"Efforts of Nature IV considers one of the defining existential dualities and psychological tensions of contemporary life: the push and pull in awareness and concern between individual mental states and planetary shifts in environmental conditions."

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer whose artistic practice intertwines experimental cinema, essayistic film, documental autobiography and articulated sound work.

Quaintance works with moving images and broad sonorities to create a mesh of juxtaposed, intersecting and perceptively atmosphered textures. His works are authentic bodies of memories, infused with expanded individual and collective portraits that navigate complex cultural and socio-political experiences. Interested in matters of the human condition, ethnography, counter-culture, the cultic milieu, built environments and Afro-Caribbean, British and East Asian histories, the artist's work instrumentalises temporal flows to excavate narratives that, while recovered from the past, remain incisive and reactive to contemporaneity.

His presence at Curtas Vila do Conde is already well known, having taken part in the Festival's Experimental Competition three times, and winning it in 2020 and 2021 with South and Surviving You, Always, respectively. The 32nd edition of Curtas will therefore dedicate a wide-ranging and diverse programme to Morgan Quaintance, centered around his original exhibition Efforts of Nature IV, which was designed specifically for Solar - Cinematic Art Gallery.

For the first time in Portugal, Morgan Quaintance will present an unprecedented and site-specific body of work, composed of moving images, sound pieces, photographs, satellite images, found materials and diverse documentation. Seeking to relate individual mental states to planetary shifts in environmental conditions, this exhibition sparks reflections on the passage of time, mortality and the dissolution of the body, in its conceptual articulation with the disintegration of the polar ice caps.

In parallel, the artist has prepared a film programme, to be presented by himself at Curtas Vila do Conde, in which he proposes a dialogue between a partial retrospective of his work and various other films that have influenced his artistic practice and consciousness. By being understood as a dialoguing whole, they transcend their unity to open doors to an expanded comprehension and identification that oscillates over the entire spectrum of human emotions.

The programme is rounded off with other two moments led by Morgan Quaintance. On the one hand, a masterclass in which he will address the weight of physical bodily failure at the moment of artistic creation, based on his own experience with chronic pain. On the other hand, there will be a guided tour of the exhibition, where the artist will not only discuss the process of creating his pieces and the conceptual pillars that connect them, but will also answer questions raised by visitors in an open conversation.