The maat and Central will officially reopen on 10 June, at the usual opening times, between 11 am and 7 pm.
In accordance with the current health and safety regulations, the two buildings which form the EDP Foundation campus – Central and maat – will be equipped with the required hand sanitisers and temperature checks will be conducted at the entrances; there will be well-signalled visiting routes in place in order to ensure a safe and pleasant experience throughout both new and existing programmes.
The date coincides with the Portugal, Camões and Portuguese Communities Day, celebrated on 10 June, and it follows a long period of closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The maat will now finally reveal to the public the new projects which had been scheduled for launch on 27 March.
To visit at maat
Beeline is an architectural intervention that occupies the entirety of maat’s building and which was commissioned to the New York-based studio SO – IL, led by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This is an unprecedented project which marks a programme transformation under the new director, Beatrice Leanza, and which aims to turn the museum into a landscape of encounters and conversations, while emphasising the opening of a second, temporary entrance, facing the city, in addition to the original museum entrance, which faces the river Tejo. This large intervention is accompanied by the exhibition Currents – Temporary Architectures by SO – IL, which is presented along the elliptical ramp within the museum’s central space, showing 12 of the projects created by the studio over the past decade and which are organised into six themed pairs that highlight the themes explored by the studio in their ephemeral and constructed works. Beeline is a partnership with the Artworks company.
As part of this intervention, the architects also designed a set of 15 mobile and multipurpose art storage units which are scattered throughout the space. Their contents, together with archived art materials, are collectively named The Peepshow – Artists from the EDP Foundation Art Collection and present discreet and intimate interventions that reveal the artists’ work, methodologies and creative moments, thus allowing us a “peek” into their private worlds. The artists are Catarina Botelho, Paulo Brighenti, Tomás Colaço, Luísa Ferreira, Horácio Frutuoso, Mariana Gomes, Pedro Gomes, André Guedes, João Louro, Maria Lusitano, João Ferro Martins, Paulo Mendes, Rodrigo Oliveira, Francisco Vidal, Valter Vinagre.
On complementary structures, the exhibitions Memovolts — Stories from EDP Foundation’s Power Heritage Collection are presented. They are seven curated showcases with topics such as “Women in advertising for household appliances (1930-1950)” and “Memories from the City of Lisbon: Kurt Pinto’s Photography. The Design of Sound and Image (1920-1960)”.
Also complementing these projects, and still forming part of Beeline, are three audio stations entitled Sound Capsules, which are home to a series of sound proposals curated and with content produced in collaboration with students from ETIC (School of Innovation and Creation Technologies), as well as a series curated by Gonçalo F. Cardoso with works selected from the catalogue of the record label Discrepant, which explores the subjects “Alternate Realities” and “Atypical Traditions”, broadcast throughout a set of live performances that will take place on Beeline.
A commissioned sound project will be heard throughout all the spaces of the maat building. It is a soundscape created by artist Claudia Martinho with the title Extinction Calls. This form of acoustic spatialization is based on the melodies and voices of extinct or critically-endangered bird species which have been collected from collaborative platforms and online archives such as the Macaulay Library, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Internet Bird Collection. It was created for the purpose of offering a wide range of sound experiences throughout the entire museum.
“Characterised by a sonic activism which emphasises the global environmental crisis, and to round up interspecies vibratory encounters, this sound installation appeals to a change in the way we relate to our environment towards an environmental intimacy, towards our innate ability to attune to the other, the non-human”, the artist explains.
Lastly, we entrusted the French designer Sam Baron, based in Lisbon, with designing a communication system to help visitors circulate within the museum in conformity with current regulations. It is a low-tech, three-dimensional system which permeates the various museum locations with a soft and unique design language made up of multipurpose modules, using regular bricks and reflecting surfaces with a specific graphic language, to help visitors respect current regulations. “The challenge of designing an effective, communicative, yet subtle solution, adapted to maat’s mission without upstaging the museum’s contents, forced us to think of a seemingly simple yet attractive solution, which also needs to be easily implemented, modified or expanded”, Baron said about this project.
maat Mode 2020 – Prototyping the museum’s future:
Beeline was designed to host maat Mode, a public, participatory seven-month programme presented as a questioning exercise about the role of cultural institutions in society and prototyping the museum’s future.
Co-developed by a wide range of international and local professionals, cultural institutions and community groups, maat Mode embodies “a transformative manager who turns the museum into a multifunctional civil arena where public life is debated, surveyed, challenged and positively inspired towards a more inclusive and equal construction of the future”, explains director Beatrice Leanza.
Different topics, contents and forms of public engagement serve both as tests and as a prelude to future programming. Among many others, the research areas include climate action, with particular emphasis on the Oceans and aquaculture, and involve the collaboration of Portuguese and international culture and education institutions – such as Architecture Follows Fish, a project curated by André Tavares and Garagem Sul; Liquid Infrastructure, organised by Margarida Mendes together with the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University; and Disturbing Conservation: Remapping the Avencas (Marine Protected Areas), developed by curators Dani Admiss and Gillian Russell.
Other collaborations with education institutions include the Living System Lab at Central Saint Martins, ETIC (School of Innovation and Creation Technologies) and FBUL (Faculty of Fine Arts at Lisbon University).
Workshops, viewings, talks and “schools” will discuss and explore several subjects related to policies around sustainability, scientific knowledge, social and urban transformations which permeate the Portuguese narrative and beyond. Some examples of this rich programme are: Journeys to the In-between, a series of urban explorations curated by the Lisbon-based collective Arteria; a multifaceted programme about the theme Women and Freedom with twelve contributors and created by Marta Lança; and Counter Architecture, curated by Lucinda Correia and focusing on the role played by citizens when designing policies for a greener city. A programme about the relationship between art and reality includes a special series of talks and workshops with artists from the EDP Foundation Art Collection, such as Paulo Mendes, Mariana Gomes, João Louro, Luisa Ferreira (Lado B and Untitled. Workshop com Artists). Mode Diaries is a special series of creative writing and reflection laboratories organised in collaboration with writers and publishers, including the founders of the British environmental magazine It’s Freezing in LA! and the Portuguese poet Miguel-Manso.
The full programme is available at www.maat.pt
