Numerous ghosts haunt Coimbra’s Santa Clara-a-Nova Monastery, but the biggest is freedom itself, the chief poetic subject of the fifth edition of Anozero – Coimbra Biennial, this year curated by Marta Mestre and Ángel Calvo Ulloa.

With more artists and official venues – this year there are seven different locations throughout the city – the Biennale presents itself as a storyline of visions derived from environmental, political and ancestral narratives, and its title is inspired by the surrealist film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel, on the hundredth anniversary of André Breton’s artistic movement, the influences of which still affect the soul and practice of a multitude of artists around the world.

Just like the feature film, O Fantasma da Liberdade was split into 14 chapters, united by a different character; this feature is echoed in the Biennale’s composition, as it crosses and interconnects the many different presences beyond themes and spaces.

The exhibition, in fact, operates in porous layers: on the one hand, the surreal aspect – the spectres of imagination and the modification of reality – on the other, the shadow outlined by the tension created by the drive towards utopias and that freedom yearned for by humanity, which, nevertheless, has always been trapped in the nets of history and social conventions: the ideal is never satisfied.

There are ten projects specifically conceived for Anozero’24, including the public work set up in Pátio das Escolas, by Angolan artist Yonamine, and the in situ interventions on the Monastery walls by Spanish artists Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González. The biennial also brought major international art names to Coimbra, such as Cildo Meireles and Paulo Nazareth, at Centro de Artes Plásticas, and Jeremy Deller’s work will be on view in the Botanical Garden.

The surreal tone of the Biennale soon dawns at the Monastery’s entrance: visitors are greeted by birdsong, but it’s not based on any animal form: it’s Imitating the sound of the birds (1979), by French artist Robert Filliou, a Fluxus adherent who has always worked on the threshold of the fantastic, whilst reminding us how the forms of every visual art constitute a simulacrum of reality, an exacerbation of language or, as Plato wrote, an inexact replica of existence.

Still in the realm of hauntings, Bárbara Fonte’s works (Morte de um opositor and Tratamento farmacológico da paranóia, among others) shed light on the relationship between life and power, emphasizing the dynamics of submission, bringing to mind Michel Foucault’s treatise Discipline and Punishment. Not by chance, the artist shot some of the videos presented here exactly in the same Monastery rooms, a place that, as we remember, sheltered somewhat unusual nuns, in other words, forced by their families to take their vows and, soon after, became a military barracks during the dictatorship.

There is another surreal element to the Biennale in the powerful sound reverberation of a whistle blowing twice a day: Spanish artist Berio Molina has installed a ship’s horn, Dislocación (2022), on the edge of the Monastery’s hill, as a reminder of Portugal’s sailing past in a part of the country where no sea is found. This absurdity also calls attention to what is happening where the Biennial is being held until June 30.

João Marçal’s A parte dos anjos is the starring intervention in Santa Clara-a-Nova Cistern. In this piece commissioned by the Bienal, Marçal offers us “abstract-sentimental” paintings based on seat patterns and architectural lines that recall both the interiors of Portuguese trains and old wallpapers: a creative act that becomes invisible, a ghost of the very concept of authorship.

Two striking installations seemingly in dialogue with each other are Susanne Themlitz’s E lá dentro. Vento (2024), on the first floor of the Monastery, and Felipe Feijão’s Estrutura (2019-2024), in the Tower. Launched before the pandemic, Estrutura is meant to never end, as it changes according to the venues hosting it and also to the artist’s own will: a reflection on the creative act, involving architectural elements that have no function whatsoever, including beams from houses that were knocked down by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. E lá dentro. Vento. inhabits a more specific environment, where human and ghostly presences connect, creating sounds and visual labyrinths, and distorting perceptions between the internal and the external.

Teresa Lanceta, outside the Monastery in Sala da Cidade, displays a group of works forming El Raval (2019-2021). Inspired by Madrid’s gypsy quarter and featuring stitched fabrics and carpets, the installation is an affective inheritance from the artist’s memory of living there in the 1980s and, at the same time, drawing a historical parallel between the different and united political backgrounds of Spain and Portugal.

Cildo Meireles’ O Sanduíche muito branco (1966), the artist’s defining work which opens the route at the Centro de Artes Plásticas headquarters, is strangely reminiscent of situations where ghosts are found in daydreams, memories of one’s own origins and orientations: in fact, human beings, from the very beginning to the very end of their lives, are riddled with spectres!

Speaking of never-resolved utopias and the spirits of the past, Paulo Nazareth’s video installation Antropologia do Negro (2014) takes us back to the time of colonialism and slavery: the artist’s head, lying on the floor, is topped by dozens of skulls, metaphorically carrying both the weight of his ancestors’ suffering and all the identities erased in the name of blind power.

Stepping back in time but retaining the same force, there is a beautiful tribute to Luis Cília, an Angolan singer who became a naturalized Portuguese citizen and whose lyrics condemned the 1960s colonial war in his homeland, connecting it to Ilídio Candja Candja’s beautiful work, a Mozambican artist who created a large installation for the Biennial called Pregador de almas, updating parts of colonial history through paintings, bricks that will return to the earth, and clay objects.

At Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, Fundação Altice is presenting two installations by artists Ana Vieira and Martinha Maia in the exhibition Entre Espaços, designed to provide an interpretation of the concept of freedom in contemporary art, inspired – naturally – by the Anozero’24 motto. In Pronomes (2001), Ana Vieira, who passed away in 2016, carves human silhouettes using black suits. No bodies, but rather volatile presences populating the room; ghosts with identities belonging to our imagination: who wore those clothes? Where is that figure looking? The idea of a human being vanishes, hiding and unveiling our true essence through an absence of physical boundaries. Fato II by Martinha Maia (2004) calls for an action-performance of the human body in space. Using a clothing structure that becomes both an obstacle and a determining element – with its unprecedented range of hindrances or movements -, it proposes a reflection on the paradoxes of freedom, “in the courage to be ourselves, with authenticity although vulnerable”.

In sum, an evanescent atmosphere seems to permeate this Biennale, surrounded by the finesse of sometimes fleeting works, acting as if in a labyrinth, between different perceptions. Yet, today, the Monastery is facing a new ghost: gentrification, an attempt to convert it into a five-star hotel, putting an end to the Biennale and creating yet another dismal haunting of the country’s and Europe’s culture.

The middle finger in the digital animation Una vez más, by Brazilian artist Regina Silveira, is perhaps the most appropriate reply to the ghosts that today still limit freedom in dozens of places around the world and in thousands of different forms. Fortunately, art – at least! – occasionally tries to tackle dread.