This exhibition is the result of a challenge set by the CAM – Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG) and Alcântara Library to a group of people living near the library, with nothing in common other than a taste for art and a desire to move out of the role of spectator to take the place of curator.

In this new place, the group immersed itself in the collection of artworks belonging to the CAM and the FCG’s Art Library. Over six months it became a community, a space for exchange, simultaneously a point of arrival and departure for dialogue and affection, for debate and questioning, forming from the artworks and the act of learning together a meeting place in constant change, a space for multiple gazes. 

A gaze is not a passive experience To gaze is to ‘bring the world inside ourselves,’ it is our body’s encounter with the world. Our gaze shapes us as people, allowing us to build the world with it. And it is not merely an individual act. There is always an exchange of gazes because, our bodies being made of the same matter as the world, we are all a visible body to others. All gazes are therefore an encounter and encounters are an exchange of gazes through which we draw the world collectively.

Perhaps that is why the encounter has become both the space and theme of the work. The works selected to form the exhibition are a possible translation of this convergence of such diverse gazes and an invitation to produce other fertile encounters with those who visit them.

CAM IN MOTION

CAM in Motion is an ‘outdoor’ programme that brings together a series of site-specific interventions by artists and exhibitions with works from the Collection in different spaces in the city of Lisbon and its surroundings.