From a collective and emancipatory standpoint, the exhibition forms of the surrounding futures, curated by João Laia and on show at Galeria Municipal do Porto, offers an alignment of different positions, narratives and agencies which, through a nonconformist kinship, embody themselves in the present, shaping new possibilities and promoting the rise of multiple futures. By reacting to, resisting and counteracting the current scenario of permanent crises – permacrisis -, by incorporating and promoting plural narratives, the exhibition reveals an imagination that anticipates potential futures and conceptualises the present time as a transitional and changing moment.

Through a collective plea for imagination, the exhibition honours what is to come through a curatorial proposal that defies prevailing narratives by adopting “an expanded queer perspective”. Building a community that embraces more than what we already know and identify with, whilst devising other ways of being and existing in the world, are actions pervading the exhibition, stressing João Laia’s expanded concept of queer as a transformative process. Agreeing with Cuban-American theorist and academic José Esteban Muñoz, according to whom “Queer, if it wishes to be politically meaningful, must be more than an identity marker and express an undaunted futurity”, and geographer Natalie Oswin’s reading of Kath Browne’s investigation, for whom “queer poses a challenge to the norm by working beyond the powers and controls that enforce normativity, triggering radical ways of (re)thinking, (re)drawing, (re)conceptualising, (re)mappings that could redo bodies, spaces and geographies”, Laia combines these concepts with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of alterity, grouping and embracing the “sexualised, racialised and naturalised Others” within a non-normative affinity. “From this angle, queer embraces it all: queer is a non-normative way of being more than a specific entity (…) It is queer as a way of uniting instead of fracturing.”

The organic and multi-faceted nature of choosing artists and works echoes one of the curator’s ambitions: to gather through diversity, not by collecting the same agencies, positions or histories, but by “grouping roles that essentially share a non-normative nature, constructing a collective through these differences”. Part of the project forms of the surrounding futures, curated by Laia for the twelfth edition of the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2023), and after its stint at the Kunsthalle Münster – where it is on show until August 4 – the exhibition has its third iteration at Galeria Municipal do Porto, with eleven artists from the twenty-five original cast, with the curator stressing how “interesting it is that the exhibition does not become a permanent object, but materialises itself in different ways and times”.

The three-channel video installation Pervasive Light (2021) by Sandra Mujinga stands out as a sensory and thematic introduction to the exhibition, where, in a dark-dominated room, we watch the sombre profile of the protagonist who vanishes and reappears to the beat of electronic music. On the edge between visibility and invisibility, the work throws us into an Afrofuturist setting, through which it tackles concepts of presence and the political potential of absence, raising hypervisibility and invisibility as key conditions for perceptions and experiences of blackness.

From the first piece’s darkness, we return to light, albeit not in its natural state. Playing with the outside light – reducing it -, GMP’s windows were equipped with filters to achieve a “luminous environment, both familiar and alien”, which the curator found interesting as part of the storytelling experience. Under a sombre light, like an eclipse, we were drawn to the yellow, vigorous, feverish and radioactive colour of P. Staff’s site-specific installation On Venus (2019). Flooding a small room with a mirrored floor, the yellow light generates a mysterious mood heightened by the combined sound effects and image sequence of the artist’s visual essay. With a psychedelic feel, we see images of animal abuse and a poetic ode to queer life paralleled by Venus, a planet whose hostile environment appears to hold out possibilities for transformation while creating fairer futures.

Environmental settings, the relationship with the earth and ancestry are all addressed in Ana Vaz’s Atomic Garden (2018) and Spell on you! (2020); Spell on Me! (2024) by Sámi Outi Pieski, works that look at life and death cycles, the resilience of nature and holistic cosmologies as metaphors for envisioning futures. Fukushima’s nuclear and environmental catastrophe and its virtual invisibility is addressed in Ana Vaz’s experimental film, in which she attempts a “stroboscopic reflection” on transmutation, metamorphosis and survival, through ecstasy and a correlation between flowers, plants and fireworks. The visual and auditory pace of the work spreads to Outi Pieski’s subtle and dynamic installation which, with its fragile and poetic expression, adopts the Sámi Duodji craft technique as a way of fighting, resisting and honouring the identity of a people. Staging a clash between a plethora of hand-woven knots in black thread and a complementary brightly coloured composition, the three-dimensional, floating paintings construct a landscape reminiscent of an indigenous people’s invisible history, a throwback to their ancestry and the importance of the relationship between humans, animals and nature.

Floating between dream and reality, Rodrigo Hernández’s Anche di notte (1) (2022) – two large brass panels manually hammered by the artist – douses us in a silent, devotional atmosphere of contemplation inspired by twilight magic. Drifting between stars and planets, a vampire and human figures, smoothly outlined against bright golden backgrounds, provide us with an imagined perception of the world, in the artist’s hint of a yet-to-be-reached horizon. Standing nearby, taking centre stage, is María Jerez’s anthropomorphic and hybrid installation Yabba (2017-2024), an animated, smoky, breathing abstract presence which, constantly morphing, materialises as a volcanic landscape, an ill-defined body, shaped by shiny fabrics.

Issues of gender, sexual diversity and invisibility are addressed in Luiz Roque’s video essay S (2017). Shot in the São Paulo metro, as if to unveil what lies beneath Avenida Paulista, the b/w, poetic and dichotomous work expresses, using the visual language of dance, a revolutionary message from Jota Mombaça’s manifesto Towards a Gender Disobedient & Anti-Colonial Redistribution of Violence. The political dimension of S, the yearning for new utopias and social transformation, finds a perfect dialogue with Neon (2018-24) by the KEM collective, a sign whose pink triangle inside a green circle calls forth the queer struggle symbol, serving also as a marker for a safe space.

The relationship between humans and machines, plus a reflection on domination and submission, are examined in Osías Yanov’s installation Orphan Dance (2018-24), which, between a gym, an office and a nightclub, provides a ritualistic and meditative space, with robot hoovers as protagonists with which visitors can interact.

João Laia’s fascination with immersive exhibitions that holistically deal with the body is clear throughout the show, where sound, performance, dreams and contamination help us approach it as a lively organism, able to trigger multiple experiences, like a sort of sensory overdose. By offering cognitive, emotional and sensual ways of getting involved, the works on display operate bodily with the viewer, arousing all the senses and influencing the way we can imagine other narratives and forms of being in the world. Using light and soundscapes, the visitor is encouraged to partake in a theatrical piece in which their body is as central as the works on stage. This notion of contamination and contagion, emphasised by the crossing and overlapping of sounds from various works – as in life – persists in the second exhibition on the gallery’s upper floor. Embracing a hybrid form, the group exhibition includes Nave Geo-Celestial, Joana da Conceição’s first institutional and solo exhibition in Portugal. Suggesting magical approaches to the unknown and viewing life as a continuous stream in which the body melts away, the exhibition introduces us to multi-sensory settings in which the viewer is asked to activate their senses. Through a collective appeal to the imagination, we dive into an immersive and performative stage where the living diversity of the universe is celebrated in works such as Drifters, “echoing the obscure depths of the oceans and their connection to the shifting tectonic plates, and Cosmic Solipsism“, a multimedia installation that calls on us to slow down, leave our bodies behind and admire abstract paintings in dialogue with lights and choreographed soundscapes. As the exhibition deals with the absence of borders and the limits between spaces, so too Joana da Conceição’s alchemical and metamorphic paintings, part of the Rave da Terra, Terreiro and Index sections, spread outwards from their media, acquiring autonomy through a constant metamorphosis that mesmerises us, honing our ability to conceive cosmologies and worlds to come.

forms of the surrounding futures is showing at Galeria Municipal do Porto until 15 September, 2024.