The Post-Summer Laboratories 2025 exhibition is organised following the 12th edition of the Summer Laboratories Artistic Creation Support Programme, a partnership between gnration (Braga), CIAJG –José de Guimarães International Centre for the Arts (Guimarães) and Solar – Cinematic Art Gallery (Vila do Conde). Based on a competition open to artists and collectives, resident or born in the District of Braga or the Municipality of Vila do Conde, four artistic proposals were selected to be produced during residency periods at the participating cultural institutions this summer. After the initial presentation of the results in September, at gnration, a second exhibition took place at CIAJG in October, and now at Solar. This itinerant programme enables the work of the selected artists - Catarina Braga, Dora Vieira, Renato Cruz Santos and Mariana Sardon - to be shown to different audiences, while reconfiguring the exhibition in function of the unique characteristics of each space.

Catarina Braga presents In Search of the Forgotten Image, a video-essay about a plant-image, an emoji, which narrates the search for its ontological truth. This speculative assumption leads to experimentation with processes of representation of the non-human and a reflection on post-natural matter, which highlights the role of technological mediation in our relationship with nature.

Dora Vieira presents the immersive installation Homunculus, comprised by sculptural and pictorial works and a video projection that jointly evoke the complexity of the body's materiality in a post-human context.

Renato Cruz Santos presents Stone of Memory, an audiovisual installation about the imaginary, landscape and identity of the community in Caxinas, that is being impacted by progressive urbanisation. Through a sensory narrative, dialogues are established between human and non-human temporalities, in the terrestrial and underwater space, wherein the common horizon is the presence of Forcada, a granite rock located offshore in that coastal area.

Finally, Mariana Sardon is exhibiting Electromagnetic Botany, an installation comprised by five interconnected devices that generate a dynamic soundscape, referring to different forms of life and matter - living and non-living, natural and synthetic.

Overall, the exhibition affirms the heterogeneity of the artistic proposals, anchored in each artist's research, aesthetic and conceptual principles, which generate a diversity of materials, supports and themes. Notwithstanding their autonomous paths, the proposals share an experimental stance in relation to the resources used and reflect the artists' position in a common moment in time, marked by the interdependence between biological and technological systems. In this set of four works, each viewer is left to feel and establish different lines of convergence between the proposals on display, together with the challenge of the concept of nature and the recognition of our inter-personal and inter-relational coexistence with the environment.

- Joana Pestana