part of The Plot begins
Somatic listening
“Somatic Listening” is a cycle of interventions proposed by curator and researcher Margarida Mendes on expanded hearing, which takes the space of the farm ‘The Plot’ as the setting for a series of sensory experiences around listening. Exploring the limits of perception and challenging our ability to immerse in the body as a total aural tool, sensitive to the vibrational continuum of the world, this cycle of interventions thinks about the political and expressive place of sensoriality based on the openness and care for ecosystems.
It proposes to deconstruct the hierarchy of the senses through a program that explores the body in its reverberative and mutualist power, questioning the relationship with the environment and with the different forms of life that inhabit the space of the farm and the planet. This cycle of flows includes listening wanderings, shamanic journeys to ancestral auditory memories, as well as other spontaneous proposals and listening exercises on the farm.
Exploring in a pedagogical way the sensitivity and enjoyment in listening to the common, they include artistic proposals that support the debate on environmental pollution and noise, the hearing of animals and plants, healing through sound and body awareness, as well as the resilience of ecosystems. With open pores, we listen.
Margarida Mendes research explores the overlap between infrastructure, ecology, experimental film, and sound practices, investigating environmental transformations and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She is interested in exploring alternative modes of education and political resilience through her curatorial practice and activism. She was part of the curatorial team of the 11th Gwangju Biennale “The 8th Climate (What Does Art Do?)”, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial “A School of Schools”, and 11th Liverpool Biennale “The Stomach and the Port”. In 2019 she launched the exhibition series Plant Revolution! which explores different narratives of technological mediation of the interspecies encounter, and in 2016 she curated Matter Fictions, publishing a joint reader with Sternberg Press. She is consultant for environmental NGOs working on marine policy and deep sea mining and has directed several educational platforms, such as escuelita, an informal school at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CA2M, Madrid; The Barber Shop project space in Lisbon dedicated to transdisciplinary research; and the ecological inquiry curatorial research platform The World In Which We Occur/Matter in Flux. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and a frequent collaborator of the online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting Inhabitants-tv.org
August 22nd - THE PLOT BEGINS!
1º Flux: Wandering listening and conversing about different forms of listening in nature with Diana Policarpo and Margarida Mendes
Diana Policarpo is a visual artist and composer working in visual and musical media including drawing, video, sculpture, text, performance, and multi-channel sound installation.
Policarpo investigates gender politics, economic structures, health, and interspecies relations through speculative cross disciplinary research. She creates performances and installations to examine experiences of vulnerability and empowerment associated with acts of exposing oneself to the capitalist world.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide including solo presentations at Kunsthall Trondheim; Galeria Municipal do Porto; Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra; Galeria Lehmann + Silva, Porto; Belo Campo/Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon; GNRtion, Braga; lAB Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld; Kunstverein Leipzig; Xero, Kline and Coma, London; Kunsthall Baden-Baden among others.
Policarpo has recently exhibited, performed and screened her work at TBA21- Academy; Maus Hábitos, Porto; Interstício, London; Nottingham Contemporary; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MACE, Elvas; ARCOmadrid; Chiado 8, Lisbon; Kunsthall Oslo (with Marie Kolbæk Iversen); LUX – Moving Image, London; Cafe OTO, London; Guest Projects, London; Tenderpixel, London; Shau Fenster, Berlin; Mars Gallery, Melbourne; Peninsula Gallery, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and W139, Amsterdam. Policarpo was the winner of Prémio Novos Artistas Fundação EDP 2019.
September 19th - THE PLOT THICKENS
Sound Dive - ritual conducted by Mónica Alquimia
Mónica Alquimia will lead a sound meditation ritual that invites participants to cross the linearity of space-time, proposing reconnection with the primordial habitats of the deep ocean. This ritual begins with breath and will transport us through trance supported by instruments to other sensory and imagetic dimensions inscribed in the textures of the organic, transgenerational and transpersonal body.
This session, developed from a conversation with Margarida Mendes, intends to deepen the acoustic and corporal states of consciousness, accessing other ways of perception, which expand through a shared aquatic subconscious.
This proposal involves the opening to the dissolution of the senses and is aimed at those who are comfortable entering states of bodily trance. Limited to 12 registrations.
Mónica Alquimia has traveled the world in search of the experience of the sacred, of transcendence and of genuine adventure in profound journeys that have transformed the perception and awareness of herself, life, and the experience of the divine. She has crossed deserts, oceans and endless roads, lived in ashrams, participated in rituals and ceremonies, climbed sacred mountains, visited temples and countless places of power.
Mónica graduated in Social Anthropology at ISCTE, specializing in Asian Religions, Ritual and Performance. Since then she has deepened her practice and study of shamanic traditions, having started learning in 1995 directly with a medicine woman in the North American and Amazonian tradition. In her eclectic path she has integrated ancient and contemporary knowledge and for that she has done numerous trainings and immersions, having obtained certification in Alchemical Spirituality, Shamanic Family Constellation, Rebirthing Therapy, Sound Massage, Sound Healing, Inca Initiations, Essential Shamanism (FFSS), Somatic Experiencing, Quantum Healing, Radiesthesia and Conscious Geobiology, Sacred Feminine and others. Currently she is attending the International Specialization course in Somatic Psychotherapy in Biosynthesis.
Mónica dedicates her life to fulfilling her service to the elevation and transformation of consciousness with an enormous love for the Earth. She is mother of 2 children and lives in Arrábida Natural Park.
November 20th - THE PLOT RETURNS
3º Flux: The snake's breath - with Mumtazz and Vuduvum Vadavã
The snake’s breath invokes the words of Mumtazz and its rhythmic and aural imagery in a séance performed by Marta Vuduvum.
The Mumtazz pantheon, made of incorporeal beings and metamorphosed objects, subsists through the persistence of the voice that unfolds in sound collages such as Sound Sees Silence Hears, installed in a loop. Compiled from audio excerpts, these sound collages are dense in cutout and detail, completely bundled with the homemade tape recorder. In these, we can travel through the plural and dense universe of spoken word, listen to excerpts from films, or from lectures and books collected by Mumtazz, an eternal student.
Their sonic texture, syncopated and sometimes noisy, but always ethereal, conspicuously completes the artist’s prophetic mood, which unfolds through the word-meaning game in its recombination as a poetic enchantment. Here, we travel in a liminal dimension where spirits and spectrum intersect, co-inhabiting in the electromagnetic band the galvanized word and the aural dimension of the voice of those who disincarnated but never left.
On this full moon, Marta Vuduvum will voice The Agitator and the Current / Scene and Poem written by António Poppe (the Agitator) and Mumtazz (the Current) over more than a decade of rhythmic, improvised and dreamed encounters between these “two Siamese brothers”, edited now by Mariposa Azul.
Mumtazz lived in Lisbon, Chicago, New York, Evoramonte, Buenos Aires, Morocco, among other places in 1970 and 2019. Until 2008 he worked under the pseudonym Andrea Martha. Completed a Masters in Performance and Visual Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, U.S.A. and attended the Advanced Drawing Course at Ar.Co, exhibiting internationally. The root of the work is poetry, which finds forms of expression in drawing and collage, ceramics, sculpture, set design, photography, film, audio pieces, props and costumes, performance, and in agriculture. The works, although using such diverse means, share a physical and erotic quality, aware of their theatricality – they become ethereal. Mumtazz uses perception as a material, as well as the ephemeral, the anonymous, and magic.
Vuduvum Vadavã is Marta-half of Von Calhau! Her passion resides in the absurd, the wild and primitive state of language, from preverbal to palindrome and other fancy word games. This investigation focuses on the relation of opposites, which can be complementary or repellent in their combination. In visual and invisual arts, singing/voice, performance, circuit-bending or as a DJ experiencing noise and silence in a drift driven by the unknown.
December 19th - THE PLOT EXPANDS
4º Flux: Breath of Fire – Solstice celebration conducted by Nazarè Soares (Invisibledrum), Margarida Mendes and Ângelo Surinder (Cosmic Gong)
Breath of Fire honors the connection with Earth’s elements and cycles by opening a work of reverence through chanting and meditation with gongs, resonating with the secret reverberations of water.
In this solstice celebration conducted in alliance with Nazarè Soares (Invisibledrum) and Ângelo Surinder (Cosmic Gong) we will invoke the mixture of the three waters in thanks to the rain that comes to nourish us and the year of light that opens. In a circle of collective gestures, we will appeal to the frequencies that travel between the various planes of cosmic bodies, reconnecting with ancestry through singing, geomantic invocation, the resounding of gongs and offerings to the fire, seeking liberation and renewal.
Nazarè Soares is an artist and curator mainly working with animism & spiritual technologies within contexts of contemporary art & new ecologies. She works around notions of neo-pharmacopeias, geomancy, invisible architectures, and magic engineering. Her practice interweaves, psychoacoustic and cinematic spaces, speculative design and performance arts, incubating spaces for ritual, and incubation means. She is a founder of the art platform Invisibledrum based in Norway, a platform investigating interrelationships and interconnections within technology, art, ecologies, and animistic systems in contemporary society. Nazaré is the curator of art and new ecologies for Tribute Earth, an NGO that provides access to ancestral wisdom and regenerative biocultural projects.
Ângelo Surinder was born in Portugal but lived for four years in a community in Galicia, where he felt the call to communion with nature, starting his journey in shamanism. When he returned to his homeland, Portugal, he found in yoga an excellent practice for the balance between body, mind and spirit. He started practicing Shivananda yoga in 2005, which encouraged him to deepen his knowledge in other areas such as Reiki, Kundalini Yoga according to the teachings of Yogi Bhajan, Sound Massage at Peter Hess Academy. Later, he found in Gong an instrument of power and a new way of seeing the knowledge acquired, introducing Gong into his practices as a Shamanic instrument. It was with Don Conreaux that he graduated in Gong Master and Gong Yoga. He learned Ritual Trance Dance with Wilbert Alix and even trained in healing with Andean ancestral sounds with Tito la Rosa in Peru. Later, he embarked on Advanced Thetahealing and Clinical Hypnosis, among others. He is a member of the board of the Kundalini Yoga Teachers Association, collaborates with the Oncology department at the Setubal’s Hospital for pain relief, with the Lisbon Red Cross giving yoga classes to seniors and Lisbon prison inmates.