Geodesic markers, like the one standing at the center of Rita GT's performance 1919 (2019) and which we now see vandalized as an edition in this publication, were used since the 18th century to define strategic points on missions to measure the shape of the Earth. Historically embedded in a time defined by Enlightenment rationality and imperialism, scientific methodologies often served the purpose of forcefully imposing structure and order where colonizers found it to be missing. It was between 1915 and 1918 that Gago Coutinho commanded a Portuguese geodetic mission to São Tomé and Príncipe which led to the publication of a map and the Report of the Geodetic Mission on São Tomé Island in 1919 – the year that lends the performance its name. As so many others around the world, this marker is a relic from colonial times whose ghosts still hunt us.
One of the most highly regarded contemporary artists working today, Kara Walker has exhibited at several major galleries and museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate Modern. For Walker, the past is as unknown and threatening as the future, and it is this that leads to the shadows and figures that we see in the present. Starting from questions of gender and identity, racism and violence, her art investigates their complexities and contradictions. Walker’s beautiful and disturbing works are illuminated illustrations in the great book of time, in which history is written and rewritten, with advances, retreats, obfuscations and revelations, ordered words and disordered images.
Read the full text here.
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Jacques Lévy is a well-known urbanist and geographer and the author of a vast body of work (including books, movies, articles, etc.) with significant repercussion. His time is divided between being a university professor and editing the online magazine EspacesTemps.net. Lévy has received various awards, of which the Vautrin Lud Prize – the most prestigious prize in the field of geography – stands out. In this interview given to Sofia Steinvorth for Electra, he speaks about urbanism (its new tendencies and its relationship with politics), cities, people and their everyday lives, open societies, democracy and serendipity.
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Catalogue from an online exhibition project we developed in the early days of the pandemic. Jabulani recorded a series of videos from the sky throughout these first days of disruption which led us to think about the sky as a map to read our present earthly reality. By looking up we would get a better grasp of what was happening.
Throughout five days dedicated to the sky - the great immensity above us and the clouds in movement, we wanted to think about the possibility that lies in the air and the cyclic mixture of changing combinations of elements. Throughout the video series Atmospheric Conditions Jabulani Maseko inspects the phenomena of slow observation and non-expectation. Rather than reacting and communicating, these works are traces from an undemanding and concentrated practice of presence, from a state of listening and receiving. Visuals and soundscapes come together as settings that expand space and conjure unexpected relations inviting images from times past, present and yet to come. As in a series of photographs and installation drafts from Gerhard Richter's Atlas in which walls and windows become sky and clouds, so too do Jabulani's Atmospheric Conditions turn our attention from an apparently solid and confining interior towards the sky as an infinite projection space.
The project is available on the 4C's website who kindly hosted and commissioned the collaboration. Access their page here.
Performance review about Jabulani Maseko's A Rumble in the Jungle (2019), performed at HANGAR in Lisbon during the Open Studios from the 2019 edition of the Triangle Workshop.
You can read the text here.
Vandana Shiva, one of the most well-known environmental activists of our time, speaks of her work in support of organic agriculture, both in her home country, India, and on a global level. The main topics addressed are the indispensable role of women in a caring, human and ecological economy, and the need for us to resist the distortion of the original meanings of words in the language of the market and colonization.
Read an excerpt of the interview here.
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The materials present in this publication originate within the context of the exhibition The Nature of this Room, at Lapso Galeria (Setúbal, Portugal) in the timeframe of November 1st and December 21st, 2019, featuring the work of the artists Rosanna Helena Bach (1990, Switzerland) and Nuno Moreira (1982, Portugal). Besides showing an important part of the artists’ aesthetic experimentations and research inquiries that developed in Lisbon throughout the months previous to the exhibition, this publication includes fragments on central topics that guided our conversations. It assembles theoretical discussions, poetic excerpts, physical and alchemical concepts as well as fictional and individual reflections on some key ideas in relation to the artists’ works. In this sense, the present publication does not only show a process, but provides entry points into an immersive environment similar to the one that materialized through the works at display at Lapso. Above all, it functions as an invitation to dive into the microcosmos of questions that led our interest.
Have a look at the full publication here.
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