To promote local artistic creation, gnration, the José de Guimarães International Arts Centre (CIAJG), in Guimarães, and Solar - Cinematic Art Gallery, in Vila do Conde, have teamed up to promote the tenth edition of the Summer Laboratories programme to support artistic creation. Created in 2015 by gnration, this initiative is aimed at artists or collectives who want to develop new works in the fields of image, sound, performance, interactivity, music, dance or the intersection of these areas. This year, the Summer Labs will also be accompanied by curator, researcher and writer David Revés. After a residency at gnration and CIAJG, the selected artists will present their new works in installation or performance format at the usual Post-Summer Labs exhibition.

The audiovisual installation Crónicas visuais de onde não estive, by Sally Santiago, the musical transformation project that combines sound creation with interactive and multimedia software +/-, developed by João Carlos Pinto, João Miguel Braga Simões and José Diogo Martins, the video installation Consonâncias Efémeras, by Sofia Morim and Filipe Carvalho, and the audiovisual installation Ouroboros by Francisca Miranda and Inês Leal, are the four projects selected for the Summer Laboratories 2024.

Consonâncias efémeras

by sofia morim + filipe carvalho

The ‘Consonâncias Efémeras’ project is the result of a first collaboration between Sofia Morim and Filipe Carvalho, reflecting the intersection of their individual practices and interests through two installations that integrate video projection, objects, sculpture and sound. In this work, the artists wanted to explore the broad symbolic and material connections between humans and water. They began by considering this substance as a sensitive element, taking inspiration from Masaru Emoto's observations in Hidden Messages in Water, interested in demonstrating how water is capable of reacting, molecularly and visually, to human consciousness and actions when confronted with specific energies, emotions, gestures and words. Ephemeral Consonances thus seeks to meditate on the nature of this relationship, proposing that we inhabit almost hypnotic environments, where a refined exercise of balances, suspensions, amplifications, reflections, projections and light refractions trigger and expand different rhythms, oscillations, sonorities, shapes, textures and visual patterns of the water that flows in the space. In each of the rooms where this project is presented, the presence of each visitor therefore assumes special importance and uniqueness, entering into vibrational communication with the various surrounding surfaces and liquid flows, thus contributing to their potential, albeit more or less perceptible, modification and movement.

Crónicas visuais de onde não estive

by sally santiago

The audiovisual installation ‘Crónicas visuais de onde não estive’ (Visual chronicles of where I haven't been) proposes thinking about certain facets of fictional and narrative space through the construction of particular realities. In this work, Sally Santiago starts from the childhood stories of people from older generations, transmitted through overlaps or small lapses of memory, typical of the act of remembrance. Referring to events that took place between 1945 and 1950 on an island in the Atlantic, the three episodes now serve as the basis for the construction of the three chronicles presented here, as scenarios where a long journey of signs is established, ideas and images, between a past that expands, recreating itself, and a present that is permeated and fictionalised. The artist promotes the opening up of the multiplicity and multiplication of the territory of the possible, where the appropriation of memories serves to drive sensitive perceptions of new actions and landscapes, both concrete and emotional, embodying an experimental alternative to contemporary speed and a certain current inability to look and feel. Interpolating themes from everyday life, where subjective planes are tinged with humour and irony, between games of figures and characters that interact under a particular slowness and melancholy, this installation seeks to work in the interval between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, leading the viewer to exercise reminiscence, projection and reconstruction of their own memory.

Ouroboros

by francisca miranda + inês leal

Echoing the primitive meaning - ‘he who bites his tail’ - and the circularity suggested by the word that serves as its title, Ouroboros, a project by Francisca Miranda and Inês Leal, presents an audiovisual installation made up of two videos and a sound piece. In this work, the artists' research was based on the concept of soundbite, moving between devices for captivating and controlling individual and collective thought generated by certain political discourses and contemporary media agents, in order to search for other associations, images, languages and sounds. In this way, this project both promotes the relationship between the soundbite - petit phrase or sound bite - and the much older expression lard of the snake, due to the similar baculine and paralogical argumentation of the production of conviction and reproducibility that they both share, and makes use of images from the natural world or certain ritualistic spaces and gestures. Claiming an aesthetic evocative of the television screen and broadcast, and thus reminiscent of the family and domestic space, Ouroboros creates a landscape that seeks to mobilise the whole body and attention of the spectator and which, not being diegetic, is characterised by a capacity for attraction, enchantment and hypnosis, but also by opacity, indiscernibility and confusion, existing between the illusion of the circus spectacle and the camouflage of the predatory animal.

+/-

by joão carlos pinto + joão miguel braga simões + josé diogo martins

blackbox - 8 sep - 17:00

+/- is an audiovisual performance that, using the acoustic sound of percussion instruments and the piano, as well as digital music manipulation technology, seeks to explore different collective archetypes in the form of drawings and sound graphics. Describing a path that unites written and improvised music, this project oscillates between the traditional concert and the concepts of sound art and installation, thus blurring boundaries between these artistic territories and their more conventional forms of presentation, through the decomposition of the musical performance device and the exposure of its creative movement in real time. Upon entering the blackbox space, and throughout the duration of the performance, the spectator is thus confronted with a multiplicity of material and sensitive dynamics, as well as symbolic and emotional ones. On the one hand, seeing themselves inside an enclosure defined by six multimedia modules, they are enveloped by an apparatus of light and smoke that destabilises notions of centre and end, inside and outside, continuity and interruption, in a situation that polarises between the uterine and the psychedelic. On the other hand, when you experience the music, you are crossed by different trajectories of sounds, timbres, scales and sound narratives that activate the space of the imagination and bring an unconscious background to the surface. Between concealment and unveiling, vision and blindness, direct touch and detachment, +/- is an ambivalent creation centred around images that, not being in space but in time, are both individual and collective in nature, operating in the memory and reactions of each individual.

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PÓS-LABORATÓRIOS DE VERÃO 2024
Curated by: David Revés

gnration

EXHIBITION [galeria zero + galeria um]

FRI · SEPT 6 · 11 am – 10 pm

SAT · SEPT 7 · 10 am – 1 pm

SUN · SEPT 8 · 10 am – 5.30 pm

PERFORMANCE [blackbox]
SUN · SEPT 8 · 5 pm