Name: Álvaro Siza Discipline: As little as possible This confessional note - once written by Álvaro Siza on the inner endpaper of one of his sketchbooks – was the starting point for this commemorative exhibition of the 20th anniversary of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Álvaro Siza: in / discipline reveals to us the salutary disquiet and insubordination of his creative method which, forged at the cross-fertilization of knowledges, cultures, geographies, works and authors, has sustained, for more than six decades, a constant questioning of architecture from, simultaneously, what is inside and outside the discipline. Featuring thirty projects carried out between 1954 and 2019 (both built or unbuilt), the exhibition traces the professional trajectory of Álvaro Siza, since the period of his education to his full consolidation as an architect, through his readings, his sketchbooks and travel records, and the way his work was portrayed, photographically in seminal publications and verbally in personal statements by many of those contemporaries who have crossed paths with it over time.
Galeria Municipal do Porto opens the exhibition "9kg de Oxigénio". The exhibition is the result from the challenge launched by Galeria Municipal do Porto to the project "Uma Certa Falta de Coerência" to develop an exercise that reflects on the relationship between independent curatorial practice, self-managed by artists, and an institutional exhibition context. In this sense, "Uma Certa Falta de Coerência", which has been developing its work independently since 2008, will present this exhibition in which it will "test the production policies and ways of understanding, taking as its starting point the exercise of survival under conditions adverse and subject to institutional oppression". "Uma Certa Falta de Coerência" will transfer the atmosphere of the small space it occupies on Rua dos Caldeireiros, where air breathability is often questioned, and will feature works by artists who, over the past few years, have collaborated with the project: Babi Badalov, Daniel Barroca, António Bolota, Camilo Castelo Branco, Merlin Carpenter, Rolando Castellón, June Crespo, Luisa Cunha, Stephan Dillemuth, Loretta Fahrenholz, Pedro G. Romero, Dan Graham, Alisa Heil, Mike Kelley, Ruchama Noorda, Silvestre Pestana, Josephine Pryde and Xoan Torres.
Galeria Municipal do Porto opens the exhibition "Depois do Estouro", curated by Tomás Abreu and results from the "Expo'98 no Porto" competition project. "Depois do Estouro" was selected by an independent jury of the Galeria Municipal do Porto’s artistic team, composed by Daniela Marinho, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Miguel Ferrão, who directs with Eduardo Guerra the artistic project Musa paradisiaca, and Nuno Faria, artistic director of Museu da Cidade. This exposition arises from the effects that the socioeconomic and technological developments by the end of the last century had on contemporary culture and "proposes a reflection on paradoxes of their consequences, while challenging notions of time manipulation". It brings together a set of works, produced at the end of the last decade by 13 young artists who grew up in Portugal in the 1990s, which "focus on issues of humanity, physical space and time": Alice dos Reis, Francisco M. Gomes, Henrique Pavão, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Igor Jesus, Jorge Jácome, Lucia Prancha, Mariana Rocha, Mariana Vilanova, Pedro Huet, Rodrigo Gomes, Sara Graça and Tomás Abreu.
The exhibition marks the 30 years of the Foundation and the 20th anniversary of Museu de Serralves, presenting the programme of the Performing Arts Service between 1999 and today. It was born and developed through compromises between seemingly irreconcilable objectives: on the one hand, the need to present concrete data (names, dates, images) that showed where, how and when certain artists performed, and mirrored the pioneering character of the importance given to the performing arts by Serralves; on the other hand, it translates what seems to immediately distinguish these arts: the implication of the spectator, the eminently collaborative spirit, the "here and now" as opposed to "this was". The compromises included by putting on display documentation and letting its visitors know who has performed in Serralves (and when, how and where), while presenting elements that evoked the “here and now.” The documentation was incorporated through a process of collaboration: once the programmers Cristina Grande and Pedro Rocha selected the images and words that best illustrated the last twenty years of their programming (between stage photography and graphic materials that announced and accompanied the activities), it was commissioned to a graphic designer, Luís Teixeira, to create a book that would never be published, whose pages would be exclusively presented on the walls of Biblioteca de Serralves, along with the recordings of shows and props to which these programmers considered to be of special importance. At the same time, it was decided to occupy a considerable area of the library’s mezzanine with an object that would immediately evoke the idea of theatre and could "trigger" the viewer: a small stage waiting to be occupied. The visitor can and should sit down to read (programming texts, key books to understand the performing arts today) and, most importantly, to hear testimonials and memories of spectacles written by people especially attentive to Serralves' performing arts programming - between artists, musicians, writers and current or former directors and programmers of theatres and music and performance festivals - and then read by two actors. These testimonies came to reconcile the irreconcilable: the memories of certain shows, or of concerts and performances - necessarily subjective, incomplete, fragmentary - constitute the necessary counterpoint to data, dates, chronologies, documentation. It is largely thanks to them that this exhibition is not just about "what it was"; it is also now, and it is also here.
We are familiar with the irreverence of João Garcia Miguel's stage creations. There are, for instance, his bold treatments of Shakespeare in Burgher King Lear (2007) or Calderón de la Barca in La Vida Es Sonho (2015). Now, he returns with A Plan of the Labyrinth, adapting a text written by Francisco Luís Parreira (in what is already the fourth joint creation by their “close and durable relationship”), to whom the reverberation of the historical situations or the old texts he chooses acts as a revelation of what we are today – he is responsible for an amazing Portuguese translation of the Babylonian poem The Epic by Gilgamesh, one of the oldest texts in the world. After Lilith, which looked at the crisis in Greece / Europe, Três Parábolas de Possessão, filled with biblical references and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and a free version of Medea, Um Plano do Labirinto is a polyphonic mythological tale about the twentieth century Portuguese diaspora, in the Orient and in Africa, questioning itself/us about the truth and lies of many collected stories in “our” war “overseas”. One of them, quite remarkable in its "indifference to the truth," tells of an immaterial confrontation between soldiers in patrol and a herd of antelopes in the unexplored savannah. “Why do these stories lie so deliberately?”
“Little B”, the new creation of Visões Úteis, is designed, written and directed by Ana Vitorino, Carlos Costa, Mário Moutinho and Sara Barros Leitão, taking over and broadening the collaborative dynamic that is the company's trademark. Inspired by the professional biography of Mário Moutinho, Associated Artist at Visões Úteis during the 2018/2019 season, the performance declines, however, an archival or documentary perspective: what matters is not so much Mário's life, but rather the plurality of lives that one life can contain; not so much the life he lived, but rather the life he still has to live; not so much what he remembers (or is remembered for), but rather the memory shortcuts, inaccuracies, and traps that become clear when one tries to archive a life. Above all, more than what Mário did, what matters is what he dreamt and failed to do, because that's where we all come togethrt: the protagonist of Dumas / Sartre (“Keane”) which he never played, Próspero, surrounded by puppets, which he never played, the drum solo (“Little B”, The Shadows) he never played.