Diafragma, international photography and visual arts festival, Covilhã 2021, proposes an alternative view of everything that surrounds us, a place that is a stimulus to diéerent «ways of seeing» (J. Berger), a place of interventions and revelations. Culture is also made of diéerences. A diéerence that time and space, chaos and order seek ceaselessly to understand.

The theme we chose for this year’s festival is “There is only one land”, a theme that refers to multiple readings. More than invoking the need to êght for the protection of the environment, against climate change, it also refers to the reëection on everything that man leaves as a mark on the earth; it demands for you to look at yourself as an
earthly being and think about contributing to a better and more digniêed world which protects life in all its forms and manifestations.

Including work from twenty-two artists and two groups of talented young people, students from Campos de Melo and Quinta das Palmeiras secondary schools, in exhibitions spread over four of the municipality’s cultural spaces: Galeria de Exposiçoes Tinturaria (Tinturaria Art Gallery) Museu de Lanifícios /UBI , Wool Museum /UBI, Biblioteca Municipal (Municipal Library), in Covilhã, and Casa de Cultura José Marmelo e Silva, in Paul.

O Silêncio da Terra problematizes the photographic archive of the Diamond Company of Angola, constituted with the explicit objective of documenting the civilizational mission undertaken in Lunda, between 1917 and 1974.

The ambiguity of the exhibition’s title – O Silêncio da Terra – is combined with the ambiguity of the image of colonial photography.This Exhibition – which unfolds in twospaces, Galeria do Paço and Museu Nogueira da Silva – invites the viewer to broaden one’s gaze and to live dialectically with the diéerent sides of what one sees and what is given to see.

These images of colonial photography are confronted by counter-narratives oéered by post-colonial art, exposing the contradictions of the instituted narratives. Thus, creating tensions and loopholes that resonate with visual artefacts. Creating a dynamic where in the eyes of the present, returns an unênished past full of incomplete relationships and
open questions.

The exhibition at Galeria do Paço is conceived in dialogical and critical terms between the selection of the photographic archive, which are intercepted by a set of art works delving into issues related to memories, colonial and post-colonial narratives and discourses surrounding late Portuguese and European colonialism. Through the proposal of an intercepted reading between photographs in their archival and colonial dimension and contemporary art, the exhibition highlights it’s inspiration of the concept of ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) conducive to the (re) negotiation of meanings creating multiple perspectives and temporalities.

Featured artists:
Alida Rodrigues, Ângela Ferreira, Catarina Simão, Délio Jasse, Filipa César, Francisco
Vidal, Henrique Neves Lopes, Irineu Destourelles, Kiluanji Kia-Henda, Marilu Námoda,
Mónica de Miranda, Nuno Nunes-Ferreira, René Tavares, Rita Rainho / Ângelo Lopes.

Adopting the Deleuzian idea of the fold as a desire of change (1993), The Fold(s) is a curatorial project composed of four books operating as four individual exhibitions by Carolina Grilo Santos, Joana Patrão, Mónica de Miranda, and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Under the artistic direction of Luísa Santos, The Fold(s) was developed in the context of the Seminar in Curatorship by the MA and PhD students in Culture Studies of The Lisbon Consortium, Faculty of Human Sciences, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Participants
Luísa Santos, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Joana Patrão, Mónica de Miranda, Carolina Grilo Santos, Ilaria Sponda, Jeanne Pasque, Manon Klein, Agustina O’Farrell, Victoria Page , Alexandra Tavares Agostinho, Ana Carvalho, Anaïs Jung, Brian Jay de Lima Ambulo, Denise Wieslhuber, Gloria Adu-Kankam, Joana Flor Rato, João Carvalha

SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY

A partly fictionalised, partly documentary portrait, this exhibition-installation-film displays places between ruin and the forest, between the utopian visions of the modernist avant-garde and the post-fall images of Socialism and its ideologies. The past reappears transformed into the present, in a transcendent process of rebirth that, in its ethereal quality, has the potential to travel again from today to tomorrow.

The exhibition proposes a territorial, urban and architectural reading, calling for a series of plans, projects and works considered relevant and qualified, of which there are significant records. This reading takes place through a series of documentary, technical and artistic material that allows a structured and open understanding of the proposed ecologies, integrating a cartographic interpretation of the municipality, extensive archival material from public and private institutions, works of art that open reëections about this territory and artistic and investigative projects
carried out especially for the exhibition

Curated by
Luís Santiago Baptista
Paula Melâneo

The MNAC presents a selection of the most recent works from the MNAC collection, whose entry is due to acquisitions and donations made in the last decade. Curatorship: Adelaide Ginga, Emília Tavares.