y Dibujos DE La Calle" (instagram: @archivodelistasnotasydibujos), where he shares some of the notes, lists, drawings and notebooks he finds, resulting in an organic archive of anonymous but mundane messages, in permanent growth.
Studio Visit π
JosΓ© Almeida Pereira
On a visit to José Almeida Pereira's (Guimarães, 1979) studio, located in an old shopping mall in the center of Porto, we are immediately confronted with an unstoppable but slow process of creation, spatially organized by infinite layers of paint.
His practice reveals an obsession with appropriating images, particularly those that reproduce the great works of Western Art History, which we easily recognize the authorship and location in the big European museums. It is from there that the artist provokes and challenges the auratic properties of the compositions, resorting to distortions, fragmentations, and anamorphosis, complemented by technological processes of image filtering, translating into a strangeness that unsettles the vision.
Contrary to the referents used, painting asserts itself as an exercise in metalanguage, where everything is left unsaid, unquestioned, unresolved.
Studio Visit π
Rita Castro Neves and Daniel Moreira
Two artists with separate paths, Rita Castro Neves and Daniel Moreira, met in 2015 to form a common path that runs through multiple practices such as photography, drawing, video or performance. They trace footpaths in the territory, follow the animals' rattles, listen to the shepherds' stories, spend the night in stables, record and collect elements of the landscape: "from so much watching, listening and drawing we are like the transforming of humans into animals and vegetation".
In 2022 they created the NEBLINA space, in Porto, a workshop space that is also for occasional exhibitions. A little before, in 2020, they recovered the Macieira School, in the mountains of São Pedro do Sul, turning it into a home-atelier space, where they receive artists for a residency project focused on issues of territory, nature and the rural, on environmental and ecological preservation.
Studio Visit π
Saber Fazer
Saber Fazer was founded in 2011 by Alice Bernardo, as a workshop and creative place that stimulates the senses as soon as you enter: the smell of linen flowers, the texture of sheared wool, or the colours of jars with dyeing plants.
Appealing to the dissemination of knowledge about every raw material or tool, everything integrates a larger repository that goes from assessment to archive, from harvest to production. From three main crafts—Wool, Silk and Linen—aesthetic and practical issues of economic, environmental and social sustainability are addressed, in a sharing platform between apprentices, artisans and professionals in the areas of natural dyeing, weaving, felting, basketry and tapestry.
Saber Fazer is located in Rua da Aliança 112-114, Porto and is open to all who wish to attend courses and buy raw materials or tools.
Studio Visit π
Pedra no Rim
We went to Bonfim to visit Pedra no Rim, a ceramics atelier created by Fabrizio Matos and Israel Pimenta.
Through a political, social and emotional mapping of the neighbourhood, this duo of artists collects abandoned and unusual objects from the streets, mapping each place and recording every detail.
From shoes, doilies and lost wigs, to rats, cats and pigeons attacked by seagulls, it is up to the clay to eternalize them, reproducing an atlas of urban memories and mythologies, local experiences and vices.
The name "Pedra No Rim" (Kidney Stone) gives a foretaste of the mixture between humour and the bizarre, in a process of self-taught creation, where political strategy emerges in the production and sale of each piece. It is the case of the series "Sapo Anti-Racista" (Anti-racist frog), manufactured in the same quantity as the total number of extreme-right voters in the parish of Bonfim, reverting part of its revenue to the organisation SOS Racismo.
Studio Visits π
Vera Mota
In addition to a degree in Fine Arts from FBAUP, contemporary dance has accompanied Vera Mota's path, informing and expanding her artistic practice. The "performative awareness of making" underlines the intimate relationship she explores with the materials, in an organized game of rhythms, concepts and scales, where the body deliberates and sometimes materializes.
The artist conceives the exhibition space and the relationship between artworks as a dedicated choreography, where each volume integrates a synthesis of movements, often embodied in drawing.
Studio Visits π
TΓ’nia Dinis
We went to the studio/home of Tânia Dinis, as her artistic practice is so intimately linked to the domestic scale, crossing photographic and filmic memories from her family, in a diaristic universe that reveals itself.
Her training in Theatre Studies at ESMAE and a Masters in Contemporary Art Practices FBAUP, led her work to the possibilities of cinema, playing with the movement of film, the static of photography and projection devices. The analogue material, in dialogue with the past, assists the perspectives of memory and fiction, creating narratives where time assumes a preponderant role.
In the artist's words — "I'm interested in what you're not seeing, what can be constructed and fictionalised from the image" — and it is through the layers, the overlapped planes and the optical lenses that history is written, resignified and transformed.
Studio Visits π
Ruben Santiago
This week we visited the studio of artist Ruben Santiago. Originally from Lugo, Galicia, and living in Porto, Ruben Santiago is interested in the relationship between alchemy and symbolism.
During our visit, he told us about how he has been materializing the cyclical transmutation of life, creating works in which the symbolic and conceptual traditions intersect in an anthropogenic world.
In this image, we see one of the 60 Baobab seeds that he used in the work "Not what is cracked up to be", in which he pays homage to the pictorial traditions of the Australian aborigine communities with which he lived.
Studio visits π
Cristina Mateus
Cristina Mateus was, for a long time, a woman artist in a group of mostly male artists. It is at this period that she approaches multimedia, attracted by the technological demands that the multidisciplinarity of this artistic medium imposed in the 1990's. The cinema of Kiarostami, Agnés Varda and Pedro Costa led her to understand that the work is done outside the studio, often on the road, driving, or during a walk.
The routine of research was fundamental to understand "that the night is constructive and the day is one of accumulation". And it is in this cycle that her works are photographs of the equipment she uses to collect images, like cameras, and of the writing for her doctorate, like the computer screen.
—"The artistic work is not in the places where you expect it to be", she tells us.
Besides being an artist, Cristina Mateus is also a professor at FBAUP. There, she focuses on the processes of creation of meanings and senses, working on the creation of a "lighter" art school, adapted to issues such as neurodiversity and inclusion.
Studio visits π
LetΓcia Maia
What is the relationship between body, power and performance? This question has become central to the practice of Letícia Maia, an artist who has been living in Portugal since 2019 and who articulates her training in "Arts of the Body", in São Paulo, with the master's project in Visual Arts, by FBAUP, in Porto.
It is through performance, but also photography, video and objects, that the artist explores "the body as a problem". She crosses exercises and choreographies, unfolding theoretical concepts such as "docile-bodies", to question the social construction of the body.
Letícia's actions trigger poetics that challenge us to rethink the world and its norms. Maybe even "learn to disobey" (“aprender a desobedecer”).
Studio visits π
Tales Frey
We went to Tales Freys's atelier at the Túnel space, an old print factory in Campanhã, converted into a shared artists studio.
Living in Porto since 2008, Frey uses performance as the main medium for visual and discursive expression, crossing video, sculpture or writing. Some of his most recent works, such as the collaborative performance "Veste Única", explore aesthetic syntheses on the notion of living in community, reflecting on the possibilities of building a common body. He has been exploring new conceptual and aesthetic challenges, including in his artistic production a documental, graphic and signifiable dimension.
He is represented by Galeria Verve, in São Paulo and Shame, in Brussels, and until May 7th, we can visit his exhibition "Indexxx" at Galeria Ocupa, in Porto.
Studio Visits π
Paralaxe
From the study of the planets, to seismology or meteorology, the research project PARALAXE explores places foreign to artistic practice, encouraging artists to occupy and rethink these spaces.
We went to meet Carolina Grilo Santos, Diana Geiroto and Luisa Abreu, who created the Paralaxe in 2019, already counting on a second edition. The first, occupied the Instituto Geofísico da Universidade do Porto, with the second cycle taking place at the Observatório Astronómico Prof. Manuel de Barros, in Gaia.
Between the Meridian Circle and the Great Telescope, the artists turned the territory and the scientific equipment into a crossed laboratory that will open its doors next May 7th, at 5pm, with an exhibition of the works developed in residence by Beatriz Sarmento, Bruno Silva, Carlos Mensil, Ece Canli, H0b0, Joana Ribeiro and Juliana Campos.
Studio Visits π
Gata da Mata
We went to meet Gata da Mata, a project for knowledge and sharing about food and territories, which stems from Aija Repsa and ElΔ«na ŠtoΔΌde's fascination with nature and cooking.
Over several years, the two chefs "by training and heart" have been accumulating knowledge and sharing experiences about wild plants, mushrooms and bacteria.
Having come from Latvia about 10 years ago, it was on the Northern beaches of Portugal that they started a new research and collection of Atlantic seaweed. Gata da Mata organises low tide walks, fermentation workshops and regular publications on plant species, and have been networking with the community through DIY projects, rooted in the desire to change lifestyle behaviours and eating habits, fostering the link between community and biodiversity.
Studio Visits π
Thais de Menezes
Colour, words of command and Samba — this is the studio in Porto of artist Thais de Menezes.
Her practice grows in parallel with the historical and visual research she is developing at the Master in Art History at FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa, focused on the different dynamics of the "construction of the other". Based on the pieces "Cabeça de preto", by Soares dos Reis, Thais questions the hegemonic narratives of art history in which Black people and bodies are captured as iconographic categories.
Thais' critical and urgent approach crosses intersectional, feminist, and decolonial readings, proposing new configurations and experiences. This is the case of her paintings "ORÍ de Preto" (Black ORÍ) —"ORÍ" being a Yoruba prefix meaning head—with which she opposes and challenges Black representations, in contrast to the whiteness imposed throughout history.
Studio visits π
Clarice Cunha
Disposable monuments, material unfoldings and paradoxical dialogues, are some of the imaginaries explored by the artist Clarice Cunha. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she lives in Porto since 2019, where she articulates, through a hybrid language, her education in Architecture and Urbanism and the Master in Fine Arts.
From observations on urban territory, landscape formation and the materiality of cities, Clarice reflects on the human presence and how its intense activity has profoundly altered and explored urban and natural environments.
From a research process marked by intensive collection and cataloging, results sculptures, installations and scenographies, which take us to a metalinguistic game about the ruin of the world, articulated in a playful and simultaneously critical way.
In 2021, she participated in the Anuário project with the piece "Sondagem", being her last project “Fábulas sobre a fauna urbana: sala de estar para gatos errantes", an intervention for the Entre Montra platform, in the Parnaso building, Porto.
Studio visits π
Mariana Vilanova
How can technology become an extension of the body and memory? — This is perhaps one of the major questions approched by Mariana Vilanova in her work.
In a digital journey through the processes of simulation and reconstruction of images, the artist tells us about the manipulations of human and artificial memory in works like "Evoking a Simulated Past", but also about the premises of Russian Cosmism, with which she worked for her last exhibition "Before and After Us" at Rampa space.
Living in Porto, Mariana Vilanova has been exploring a permanent dialogue between space and time, reflecting on the impact of the digital in the apprehension of information and in a production of images that merge the representation of the visible with the poetics of scale.
Studio visits π
Joana da Conceição
Psychedelic camellias, feminist echoes of Classical Antiquity, Yoda's manicured hands, delirious geometry — these are some of the fragments of the multifaceted work of artist Joana da Conceição.
Born in Porto and currently residing in Lisbon, after a period of residence in New York, the artist has a syncretic practice, being also the founder, along with André Abel, of Tropa Macaca, one of the most active musical duos in the country.
During our visit to his studio, in an old and picturesque cultural association in Lisbon, we talked about his love for prehistoric forms and imagery, his relationship between images and sounds, and his most recent exhibition, at Quérela, where she created an intimate and scenic environment with paintings and sounds, which we also visited.
Studio visits π
Alisa Heil
We visited "Tiresias Und Der Kleine Tod", Alisa Heil's exhibition/installation at Espaço Mira. Based on the Greek mythology of Tiresias, a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, who was for seven years turned into a woman, Heil created an immersive and sensorial environment, where material elements and lighting, sound and olfactory compositions surround us, transforming our perceptual experience. The visit was made together with curator Fernanda Brenner, artistic director of Pivô Arte e Pesquisa in São Paulo.
Born in Germany, Alisa Heil lives in Porto, occasionally working under the pseudonym Abraham Winterstein, a combination of the maiden names of her two grandmothers. Heil focuses on the feminine representation of mythology and popular culture, reflecting it in the present through the sensoriality of materials. She has programmed, since 2017, the independent art space Kunsthalle Freeport, at Stop Shopping Centre, in Porto.
Studio visits π
Samuel Wenceslau
"A stain is also beauty", teach us Samuel Wenceslau. Artist originally from Nova Lima (Brazil) and currently living in Porto, Samuel welcomed us in his studio-garden-home that houses plants and images of plants, archives and scenography, memory and discovery, affections and research.
During our Study visit, we talked about his relationship with botany and discovered the affective-formal nomenclatures he has been creating through graphic representations of plants and mosses. In his project "Studiolo Gráfico / Inventário Gráfico de Formas Naturais", Samuel brings together elements from the landscape of Minas Gerais and Northern Portugal.
Besides being a visual artist, Samuel is also the "Queen of Scrap", collecting abandoned objects in the streets, and is part of the Kebraku collective.
Studio visits π
Paula Pinto
We visited the studio of the curator Paula Parente Pinto, co-curator of the exhibition "Que Horas são Que Horas / Uma Galeria de Histórias" which took place at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2021. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on historical research and the recovery and activation of archives.
During our visit, Paula Parente Pinto showed us the work she is developing around the performance collection of art critic Egídio Álvaro. The various materials that make up the collection, originally archived in Paris, were brought to Porto by the curator, and are now being researched, restored and catalogued. They will soon be shared through a programme of activities at the RAMPA space, a project developed thanks to a Criatório 2021 support grant.
Studio Visit π
Orlando Vieira Francisco
Today we visited Orlando Vieira Francisco, born in Brazil, artist in residence at the Ateliers Municipais do Porto.
Orlando focuses on reseach as artistic practice, exploring, exploring themes such as landscape, environmental crime or the extractive industry and archives, from a critical, activist and transnational perspective.
He has recently been in residency in Belgium, with the project "It's already night / no light above the horizon" at Samenschool, Antwerp, with the Shuttle support; and in Brazil, where he initiated the investigation "O cerne da questão", by the LARS project.
Studio visits π
Svenja Tiger
We headed to Bonfin to visit the studio of Svenja Tiger, who took part in the last edition of the Anuário project.
Trained in costume design and fine arts, Svenja Tiger conceives of textiles as a form of painting in which she celebrates the multiplicity of bodies, shaping their possible mutations.
Influenced by fables and folk tales, mythologies and fictions, the artist crosses the real and folklore, the human, animal and natural in artworks in which the body is both vehicle, adornment and movement.
Studio visit π
Pedro Moreira
We visited Sarau Studio where Pedro Moreira works, whose artistic practice explores questions of identity. Combining theology, mythology and esotericism, Pedro Moreira creates imaginary forms and beings that organically emerge from their videos, installations, performances and ceramic sculptures.
www.pedmoreira.com
www.pedmoreira.com
Studio visits π
Dayana Lucas
Dayana Lucas, in residence at Ateliers Municipais, was the first artist we visited in an encounter that led us to talk about her current work, which crosses drawing, sculpture, performance and graphic design. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Dayana Lucas has lived in Porto for several years, where she recently launched Orinoco, an editorial project dedicated to the publication of artist's books, each with its own identity and format.
Artist Uriel Orlow, who has been developing the workshop "Assembly of Plants" with ping!, also joined the visit.
www.dayanalucas.com
www.urielorlow.net