O Último Adeus, 2022
Sound instalation for Festival d’Automne, Paris 2022
Chapelle des Petits-Augustins

Audio recording of the mourning of three women of Nazaré for the fishermen who left and never returned from the sea.

We Are (still) Not Somewhere

As part of the France-Portugal cross-season and the Festival d’Automne in Paris, students from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Faculdade de Belas-Artes of the University of Lisbon have collectively imagined an event for the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins based on performances, films, and sound pieces that resonate with the work of the Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa. Originating in a performance "Nós não estamos algures", imagined by the Portuguese filmmaker, art critic and curator Ernesto de Sousa (1921-1988) in 1969 at the Primeiro Acto theater club (Algés), the event "We are (still) not somewhere" is intended to be a transcultural iteration of the performative and intermedia experiments initiated by the Portuguese artists' collectives of the late 1960s. Freely inspired by the improvised lecture of the Portuguese artist and writer Almada Negreiros in his collection "A Invenção do Dia Claro" (The Invention of Clear Time, 1921), the collective performance "Nós não estamos algures" was originally conceived as an open work of art that brought together diverse practices, from the reading of poems and the realization of theatrical stagings to the screening of films simultaneously, the broadcasting of sound compositions, and the exhibition of sculptures to be activated. In search of new modes of communication and interaction with the public, Ernesto de Sousa conceived art as a collaborative process and intended to inscribe it in a festive ritual capable of destabilizing social hierarchies and of forming a true community of artists/authors considered as "aesthetic operators". Within the chapel of the Petits-Augustins des Beaux-Arts, a utopian microcosm of a Western art history that is both fantasized and contested, performances, films, dances, scores, and sound pieces imagined by artists trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Faculdade de Belas-Artes of the University of Lisbon will be mixed. At the heart of this concert of forms, voices and images combine, clash, annihilate and reinforce each other like a random choreography of gestures and narratives that re-negotiate the contours of a cultural landscape in the making.