“Religar” is the title of the second edition of the artistic residency Desloca\u00e7\u00f5es, a collaboration between the Museu Municipal Abade Pedrosa \/ Museu Internacional de Escultura Contempor\u00e2nea de Santo Tirso and the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto.
In this edition, students from the Sculpture Practices course unit were challenged to select an artifact from the Abade Pedrosa archaeological collection \u2014 one with a spiritual character and vocation \u2014 as the basis for a sculptural project that would engage with its formal, symbolic, and contextual properties.
This focus on the archaeological trace seeks to direct our attention toward an archaic world of inexhaustible knowledge that escapes the urgencies of daily life, while simultaneously generating an act of self-deciphering within the subject \u2014 for when we place ourselves before an artifact and its historical depth, we receive from it a more expansive Self. <\/p>\n\n
It has already begun for us too<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Any magical, sacred, or spiritually oriented artifact possesses a genetically plural nature: it brings into collision a set of formal qualities with a broad and discontinuous intentionality within a belief system that must be understood \u2014 from sacrifices, festivals, trances, initiation or funerary rites, prayers, music, among others. For when we approach objects and their historical depth, we receive from them a Self that is broader, deeper, and more lucid. To contemplate a sacred artifact while separating it from its original context \u2014 or while concealing our own desires in its presence \u2014 is an act of naivety, if not of perversion. First concern \u2014 to recognize that in the most archaic roots we may find the least illusory fire;<\/p>\n\n Second concern \u2014 to begin, in that primordial fire, a search for ourselves, \u201cto escape across the centuries from the mechanics of the present; to reach my own thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Thus, through weekly meetings over the past two months, each student developed a path of intimate experiences in drawing and small-scale sculpture, initiating a restless and yearning circumspection on and from the chosen object to arrive at the results now presented in this exhibition. Samuel J M Silva<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5619,"template":"","categoria-do-programa":[117],"class_list":["post-5625","exposicoes","type-exposicoes","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","categoria-do-programa-exhibitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposicoes\/5625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposicoes"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exposicoes"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposicoes\/5625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8680,"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposicoes\/5625\/revisions\/8680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"categoria-do-programa","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miec.cm-stirso.pt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categoria-do-programa?post=5625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
It is hardly possible to approach the essence of such an object while ignoring its origin or foundational context. A displacement will always be necessary.
For this second edition of the artistic residency \u2014 Desloca\u00e7\u00f5es \u2014 students from the Sculpture Practices course unit at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto were challenged to select an object of spiritual character or vocation from the Abade Pedrosa archaeological collection, in order to undertake a thorough study process leading to the creation of a sculpture capable of entering into dialogue with the chosen trace.
It was, quite simply, about proposing the construction of a dialogue \u2014 an intimate conversation between forms, densities, colours, scales, weights, symbols, materials, and ideas. It was, quite simply, about building a relationship.
Even before beginning, we were forewarned (as we now confirm) of the crucial challenge of this task: no archaeological trace can ever be regarded merely as a window into another, more or less immemorial, time \u2014 without acknowledging its powerful speculative capacity to unexpectedly return our own reflection.
A ruin is always a window \u2014 but also a mirror.
This awareness allowed each student, through their multiple revisitations of the objects, to enter into them \u2014 not just into the things themselves, but quite literally into their very being \u2014 in a process of self-deciphering. <\/p>\n\n
Alert and attentive, we sought in this residency to bring a dual concern to the worktable. <\/p>\n\n
Each journey produced a dialogue, an alternation of (timeless) voices (discourses) that relate through that immense, undecipherable \u201cbinding void.\u201d <\/p>\n\n