Botany and visual anthropology paved the way for AnneMarie Maes’ practice to encounter the most varied forms of life. Her multidisciplinary work, driven by a scientific and alchemical curiosity, is always the result of continuous observation and close contact with different territories, their particularities and organisms. Using biological, digital or traditional means, Maes turns her studio into a laboratory, where she experiments with bringing non-human existences – especially insects, bacteria or lichens – and their creative processes to the centre of her artistic research.

This was the practice developed by the artist last year in the grounds surrounding Casa de Mateus (House of Mateus). Located in Vila Real, the Foundation, which works in the areas of heritage, culture and education, offered the ideal setting and conditions to host her travelling Laboratory of Form and Matter. In dialogue with scientists and other creators, facilitated by the School of Transitions project – a Casa de Mateus Foundation device for promoting the study, reflection and testing of a possible and just climate, ecological and digital transition -, AnneMarie Maes gathered impressions of the House’s various micro-environments throughout the various seasons of the year. From these countless multi-species interactions emerged the exhibition Matter of Kinship, whose works explore self-generative methods of creation while weaving new stories about the Foundation’s space and the many relationships it encompasses.

On 26 April, at 6pm, the exhibition catalogue will be launched – with contributions from Anne-Marie Maes, Alvaro García de Zúñiga, Luc Steels, Teresa Albuquerque and Jonathan Minchin – and issue #88 of Umbigo, dedicated to the themes of Biophilia – what would be an innate affinity between human beings and nature – and Freedom – on the 50th anniversary of 25 April. This issue of the magazine includes a visual essay by AnneMarie Maes, an extension of the artist’s experience in dialogue with the Foundation’s natural territory.