Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista
24 February–28 May 2023
Opening: 24 February, 4–8pm, with performances by
Colectivo Ayllu and Raquel Lima
Artists:
Alfredo Jaar
Colectivo Ayllu
Frame Colectivo
Raquel Lima
Galeria Municipal de Almada
18 March–3 June 2023
Opening: 18 March, with a performance by
Dima Mabsout
Artists:
Dima Mabsout
ETC
Filipa César
Frame Colectivo
“Imagine, envision what it would be like to know that your comfort, your fun, your safety are not based on the deprivation of another. It’s possible.”
—Toni Morrison in The Source of Self-Regard
The Museum for the Displaced understands Dis place/meant[1] in an expansive way—something that can happen to humans as well as non-humans. Displacement can be a physical, mental, and/or emotional state. Displacement is often linked to traumatising experiences such as forced migration that need time to be deconstructed and healed. It happens through many forms of violence be it physical or economic; being a first-generation child; or simply existing between different cultures, languages, and customs. Displacement is being evicted for not being able to pay high urban rents, or because certain real estate companies desire the land we’ve built our house on. Displacement is to lose connection to the earth under one’s feet. Displacement is having been uprooted and not finding home again. Displacement is having to invent a new home out of fragments.
Emancipation of the Living is Mf D’s first exposition. A collaboration between the Municipal Galleries of Lisbon and Almada, the project simultaneously occupies two spaces, one in each of the two neighbouring and deeply interconnected cities that have witnessed immense movement and change, including rapid gentrification, in the last decade. The presented works provide different entry points into complex topics related to displacement. In Lisbon, works by Colectivo Ayllu, Raquel Lima, Alfredo Jaar, and Frame Colectivo focus on Europe as a colonising territory, while in Almada, works by Frame Colectivo, Dima Mabsout, ETC, and Filipa César think through issues of land, dispossession, and housing rights.
As a Southern European country, Portugal forms part of a ruthless Fortress Europe that has transformed the Mediterranean Sea into an anonymous, collective grave, upholding a refusal to include the displaced into its contemporary identity. In direct response to the colonial matrix enmeshed in European society, the exhibition at Galeria da Boavista opens with a site-specific installation by Colectivo Ayllu, whose artistic practice translates as an anti-colonial, ancestral healing project. The dialogue continues with a text-based installation by poet Raquel Lima on the difference between silence and silencing from an Afrodiasporic perspective. A lightbox with a 1992 photograph by artist Alfredo Jaar depicts the barbed wire walls of the European Union, and a video installation by architecture studio Frame Colectivo reflects on the infrastructure that keeps the cold heart of Europe’s nationalist narrative beating. As through an inverted telescope, the presented works scrutinise Europe from inside, exposing the way it has established a colonial relationship with the practice of living that essentially aims to suffocate all other ways of existing.
The bridge to Almada is Frame Colectivo, who bring the recent evictions in nearby 2o Torrão, Trafaria, to centre stage, occupying the sidewalk in front of the entrance of the gallery, as well as its ground floor. Documentation of the neighbourhood’s history and resistance will be shared with passers-by, raising awareness about the dire situation of current and former inhabitants of 2o Torrão. Dispossession is also addressed by the architect duo ETC, who focus on lithium mining prospects and other megaprojects in northern Portugal, particularly Montalegre and Covas do Barroso, in a multimedia installation that deploys fiction and fragmented storytelling to bring forth non-human agency. The film Mining Soil (2012-14) by Filipa César traces the words of Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer and independence leader Amílcar Cabral, connecting soil erosion in Alentejo to Portugal’s colonial history. Multidisciplinary artist Dima Mabsout invites the viewers to regain the necessary courage to acknowledge the reality we are living in through the study of human connection to the land. The presentation in Almada’s Municipal Gallery unfolds possibilities of resistance that insist on the flourishing of all life.
The title Emancipation of the Living derives from the book Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, where the Cameroonian historian states: “What the history of Atlantic slavery urges us to do is thus to found a new institution—the anti-museum. […] As for the anti-museum, by no means is it an institution but rather the figure of another place, one of radical hospitality. A place of refuge, the anti-museum is also to be conceived as a place of unconditional rest and asylum for all the rejects of humanity and the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the ones who attest to the sacrificial system that will have been the history of our modernity—a history that the concept of archive struggles to contain.” Mbembe asks “how are we to foster the emergence of a thinking able to help consolidate a world-scale democratic politics, a thinking of complementarities rather than of difference?” He concludes that “future thinking will necessarily be about passage, crossing, and movement. This thinking will be about flowing life, about passing life, which we strive to translate as an event.”
Mf D is aligned with Mbembe’s proposal of an anti-museum, where our spaces respond to the need of forming new coalitions. The exhibition emphasises the importance of collectivity, collaborative practices, and autonomy as the only path to sustainable futures. The Museum, a collective in itself, sees its “collection” as an ever-changing archive of lively relationships, where it matters where we place our horizon. Where we are looking defines what it is that we consider important to be documented and presented, to be recovered as part of our histories and cultures. This living archive allows for new kinds of relationships to emerge, not only with each other, but also with our own imagination of what is possible.
[1] US-American theorist and poet Fred Moten’s spelling in his lecture Building and Bildung und Blackness: Some Architectural Questions for Fela, March 10, 2022. He puts together Amiri Baraka’s “Place/meant” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Dis Place”, in the hopes of operating within a “ruptural resistance and refusal to an ongoing history of displacement just spelled regular.”
Public programmes
Lisbon
Experimental Pedagogies Workshop: White Blindspot
by Frame Colectivo and Maribel Mendes Sobreira
Almada
Open Roundtable: Housing rights
with Canto do Curió
Lisbon
Experimental Pedagogies Workshop: Rebel Islands – Zapatista Autonomy (Part 1/2)
by Lorena Tabares Salamanca
Almada
Experimental Pedagogies Workshop: Rebel Forests – Zapatista Poetics (Part 2/2)
by Lorena Tabares Salamanca
Biographies
is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017) and SESC Pompeia, São Paulo (2021).
is a Latin American collaborative research and action group based in Madrid that identifies its members as transgressive migrants, who are racialized, sexual and gender dissidents from Spain’s ex-colonies. Through their practice that involves political activism and language, they revise socioeconomic structures, resisting heteronormativity and colonial-patriarchal systems, while promoting Indigenous ways of thinking and being, where the human is part of a nature that deserves all our care and respect. The group is formed by Alex Aguirre Sánchez (Quito, Ecuador), Leticia/Kimy Rojas (Guayaquil, Ecuador), Francisco Godoy Vega (Santiago, Chile), Lucrecia Masson (Ombucta, Argentina), and Yos Piña Narváez (Caracas, Venezuela).
is an artist whose creative practice traverses educational, social, and political realms. She is interested in how the arts can bridge between experiences, disciplines, and across social structures. In 2014, she created the Naked Wagon, a mobile platform that creates context for art and exchange on the streets, whose journey contributed to symposia, lectures, and collaborations with artists and organisations in Lebanon, London, and Scotland. Mabsout began working with Catalytic Action shortly after, as the art and education programmes director, developing methods in group participation that explore relationships between art and built environments. Today, she is working at a forest school in Lebanon and actively exploring collective art making, theatre, and street performances. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, London, and an MA in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
is a multidisciplinary studio for research and project development on territories in crisis, founded in 2010 by Simon Deprez and Eléonore Labattut. The pair works in collaboration with an interdisciplinary network of experts and researchers from different fields (including architecture, urbanism, geography, sociology and anthropology). To support inclusion, ownership and citizenship, they design and implement participatory processes for use in the analysis, design, implementation or evaluation phases of development projects. ETC has been based in Lisbon since 2014.
is a Portuguese artist and filmmaker, whose work engages with the fictional aspects of documentary film and the fluid boundaries between film and its reception. She is particularly interested in militant cinema and the political dimension of the moving image and the technologies used. In numerous workshops and seminars, she has already worked with students at universities in Europe and the USA, including Harvard University. She co-founded the Mediateca Onshore, an archival project and a place of learning with ancestors, nature and people in Guinea Bissau. Together with Diana McCarty, Filipa César has been appointed to a professorship of Film and Video at Merz Akademie. In their artistic work, the duo has focused particularly on interdisciplinary projects with a feminist-critical approach.
is a Lisbon-based architecture studio founded by Gabriela Salhe and Agapi Dimitriadou in 2012. Their urban research and practice includes installations, activations, exhibition design, scenography, multimedia works, and publications, merging inventive experimentation with space theory. They have developed research focused on public and semi-public open spaces, defining a critical stance on the built environment, and conceptualising and implementing projects that are situated, formally disruptive, and socially engaged, while developing tools for public participation in place-building and decision-making processes. Under the alias Urban Editions, they publish books and games that result from and accompany the work, gathering people around social and environmental concerns in architecture and urbanism. In 2019, they published [TASCAS], where thirty authors pay tribute to the tasca, a popular and affordable restaurant typology in Portugal.
is a poet, performer, and art-educator. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Post-colonialisms and Global Citizenship from the Centre for Social Studies at Coimbra University. Her research interests focus on Orature, Slavery and Afrodiasporic movements. She holds a BA in Artistic Studies – Performative Arts from the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (2008). She co-founded the cultural association Pantalassa and was Artistic Director and General Coordinator of the first three editions of PortugalSLAM – International Poetry and Performance Festival. She published, in October 2019, her first book and audiobook of poems entitled Ingenuity Innocence Ignorance, published by BOCA and Animal Sentimental, year in which she co-coordinated the 7th Biannual Conference of the Afroeuropeans Network “Contested Black In/visibilities”. She has presented her poetic work in several countries in Europe, South America, and Africa in literature and performance events, including the workshop “Poetry, Race and Gender: Towards an intersectional poetic writing”. In 2022, she was invited to the Venice Biennale as a speaker at the Loophole of Retreat event, invited as keynote speaker for the opening session of the World Congress of Women in Maputo, Mozambique, and invited to the event Literature Talk: Poets from Black Europe at BOZAR in Brussels, Belgium. She is a member of UNA – União Negra das Artes.
is an independent researcher and curator, who focuses on contemporary art, archives, and performance. She is a graduate student at the MA in Communication Sciences and Arts at Nova University, Lisbon, and the founder of the cultural association Circuloscópio. In the last years she has focused on the intersections between fictions, performance art, and its documentation. She was co-editor of Cuerpo Pólvora, issue no.15 of Terremoto magazine. She carried out the research and implementation of the educational programme “Mesas de diálogo: Performance en revisión 1990-2019. Memoria y archivo desde el arte acción, la performance y la documentación en México” coordinated by Local 21 arte. In 2018, she worked on the conceptualisation of the archive of Antonio Juárez Caudillo, stored in Arkheia at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – MUAC. In 2017, she was part of the Ex Teresa Arte Actual team for the “Stabilization, description and digitalization of audiovisual and photographic documents in analog formats of the Ex Teresa Fund (1993-2000)”. Salamanca is based in Lisbon, Portugal.
is an architect, curator, and researcher, a PhD student in Philosophy at the School of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras) of the University of Lisbon (FLUL) in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, and she was an FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) grant holder from 2016 to 2020. She holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from FLUL, she is also a PhD student in Philosophy at FLUL in the field of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, and was an FCT scholarship holder from 2016 to 2020. Sobreira is a member of the Philosophy Centre of the University of Lisbon (CFUL) and of ISPA (International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture). Collaborating with Museu Coleção Berardo and MAAT, she designs and runs activities to raise awareness of the arts and architecture. She started her curatorial practice in 2019, with the project ARQUIVO EXQUIS, in Lisbon, and she co-founded ColectivoFACA – a curatorship and active citizenship project that questions the narratives of visual culture, not erasing history and intersecting the various narratives.