Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas (MACE) celebrated its fifteenth anniversary two years ago. It was a major city-wide event, bordered by baroque walls and lined with medieval streets and alleys. From Forte da Graça, just a few kilometres from the centre, to the Castle; from the restored Museum to the inspiring cistern, Elvas cemented a new role for itself on the Portuguese arts map, forging partnerships with private collectors and Spanish institutions, as dictated by good practice in the region. The city council is largely credited for this, but António Cachola and Ana Cristina Cachola are indeed the ones who, with their collection and curators, have been able to enliven the city and the culture produced in Portugal – organising, influencing and offering the city the selfless enjoyment of contemporary art. In the confines of centre and periphery, coast and interior, mainland and islands, they both came up with a concept that radically overhauls these concepts and schisms, through a strong and vital collective and associative endeavour.

Festa da Arte em Rede da Região do Alentejo, aptly translated into the acronym FARRA (PARTY in English), was precisely that: a celebration of all the lessons learnt in 2022, of Portuguese collecting, now public and private, with new commissions and the opportunity to set new goals for cultural policies in Portugal, of a more or less regional, more or less peninsular, more or less European nature. Elvas, in fact, is part of this concept that has yet to be properly explored and clarified from a practical standpoint, called “Eurocity Elvas-Badajoz-Campo Maior”. FARRA may be a relevant opportunity in this field, as it is a focus for the cultural renewal of the European base project, more visible in the cross-border ramifications and permeability than in the large coastal centres.

Ranging from the institutional to the independent, from the public to the private, from modern to contemporary art, from Portugal to the world and the other way around, 30 exhibition projects are on display, with more than a hundred artists, in locations that recognise Elvas’ unique heritage. Derelict or long-closed places open up to unexpected dialogues (Coleção AA Rialto 6 with Henrique Pavão’s intriguing work); churches embrace a certain religiosity, rituality and ancestry found in some of the works and artists (Coleção José Carlos Santana Pinto with Haris Epaminonda’s piece at Igreja da Ordem dos Terceiros – a surprising dialogue in its very nature and context); occupied by Appleton – Associação Cultural, the old cinema and theatre presents the work Empire by Rui Toscano, the collective exhibition of Balaclava Noir, the Margarida Appleton Library project, as well as part of the dynamic programme of performances, video and sound (Gisela Casimiro and Maria do Mar, David Maranha and Manuel Mota, Vitalina Sousa, Nuno Sousa Vieira – who extends Appleton’s productions to the Military Museum); former military facilities uncover other possibilities beyond bellicose memories (ZDB, with the interesting dialogue between Mané Pacheco and the Military Museum collection, where the cloister is used as a centre for activities, exhibitions and performances – João Marçal included in the O Armário project, and Carolina Pimenta, Nikolai Nekh and the duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in the Spirit Shop project); elementary schools are given the chance to informally learn through art (the proposals from the artist-run space Uma Certata Falta de Coerência and the tripartite curatorial proposal between Rua das Gaivotas 6, Pós-Graduação em Arte Sonora: Processos Experimentais and Electronic Warfare).

Faced with the dizzying range of exhibitions available and the required brevity of the article, the focus is on three key moments in FARRA’s programme, honouring Portuguese collecting, the commission specifically developed for this event and a brief anthology of works by a single artist within a single collection.

Jarra Humana – Works from the State Contemporary Art Collection, at MACE

The venue that usually accommodates Coleção António Cachola, this time hosts the State Contemporary Art Collection, under a healthy practice of municipal hospitality.

From the outside, Lea Managil’s irony spells out the attempt at a dialogue, an intonation, a forthcoming debate. Handless, armless and bodiless, her finger taps the microphone, and the sound warns us about this Jarra Humana formed by multiple bodies, props, gadgets, idiosyncrasies, stories and identities that are daily materialised, and questioned. Managil’s work cannot speak. However, with its silent voice, with the urgency brought about by the repetitive tapping of the finger on the microphone, the longing for the question dawns on us: what does it mean to be human? What can a severed finger, detached from the rest of the organism and imbued with all the possibilities of art, science and intuition, say about me? Of my ways and mannerisms, of the strengths and shortcomings that make body and mind vibrate, of the social structures and family networks that shape or liberate me. And, after that, what does this flat, smooth, gleaming object, used to reach someone, say about the hands that touched and built it, about the humanity it embodies?

Sandra Vieira Jürgens and Francisca Portugal’s curatorial work is accordingly a poetic essay that delves into the humanity of minor and grand gestures, of subjectivities and collective motions that take shape, grow apart, construct and deconstruct over time, in a fragmented, multiple timeline in which matter seems to take precedence, without any sort of judgement, over spirit.

As such, Jarra Humana is bound to be a document of a complex period, which forces us to reassess the many cosmovisions (or cosmopolitics) that touch us, permeate us and become the re-founders of that (post-)humanity in us, where prosthetics appear to be more human than flesh, animals more sincere than human, technology more absolute than life.

Plural, aesthetically diverse and conceptually wide-ranging, we find here signs of the post-digital (Daniel Blaufuks and Gabriel Abrantes), post-colonial or de-colonial (Mónica de Miranda and Ângela Ferreira), queer (João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira), feminist or feminine (Helena Lapas, Flávia Vieira, Sara Graça, Inês Zenha) condition. The objects of everyday life breathe worldliness, zeal, care (Bruno Zhu), expectation (Dalila Gonçalves), domesticity (Ana Pérez-Quiroga), small rituals, the presence and absence of bodies, spectres, humans and non-humans (Hernâni Reis Baptista), the terrific shadows of living rooms, bedrooms, strange bodies (Pedro Huet).

Jarra Humana is a profound, critical reflection on humanity and, ultimately, on humanism, when art used to be the noblest and most accurate representation of these values, not only because of what it represents (a face, a hand, a connection or affection, a look or frown, a construction or ruin), but also because of the sheer technical, poetic and poietic essence of artistic praxis – in other words, how this artistic praxis and its objects, metamorphoses and images can tell us about the mysterious thing that is the ghost in the shell.

A place called under, by Isabel Cordovil – Coleção António Cachola

Isabel Cordovil’s A place called under takes us back to the finite nature of life, in an age when the entire global technological and media system traps us in an infinite present, with no past or future, in which death is routinely cancelled out in favour of the immediate moment. This present holds us to an idea of infinity and immortality, corrupts the eschatological and decrepit temporality of our bodies, and freezes us in contemporary techno-scientific and chimerical cryogenics, which endlessly extends the present in its images and strategies of short-term gratification. François J. Bonnet argues in After Death that “‘tautological living’ – the instant consumed for its own sake and benefit – plunges us into perpetual oblivion, overwhelmed as we are by this presentism.” And thus we forget death. Our death. The death of life. And that the future is death. Any hedonistic rendition of the saying Carpe Diem is wrong or incomplete: we seize the day because tomorrow brings death. Death is always there, in the present, in the future, in experiencing the days to the full.

The cistern’s staircase – a place that is open to any creative, enormous, scenic, lyrical reverie – draws on a whole sequence of images that are older than us. These are biblical images, now turned into water and stone; images pulled from classical literature – from Homer to Dante, from Camões to the oral tradition of the Nordic sagas – brought to mind and breathed into a restless and wandering spirit as it descends – as it falls – towards the cistern’s solitary, watery abyss.

On the step down into the water, we are almost urged to continue the descent, wetting our feet, and our bodies, soaking in this oil-black water. Two boats float motionless on the still water in the background. A red halo slides open like a portal to another dimension. Given the physical absence of characters, we are the ones who place them there and imagine them. Charon is leading us on the definitive after-death journey; at the edge of the swamp, Rusalka is begging the witch and her father to turn her into a mortal creature so that she can follow her beloved prince; Hades is surrounded by the River Styx, Cocytus, Acheron and Leth; the figures portrayed by William Blake, Gustave Doré; the solitary sailor of the symbolist Arnold Böcklin, escorting the dead man wrapped and adorned in white drapery, who passively stares the Isle of the Dead in the face.

Cordovil’s work, commissioned by Coleção António Cachola and curated by Ana Cristina Cachola, is a mournful yet serene and inspiring journey through the history of Western art and culture. There is nothing morbid about it, just something real, reminiscent, as the curator emphasises, of the Latin expression Ars Moriendi, or the art of dying. And, like everything that requires two opposing realities to make sense, by emphasising the intensity of death, it stresses the intensity of life.

A place called under is a striking moment in the exhibition series and a must-see, the experience of which melts away any scepticism about the symbolist weight of the subject matter, in which art, the architecture of the place and Time meet to bring us back to the transience of the body, memory and spirit.

Pedro Valdez Cardoso in Coleção Figueiredo Ribeiro – Abrantes

Collectors seldom gather such a vast number of works by one artist. Whilst this is neither a retrospective nor an anthology undertaken by the artist, de formas mudadas em novos corpos, with Ricardo Escarduça as curator, it is, however, an opportunity to explore in-depth and variety a substantial part of Valdez Cardoso’s oeuvre – an author whose work offers one of the most interesting insights into contemporaneity and appropriation, falsification, fictionalisation, pretence, transformation and the mutation that this alien age makes of the signs and meanings that fill Western global culture, whose plasticity is also challenging and tangential to the themes it addresses (death, irony, post-truth, ritualistic celebrations, etc.).

Ultimately, as the curator says, Valdez Cardoso stands out for his “problematisation of identity, of I am this“.

This is an intricate work, in which any material or plastic expertise is followed by a dense archaeology of concepts, materials and knowledge, all of which are disguised, lined with something else, sewn together and glued to a substance that both seems to overturn the referential and seems to upend it or re-found it from another perspective, in another context, not far from the original, but radically and almost maliciously different. We are faced with a demiurge. This body slumped in a box: is it clad in real or counterfeit leather? Is this corpse adorned with damask fabric ethically reprehensible or not? The spirit: is it a consequence of material yearning or something transcendental? Capitalism: is it the limit state of human creation, and hence humanity’s natural conquest, or the bait we have concocted to distance ourselves from ourselves and others? History: is it prose or poetry, individual or collective endeavour, fact or fallacy? Construction or deconstruction?

Many objects simply happen. In Escarduça’s words, “the original and authentic truth is what happens on the way, and where being is its own process of being, it is the coming-to-be”.

The depletion of the sign and meaning of objects calls for a new re-signification. For the skull – object, thing, artifice, profuse element in Valdez Cardoso’s artistic catalogue -, in its ubiquity in media and culture, has lost its aura, its death and the life that existed alongside it.

The curatorial structuring of his work, whose key element is the staircase, allows us to fluctuate between rise and fall, not only individually and collectively, but also civilisationally, in an age when basic ancestral symbols have become commodities, futile and meaningless slogans that can be used outside of what they were, subject to manipulation outside of what they could have been.

Still, we ask ourselves: is this really what the artist wants to show? Consequently, de formas mudadas em novos corpos, this is an endless, winding conversation that metamorphoses according to Ovid’s poetics – an author who, in fact, provides the exhibition’s title.

“Guarda a 30 cm do chão” [“Handrail 30cm above ground”] (2011) is both an artistic and physical exercise in which the artist prepares his body to battle gravity. It is an enduring performance, one that requires resistance and plays with the physics of objects. Two masses. Two forces. The balance is one, even. Simultaneously, this work subverts the mundanity and utility of constructions whilst reconceptualising words, meanings and signs, and that physical protection – the handrail – is transformed in a circumferential drawing. For a moment, time is locked, and gravity ceases to exist because the body overcomes it. All is well above 30cm from the ground. And when the body fails to keep this balance going, the handrail collapses, the ground shaking and the cloister echoing the fall. The circumference opens itself and the handrail reconfigures itself, now with no interior or exterior, but with an absolute spatiality. Even with the 10-year gap after its conception, now reactivated with the production of Appleton, bodies still maintain the same strength and form, the same harmony of masses, alignments and temporalities as if artist and work were the same thing.

This article could go on. Coleção AA, curated by Ana Antunes and António Albertino, also features an interesting exhibition project that merges with the host abandoned house, where the works appear to occupy an integral part of the walls, floor and ceiling. Dan Võ, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Miroslaw Balka, Joana Escoval, Patrícia Garrido and Philippe Van Snick form dialogues that broaden the hours of every home, the multiple planes and times of which a household is made, uniting the essential nature of the material in a raw and at the same time enthralling lyricism.

Coleções Marin Gaspar, PLMJ and Fundação Carmona e Costa also claim the hosting premises for themselves, with built landscapes, interior and communal settings, and Inez Teixeira’s dreamlike, elemental and natural landscapes.

The PLMJ Foundation Collection, curated by João Silvério with works by Cristina Ataíde, João Leonardo, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Miguel Ângelo Rocha and Vanda Vilela occupies the main hall of the “O Elvas” CAD Headquarters, in a close dialogue with the place and its recreational, sporting and community past.

In four centuries, under the curatorship of Lourenço Egreja, the exhibition from the Fundação Millennium bcp Collection, living up to the title of the event, develops around the idea of ​​a party – with works by Ana Romãozinho, António Quadros, Alfredo Volpi, Artur Rosa, Francis Smith, José Malhoa, Júlio Pomar, Júlio Reis Pereira, Sofia Areal and Sonia Delaunay.

Committed to drawing and its respective expanded fields, the Carmona e Costa Foundation brings, at two different moments, Inez Teixeira, with the exhibition As Montanhas são montanhas agora…, and Pedro Cabrita Reis, with the exhibition Calendário Perpétuo, under the curatorship of João Pinharanda, at the Elvas Museum of Archeology and Ethnology.

“The Ultimate Romance” (2023) underlines an all-too-human circular feature – the flaw, the mistake, the error, and the circularity. The pharaoh’s head turns and turns, crisscrossed with the laser beam that tries to digitalize it; a cover of Black Sabath’s Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabath – Venïce Cathouse. The result of this digitisation is upsetting – the laser, no matter how precise in capturing details and forms, fails in capturing and recording the pharaoh’s head. But what was once a mistake for the conservation sciences, constitutes, in fact, an opportunity for Henrique Pavão to reveal the most human perspective in human speculative science – the imperfection and the process of learning after failing. The spectator is invited to wander in this quasi-archaeological site. In the end, a relic: the pharaoh’s head is lying there, copied in bronze, with all its digitisation errors, carefully protected by the glass displays we usually see in museums.

However, this is a biennial event, which requires the time and space of a catalogue and not that of a loosely journalistic, essayistic piece. We are left with the foundations of a collaborative, cross-border festival that turns art into a driving force behind the occupation of the city and its cultural heritage, hoping for its continuity and stability in the years to come.

FARRA‘s collections, institutions and commissions can be visited until August 25 in Elvas. Appleton’s performance programme can be experienced again on August 24, followed by the finissage on August 25.