The group exhibition Profanações is part of the Territórios cycle, the third instalment of this programme resulting from an alliance between Bruno Marchand, Fidelidade Arte and Culturgest. With each new exhibition, a new territory is ploughed under the research and process of a different curator.

Curated this time by David Revés, the chosen territory touches on profanity, the sacred, freedom and the expanse of the real. The exhibition is theoretically based on the book “Profanations” by Giorgio Agamben, borrowing its title. The exhibition includes a range of works, documents and objects ranging from esotericism to sexuality, ritual and identity.

The inspiration in Giorgio Agamben starts with the exhibition’s introductory text, with graphics resembling the instructions for a traditional board game. In the chapter “An Eulogy of Profanation”, of the book that lends its title to the exhibition, Agamben reflects on games as acts of profanation, as most derive from religious rituals. To give an example, the author cites that playing football replicates the struggle of the gods for the sun, that games of chance stem from oracular practices, and that chess was used as a divination instrument[1].

Walking into the exhibition is like entering a secret cellar, graced by Christine Henry’s suspended sculpture Ciclos (2022), made of wire, wood and bones. Mysticism is immediately felt, either in the dim light of the exhibition area or in the echo of the small drops heard in the distance.

Sonja Alhäuser provides the first contemplative moment in the middle of the first room with her installation Rotweinbrunnen(2017), a red wine fountain festooned with several putti[2] carved from white chocolate and margarine. The dripping wine splashes the ground around it, also staining the figures that embellish the fountain blood red. The place where water would normally come out under pressure from a hidden spring is now a wine fountain. The fountain symbolises the sacred, connected to mythologies that ascribe to it the miracle-working properties of eternal youth. However, the water transformed into wine evokes the god Dionysus, life’s joys and the unpredictable disinhibition brought on by its consumption. This worldly sentiment is heightened by the randomness of nature, which has taken it upon itself to lead a series of flies to the fountain, lured by its sweetness. The installation is enshrined as a living vanitas happening before our eyes.

This entire first room is dotted with eight circular paintings by Francisca Sousa, reminiscent of the erotic BDSM realm, explicitly displaying the flesh and blood of the characters dwelling on the canvas. Isabel Cordovil also presents the poetic photograph Bloody Goliath (2023) and Mariana Gomes the painting Sem título (2023), a composition of sinuous shapes between abstraction and figuration.

The following section is built around two conflicting visions of our relationship with nature. Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, on the one hand, introduce from an eco-feminist perspective the project they have developed over nine years in nine countries: Ecosexual Weddings. To forge a mutual and more sustainable relationship with nature, Annie and Beth arranged twenty-one weddings, where anyone could join in the ceremony, focused on taking vows with several natural entities. To summarise the project, the video features weddings between the attendees and entities such as the earth, the sky, the moon, the snow and the sun. Every entity is related to specific colours and materials. Participants adjust to the celebration with their own customs, music and rituals, which include performances, dancing and poetry reading. Dealing with nature by connecting it to the symbolism of marriage – a conservative ceremony rooted in religion – is surely peculiar and transformative as far as notions of sexuality and ecology are concerned.

António da Silva, on the other hand, addresses nature from an anthropocentric standpoint with Eremita (2020), positioning himself as the main driving force behind the natural environment’s fertilisation and harmony. A male character in the video walks through the landscape narrating and reflecting on his condition, while sexually explicitly interacting with the soil and its elements. Whilst Annie and Beth had previously envisaged a state of equality with nature, António da Silva demonstrates how relations of domination between humans and nature are clearly still in place in the contemporary world.

The discourse on sexuality and pleasure stretches into the next room with two drawings by Ramus Myrup Homo Homo Eretus (in the Grass) and Homo Homo Erectus (Forest Fuck). This section is also filled with historical pieces related to contemporary ones, such as a stone sculpture by an unknown author (15th-16th century) and a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, The Whore of Babylon(1497-98).

Alchemy permeates the room in the video-essay Viriditas (2019-2020) by Jol Thoms, a study of modern practices of extraction, exploitation, desacralisation and colonial rule. Making use of illustrations and historical documents on alchemy, the artist brings together a non-linear space-time, alternating ancestral images with others recalling contemporary tech. Jol Thoms simultaneously delves into the great concept under which video is developed, viriditas, meaning vitality, fecundity, lushness, greenness and growth.

Still in this room, the Pedreira collective, known for its transfeminist, hybrid and experimental artistic style, is showing the installation Banhas com Água al Dente (2023), consisting of three elements. The first is a clay pot “bathed in brandy, fire, lemon, apple, sugar and coffee beans during the damnation of the burning brethren”[3] on a classical column. The other two, spread out in two different parts of the room, are similarly sinuous to the previous one, and are described as “mineraloid amulets imbued with the binomials of the cistem”[4].. Ritualistic practice, poetry and irony render the collective’s artistic expression sacred.

The last section of the exhibition is characterised by the occult and spirituality. Documents illustrating these practices are displayed in a glass case, such as the Almanach da Bruxa D’Arruda: magica, espiritismo, sonambulismo, feiticeira e cartomancia (1909) and the Revista de Espiritualismo: Publicação Mensal de Cultura Psiquica e Filosófica (1929). In the centre of the room, the Plastique Fantastique collective appropriates this knowledge by setting up a table that simulates a Tarot reading of the Plastique Fantastique Science Fictioning: Your Future in Foolish Memes (2023), with which we can interact. The gestures of freedom continue in Paulo Serra’s painting, Pedro Moreira’s installation and the animism invoked by Igor Jesus’ photography.

Odete rounds off the exhibition with her mesmerising laughter, but not only that. For her sound installation Sorry/Sorrow (2023), Odete encourages us to stop, sit down and listen to her whispering voice as she narrates the historical atrocities that befell people accused of sodomy, having homosexual relations or being transgender. Her whispering is simultaneously a cry, emphasising the urgency of preventing the violence of the past from being carried on into the present.

Just as Agamben said, the sacred and the profane are two poles, and the artistic practices in the exhibition fluidly move between one and the other. Turning the sacred into the profane is passing on to the human realm what was once divine, and this reinvention of gestures is what gives life to the territory created by David Revés, which is certainly a Eulogy to Profanation.

The exhibition Profanações is on show at Fidelidade Arte until 1 September 2023, and at Culturgest Porto from 30 September to 14 January (opening on 29 September at 22:00).

[1] Georgio Agamben (2007). Profanações. Boitempo: São Paulo. pág.59.

[2] Child figures frequently depicted naked in mythological and religious paintings or sculptures, particularly in the Renaissance and Baroque.

[3] Information taken from the Profanations exhibition text..

[4] Idem.