Pondering the identity of the territory encompassing Galicia and Northern Portugal, the exhibition The Sylvan and Harsh North, curated by Filipa Ramos and Juan Luis Toboso, at Galeria Municipal do Porto, features works by artists and collectives focusing on themes such as landscape, mythology, traditional stories, connections between these trans-border locations, and how these universes influence their artistic practices. Switching between different mediums such as sculpture, installation, video and drawing, the exhibition unveils a new imagination that, inspired by tales, speculative ethnographies and faux anthropologies, questions the territory and builds new fictions. By mapping the Iberian Northwest as a space of authentic creativity, specific references and idiosyncratic imaginations, The Sylvan and Harsh North is not intended, according to the curators, “to nostalgically praise an ancient history of quaint details, nor to draw a time capsule of ancestral rurality, but rather to recognise an identity in permanent flux, knowing where it has its roots“.

This concern for the territory and the worries about the preservation and subsistence of nature are expressed in the playful installation Habitar a Floresta (2022) by Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves, an artistic duo influenced by animist thought, whose approach favours the landscape, tracing routes through the territory and recording and collecting its elements. The installation, paying special attention to the exhibition design, is an activation project, a forest space to inhabit, walk, ride, fly, stroll slowly, talk and watch[1]. We step through the fabric curtains, with vegetation illustrations on one side and animals on the other, serving as a backdrop, heralding and concealing the forest imagined by the artists. We join the vibrantly coloured glade with bushes where we can hide and swinging animals, sticks and wheels – traditional wooden toys – which, together with memory, culture and tradition, help us to get through the forest while avoiding obstacles. A world where animals, plants and humans coexist in harmony, as if they were one, in a piece that echoes the memory of an increasingly far-off place.

Bringing to GMP the seafaring realm and a new mythology he has recreated, Diego Vites presents the installation Cabria para Porto (2023) at a crossroads between ethnographic research and contemporary art. Through experimentation and analysing the vernacular architecture of the Cabrias, structures used for drying conger on the Costa da Morte (Galicia), Vites takes these functional and traditional devices, associated with a handmade work process, and brings them into the field of contemporary art, attributing them a new syntax. Representing a way of life connected to sea culture and the Galician people’s interaction with wild nature and a hostile climate, the Cabrias, widely documented since the Middle Ages, are still used nowadays as symbols of a culture resisting the global economy. Mimicking the last two Cabrias de Múxia working on the Galician coast, with their striking aesthetics and conger eels scaled and hung so that the nordés and the sun can dry them, Vites reenacts the conger eel’s artisanal conservation system, displaying inside the gallery a hefty, several-metre-high wooden structure built from logs which, set vertically and horizontally, form a large-scale scaffold.

Cabria para Porto is an exhibition and meeting point where Vites exhibits his own creative elements – sculptures and paintings of fishing communities – which, through a dialogue with works by other artists, assume new readings and meanings within the installation. As part of a collaborative relationship between the works of different authors, we go in and around Cabria, watching representations of congers in different materials, especially the Congrio wood sculpture by the artist’s father Santiago Vites, and the Debuxos congrio series by his mother Geles. Between signs related to seafaring iconography – ropes, fishing nets, shells and Styrofoam boxes from naval companies in which fish are preserved – Diego Vites adds, through a process of observation and collection, elements brought by the sea: from a bicycle saddle to clothes and shoes that wash up on the shore. In a reference to the Way of Saint James, these objects are joined by Paulino de Moraña’s Conxunto escultórico santos and five works by the sculptor Cândido Caneiro, which, in an exercise in art and sustainability, using recycled materials that have aged over time, testify to a deep connection with the land and its rural nature. Topping off the installation is the simplicity of the Colectivo NEG Internacional’s coloured papers which, like banners, mark out the cabria, unveiling random images from archives, drawings and annotations which are perfectly and formally integrated into the structure and, alongside the other works and authors, prompt reflection and debate on identity, anthropology and Galician craft traditions.

Salvador Cidrás and Vicente Blanco also tackle the territorial and social identity of north-west Iberia. In between art, crafts and design, Cidrás is exploring the possibilities of ceramics and textiles from a sculptural perspective, incorporating traditional Galician techniques, whilst updating its territory and history. With regard to the ceramic pieces, the hand-designed stoneware vases are modelled on improvised construction solutions from rural Galicia. Notable for their size, complexity, oddness and organic shapes resulting from the tension of the materials, the pieces feature shiny, glazed, pigmented surfaces with different textures, to which Cidrás introduces mosaic. His experimentation with different textures and the crudeness of the materials is shown in the textile works, made of pigmented plaster on warp, pieces made with intertwined threads and paint that delve into shape and colour narratives. Utilising the flexible base of the weave, Cidrás develops spatial relationships between the fabric’s texture and the plane of the gallery’s walls, in three creations that, when suspended, reveal themselves as transparent paintings. Calling into question notions of masculinity, freedom and deepening the way he builds his own identity in Galicia’s rural context, making his desire and existence invisible[2], Vicente Blanco’s five drawings reveal feelings of tension and vulnerability in portraits of dreams and fears inspired by the rural areas of northern Spain as a place of strength and resistance, of the wild and the harsh. Mariana Barrote’s grand mural Labaredas Silvestre (2023) also shows the symbiosis between nature and animals, a fictional narrative of mythical figures rising from the fire, inspired by Serra de Arga’s garrano horses. The power of the gesture and the motion of the brushstrokes are seen in the powerful drawings of these beings whose bodies float on the wall in acrylic paint. As a tribute to women, those who carve out worlds of excess under rocks and fountains[3], the hybrid creatures of female and equine bodies blending together form a relationship between the feminine and the animal that we can find once again in Alejandra Pombo Su’s pieces. Journeying through dreamlike visions and imaginations of people, animals and places through a sensory, animal, feminine and unutterable universe, we can see the artist’s colourful, naïve drawings[4] which, in dialogue with her makeshift sculptures of anthropomorphic figures on display at Cabria, establish an intense symbiosis between nature, animals and people. The relationship between the animal and the feminine, the mythological and the uncanny is also presented in the exhibition’s first work, the photographic portrait Maruja Mallo com manto de algas (1945), a performative work by the Spanish artist who, dressed in seaweed, displays a morphing body, turning into a hybrid, oceanic being.

The second floor of the exhibition is home to the short film Noite sem distância (2015) by Lois Patiño, an experimental fiction film exploring the history of smuggling on the border between Galicia and northern Portugal. Between silences and pauses, the colour negative images give us a night vision that transforms bodies into ghosts and adds a spectral aura to the landscape. The careful observation of nature, its phenomena, the relevance of the landscape and its modifications are present in Adataberna’s sculptural apparatus El Pensadero (2019-2022), the artist’s personal archive and memories, whose objects recall the depiction of time and the notion of finitude. The highlight, on the last floor of the exhibition, is the installation Flor-Fantasma- Díptico (2022) by Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, a dual slideshow on dyed silk panels which, like translucent drapes, reveal floating beings of shadow and light. The duo’s shared interest in thinking about the image-light and translucent colour, and in projecting levitating plant forms, fluid and organic spirits, comes to life in the work. As we move through the installation, the moving image of a flower-face pops up between our footsteps in an exhibition that, in permanent synergy with the natural elements, reveals different voices and accents that tell us about identity as a place.

The Sylvan and Harsh North is on show at Galeria Municipal do Porto until March 10, 2024.

[1] The Sylvan and Harsh North, exhibition text.
[2] Idem.
[3] Idem.
[4] The series is part of a larger collection of dozens of drawings to be presented during the exhibition at three different times.