Dissemination

CIAC researcher publishes twice in Umbigo magazine

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Ana Isabel Soares has two of her texts published in Umbigo online magazine no. 3: ‘Tecnosfera’ and ‘Mar Deserto — Oxímoros para uma ausência’.

Ana Isabel’s texts relate her experiences and her view of the art exhibitions she has visited. ‘What, after all, is an oxymoron?’ is her first text to be published, which aims to address the exhibition “Mar Deserto — Oxymorons”. Her vision of the work, in an excerpt from the text: ‘Mar Deserto acts on the variability of dimensions. On the one hand, it includes oversized pieces, such as the three by Mouro (it’s their spatial and functional displacement that makes them so large, but the sense they make in the exhibition goes through this deviation); on the other hand, it presents elements that almost go unnoticed, in their smallness or the subtlety with which they articulate with the waves of earth and sand — this is the case with the Alfarrobas Caiadas by Filipa Tojal (n. 1993), whose time at the Tokyo University of the Arts seems to be reflected in her attention to the minimal, the ephemeral, and her embracing of the tools used to make them as aesthetic objects: the first piece in the exhibition are the brushes she made from palm leaves and esparto, with which she created a series of delicate drawings — or rather, testimonies to the relationship her hand established with the pigments of the earth, lime, acrylic, and the paper that now supports them. The pigments are lime and earth, but the resulting tones are predominantly green: another oxymoron? The colour of the earth contains within it the colour of what arises from it, or of what emanates from it (like the sea or a lake that once stood where the Serra do Caldeirão stands today).’

‘The technosphere, according to Rodrigo Gomes’ is his second text to be published about the exhibition: “Tecnosfera” by Rodrigo Gomes. Another extract from his text: ‘Texture was the first word that occurred to me as I left the space of the Convento de Santo António, in Loulé, after visiting the exhibition Tecnosfera, by Rodrigo Gomes (b. 1991). It’s curious how ideas stick to what we perceive of the world through words. Some kind of cerebral magma gives rise to them — or something else digs them out of it. The gaps in the old convent, its floor and walls, help build the notion of texture. But why does this word come up in connection with a series of pieces generated in the work on notions (and practices) of technology, which I usually associate with abstractions, the absence of concreteness, the non-palpable (and therefore what doesn’t allow for touch, the knowing of textures)?’

These productions by Ana Isabel Soares will appear in the third edition of Umbigo online magazine (print edition), which will be launched on 7 October 2024 in Lisbon and 8 October 2024 at the Gama Lobo Palace in Loulé.

More information (here).

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