Activities of the project ‘Lugar Infinito’ [Infinite Place] © Pedro Pina
Lugar Infinito [Infinite Place]
Fábrica de Projetos [Project Factory]
Participatory project with primary schools
‘Lugar Infinito’ [Infinite Place] is a site-specific installation for the Gulbenkian Garden conceived as a new place to meet and be at one with nature and each other. The work results from a nine-month period of collaboration with the resident artist Fidel Évora, the pupils from the Marquesa de Alorna Primary School in Lisbon, and the mediation team. The collective installation will be launched on the 26th June in the Gulbenkian Garden, where a conversation with the ‘creators’ [fazedores] of the installation will happen.
The second edition of the project ‘Lugar’ [Place] delves into biographic, cultural and social identities and speaks of the revolutions we have yet to realise. Fidel Évora’s research and artistic practice echoes throughout as demonstration of the intense participatory process of debate, reflection and artistic co-creation with the primary school pupils around the places we occupy, make, and desire.
Coordinated by Andreia Dias from the education, mediation and participation department at CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, this second edition will take place throughout the 2023/24 school year and involves 142 students from six 3rd and 4th grade classes. Teachers Bruno Fernandes, Catarina Matos, Conceição Ramos, Sílvia Lino, Taís Kabat Holtz and Vera Camacho, the mediators Mariana Faria and Andreia Coutinho, and the artist Fidel Évora, will be actively involved in the design and development of the project which unfolded in fortnightly sessions with the pupils and culminated in the installation ‘Lugar Infinito’.
Drawings developed in the activities of ‘Lugar Infinito’ [Infinite Place] project
The previews edition featured Márcio Carvalho as resident artist, resulting in the installation ‘Lugar(es)’, which challenged the way knowledge is traditionally produced and flipped the power dynamics of the conventional classroom by symbolically placing the students’ desk on the roof and amplifying their collective voice through a sonic installation.
Part of ‘Fábrica de Projetos [Project Factory]’ programme, ‘Lugar [Place]’ is a participatory project focused on citizenship, human rights and social justice. On ground shared between the museum and the school, with art as a language of thought and exploring new possible paths for art education in the contemporary world, ‘Lugar [Place]’ invests in values such as empathy, inclusion, equity, interculturality and democracy.
‘Fábrica de Projetos [Project Factory]’ develops educational proposals to promote places of intersection and dialogue between the museum and the school, taking on issues of citizenship as a field of work, reinforcing the civic role of cultural institutions and of art education as a structuring axis.
Fidel Évora
Fidel Évora (Cape Verde, 1984) grew up in Barreiro and studied image and communication at ETIC and Motion Graphics at BAU Escola Superior de Disseny in Barcelona. He seeks to cultivate his taste for research and the preservation of artefacts, recovering important memories for collective and personal identity; he creates compositions between the real and the fictitious, creating forgotten dialogues on purpose or unintentionally. In 2021 she took part in the group exhibitions "Linha Imaginária", at MU.SA Museu de Artes de Sintra, and "de Dentro e Fora - Colectiva de Artistas de Cabo Verde", at UCCLA Lisboa.