Grada Kilomba: "The Boat"
"The Boat" is an outdoor performative installation by artist Grada Kilomba, composed of 140 blocks which form the silhouette of the bottom of a ship and carefully draw a space to accommodate the bodies of millions of Africans, enslaved by European empires. In the Western imaginary, a boat is easily associated with glory, freedom and maritime expansion described as “discoveries” but, in the artist's view, “a continent with millions of people cannot be discovered” nor “one of the longest and most horrendous chapters of humanity – Slavery – can be erased."
This first large-scale installation by Grada Kilomba, which stretches 32 meters along the riverbank in the museum’s campus, invites the audience to enter a garden of memory, in which poems rest on burnt wooden blocks, recalling forgotten stories and identities. What stories are told? Where are they told? How are they told? And told by whom? These are questions that arise when entering this installation.
Grada Kilomba inaugurates this work with a performance and ritual, in which several generations of Afro-descendant communities are the central interpreters, with the musical production of Kalaf Epalanga, The Boat becomes a place of acknowledgement and contemplation of the future.
Commissioned by BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts and realized in collaboration with maat the installation will be enlivened by a series of programs in collaboration with various locally based creative communities featuring performances, readings, music and talks.
Carsten Höller: "DAY"
When it is day then there is light. The exhibition "Day" brings together a large selection of works producing light and darkness, from sculptures with lamps to projections and architecture dating from 1987, when Carsten Höller was still working as a scientist, until today: Light Wall (Outdoor Version), (2021), erected outside, close to maat's entrance, will greet both museum-goers and passersby with an array of light bulbs flickering at a mesmerizing frequency of 7,8 hz, which is the global electromagnetic resonance of the Earth produced by energy discharges such as lightning activity or thunderstorms within the earth’s surface and the ionosphere.
In the large oval space at the centre of the museum, the newly created Lisbon Dots (2021) consists of 20 spotlight projectors which follow people movements and allow them to play a "social distancing and proximity" game with each other.
"Day" is arranged as a parcours including rooms devoid of objects containing only light, corridors full of light or darkness, sections with (day!)-time measuring neon devices, and a "hotel room" containing Two Roaming Beds (Grey), (2015). The latter can be rented for a night to be spent inside the museum, where everything on display can be experienced in privacy. The randomly roaming beds will leave a trace of the sleepers' nightly travel in the form of a brightly coloured line on the floor, which will add up over time to a gigantesque drawing.
For this never-seen-before survey show, no walls or temporary partitions are built nor existing lights in the museum will be used for illumination – all is lit by the artworks themselves.
A relevant public program will include 7,83Hz Meditations taking place between November 2021 and February 2022 and curated by Mariana Pestana.
7,83Hz Meditations is a set of performances and a vinyl publication that gather contributions of contemporary thinkers and composers in the form of meditations. 7.83 Hz embodies a resonance between Earth and man, as it is also the human brainwave frequency in relaxed, daydreaming activity.
Launched in a time marked by a global climate crisis and a state of social isolation with deep psychological consequences, this performance-publication offers the public a sequence of textual and sound therapeutic compositions to remind them of their radical, totalizing ecological interdependency.
Vulnerable Beings
Public assemblies on the space and time of epidemics, curated by Andrea Bagnato and Ivan L. Munuera.
Contagion is always a function of proximity – a proximity that is starting to become uncomfortable. In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services notes that “pandemics are becoming more frequent, driven by a continued rise in the underlying emerging disease events”, and that these are caused by the ecological consequences of agricultural and urban expansion.
"Vulnerable Beings" is the first part of a multi-sited project, organised by Andrea Bagnato and Ivan L. Munuera, that takes physical space as the privileged lens to understand infectious diseases.
It is well understood that public health – the science and practice of controlling contagion – reshaped buildings and cities. But while improvements in the Western world have been undeniable, public health was also a tool of colonial oppression and segregation – and such legacies remain barely examined. The project starts from these considerations to ask three questions: How is epidemiological knowledge produced and spatialized, and how do we open the “black box” of science? How can we re-signify illness and health, to do away with problematic metaphors? Which forms of collective engagement, inventiveness, and solidarity are possible?
For "Vulnerable Beings", artists, scholars, and activists will come together for two assemblies at maat in a dense schedule of lectures, dialogues, screenings, music, and performances from morning to evening. The first assembly, “Tuning In” (29–31 October), will start from the aftermath of the pandemic, and will ask whose voices need to be listened to. The second assembly, “Sounding Out” (26–28 November), will reach back to unexpected histories and geographies, and look forward toward possible futures.
