The Japanese collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group proposes an artistic intervention in Marvila, activated by a programme of parties, performances and workshops that reclaim the street as a space for socialising.
As part of CAM’s Japanese contemporary art season Engawa and the programme for the new edition of the Alkantara Festival, the Side Trip intervention creates a temporary space for celebration on an abandoned plot of land in Azinhaga dos Alfinetes, in Marvila, Lisbon.
With a programme of concerts, performances, workshops, food competitions, a market, and a magusto (traditional chestnut roasting), Side Trip celebrates an achievement of the local community: the construction of a large urban park which revitalises an area of more than seven hectares next to the train line.
The collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group proposes the construction of a temporary street and square where a yagura will be built, a tower-like structure reminiscent of the Japanese Bon-Odori festival, during which the dead and rituals of transition are honoured. Starting on 11 November with a magusto with the community group 4Crescente, the celebrations proposed by the collective will take place around this structure, which will function as a stage. Side Trip reclaims the street as a space for socialising and for the consideration of global and social issues at a time of intense urban development and gentrification.
The collective is known for its disruptive social interventions that respond to contemporary realities. In 2017-2018, the artists had already explored this concept in the 道 [street/road] project, creating a path linking the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts to a city street. Inspired by the ‘Sunflower Movement,’ a student movement that occupied the Legislative Yuan (similar to a Parliament), this project questioned how public the space of a national museum really is.
The Side Trip programme is developed in conjunction with the community group 4Crescente and various local communities. Also noteworthy is the partnership with the Kriativu association, which brings its Armador Kriativu Festival to Side Trip, with musical curation by Chelas é o Sítio.
Known as 'the subversive face of the Japanese contemporary art scene,' the Chim↑Pom collective was created in Tokyo in 2005 by Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka, and Toshinori Mizuno. In 2016, the collective created the international long-term exhibition Don't follow the wind in the restricted Fukushima Exclusion Zone and opened Garter gallery in Tokyo, a space run by artists to select and present works by their contemporaries. In 2022, now as Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, the artists presented their first retrospective at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Engawa
A season of contemporary art that brings to Lisbon a set of creators from Japan and the Japanese diaspora, many of them for the first time in Portugal. More info