Colectivos Pláka
The GMP’s Public Programmes are associated to the Colectivos Pláka courses – reflection and discussion groups on themes relevant to contemporary art and artistic practice. The project’s main goal is to provide discussion opportunities, in Porto’s cultural context, by encouraging Portuguese and international artists and researchers to share knowledge in the disciplinary fields in which they operate.
December 5 – 8, 2019
Love and Garbage
Contemporary architecture, among many other things, is a prolonged and precise logistical exercise in value re-arrangement to maximise profit. The processes that produce our built environment are typically systematised, formal and strictly hierarchical, structures well-suited to social division. Working cooperatively offers an alternative, where there is a real possibility for mutual solidarity and engagement with people’s knowledge and experience. But how to work cooperatively on the city, when the structures which generate and govern it are based on an almost diametrically opposed logic?
Assemble and a small set of their friends, collaborators and accomplices invite the participantsto join them for four days of working together. Basing each day on a set of short readings and sustained bodily and material processes, working together will be used as a space for opening up discussion on the shared ideas, preoccupations and concerns that have been coursing through the undercurrents of Assemble’s working practice over the last ten years.
Assemble and a small set of their friends, collaborators and accomplices invite the participantsto join them for four days of working together. Basing each day on a set of short readings and sustained bodily and material processes, working together will be used as a space for opening up discussion on the shared ideas, preoccupations and concerns that have been coursing through the undercurrents of Assemble’s working practice over the last ten years.
September 28 – October 4, 2019
Post-Nostalgic Knowings
Post-Nostalgic Knowings is a course on culture and critical thinking which aims to look at different places in Europe which contain collective stories in disappearance, scanning the potency of recent curatorial and artistic research and intervention. The course presents a variety of “post-nostalgic” approaches by authors addressing places in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Spain, to understand how contemporary knowings allow for reading, intervening and may contribute to re-signify those places, whether in its relation to past memories and, most specially, as redefining new contemporary narratives. Trying to overcome the strictly preservationist and conservative approaches, the course will focus on a specific location in Porto, the Freixo hillside, characterized by the simultaneity of industrial history and the current pressure of real estate interests on the buildings and the land. The program includes conferences, debate sessions, along derives, workshops and other spatial strategies to understand and dialogue with the complexity at stake.
July 10 – 13, 2019
The Time(s) of Contemporaneity 2: Decolonizing Culture
The Time(s) of Contemporaneity 2: Decolonizing Culture brings together artists and intellectuals to discuss the relationship between art, race, institutions and the legacy of colonialism. It addresses decolonization in the broadest sense of the term: as an acknowledgment of colonial legacies in the present, as an ongoing system of oppression, and as a practice of affirming different forms of repressed knowledge. The invited speakers will explore decolonial methodologies in the museum and gallery, ways to critically interact with the colonial past, and how third world feminisms have used revolutionary socialism.