Salgo Algo is the title of the exhibition of the projects developed by the students of the Sculpture Atelier II from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto for the spaces of the Santo Thyrso Factory as part of the program of the Santo Tirso’s International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.
“A salga” [Salting], as an ancestral conservation process, brings us the idea of extending time, prolonging the qualities, postponing finitude. On the other hand, the word “algo” [something] that appears to us also contained in the conjugation of the verb “salgar” [to salt] challenges us to the importance of the unknown in the creative processes. The combination of “not knowing”, as an inexhaustible reservoir of questions and uncertainties, with the notion of suspended time produced by the “salt” materializes the essence of this exhibition: the subjectivation of a space of industrial character and memory through intimate, delicate plastic processes, themselves in transformation.
The exhibition by Cristina Ataíde, held at MIEC from May 28th, 2022, revisits some of her first series of sculptures made of iron and stone, confronting them with new pieces developed by her in the context of a careful and attentive observation of NATURE.
Along the surprising 70 m long corridor, a sculpture made specifically for this location, proposes to us a walk through these small details of a nature that we are often unaware of and that always surprises us.
In all the other rooms of the Museum, drawings and sculptures are interconnected, without a visible chronology, but creating strong relationships with each other, and allowing connections between the material and the spiritual, and where the impulse of the traveler is felt, always present, in the artist’s work.
At the end of the exhibition, the visitor is summoned to actively participate in a site-specific piece that occupies the granite wall that flanks the exterior space.
