Sara Bichão (PT, 1986) has a working process, frequently the offspring of artistic residencies, rooted in her relationship with nature, her body and the objects she discovers in her surroundings. These creations are generated by the conflict and memory of such encounters, made with materials collected on site, in a poetic, alchemical and chimerical transformation. Like verses in space, installations and sculptures, formed by drawings and words, hover around the environments created, in a mysterious connection with the viewer.

Lightless (Quando não há luz), at Galeria Contemporânea of Serralves Museum and at Sacristia da Capela da Casa, curated by Inês Grosso, is part of an artistic residency carried out in an improvised studio on the Foundation’s farm, for several periods over the course of more than a year. With the assistance of the museum team, Sara Bichão worked her way around the institution in a triangular journey: studio-house-museum. In keeping with her reusing and recycling philosophy, the artist used materials she found along the way. She collected gravel (a mixture of clay and sand) from the garden, orange colouring a large part of the passageways, the aqua green tiles that line the fountain in the Parterre Lateral, or the paint extracted from grapes grown on the Farm. The Casa provided the iconic pink paint. From the museum, by rummaging through the storage rooms and workspaces, she gathered leftover materials from other exhibitions, such as those by Rui Chafes, Bruce Nauman or Olafur Eliasson.

The concept of recycling, as well as being a political statement, is based above all on a notion of memory. What emotional attachment do we have to objects? What memories remain from their daily use? And what meanings can we attach to them once they have been turned into new items? We could not forget to mention Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing a broken piece of ceramics by decorating it with noble materials such as gold, silver or platinum -, which resonates greatly in contemporary times given the excessive use of natural resources by humankind. Also with regard to museums: how can these institutions, with such a specific mission as preserving, conserving and publicising a particular legacy, adapt to this new reality and ecological dynamic?

Sara Bichão’s exhibition, besides questioning these ideas, also surrounds us in an immersive, enigmatic and poetic environment. The curator of the exhibition project, on a guided tour, even admitted that the artist had sent her the following message: «Pink, flesh, earth, bones, blue, night, water, light…».

Some hints to understanding Lightless and the artist’s spontaneous, fluid and sensitive working process.

The blue LED lights suspended from the ceiling and the sporadic lights of warmer tones in the Museum Gallery produce a strong contrast, merging in the centre on a stage with amorphous bodies huddled together, as if it were a stage set or an explained dream. All around it, a sort of cocoon hangs from the ceiling, a mirror treated with the Casa’s pink paint, ten heads sculpted from gravel and a rectangle lined with tiles from the Parterre Lateral fountain, with a small hole to let in a little light from outside. Nonetheless, there is a PVC slatted curtain at the entrance to the installation, dividing the inside from the outside, referring to one of the institution’s work areas.

As the text supporting the exhibition states, “[her] works are poems in space, events that envelop, affect and shake us internally and physically, sometimes in an almost visceral way, just as her creative process is visceral”. Following this, the artist used her body unit in her relationship with the exhibition venue – ten steps – to build the installation. With her body, she stacked ten fabric bags on a plinth in the middle of the room, the maximum weight she could carry. Bags that she sewed and stuffed, painted with gravel and grape ink, turned into amorphous bodies, as if they were meat scraps or viscera. These remind us of Francis Bacon’s paintings for their metamorphosis, movement and undoing. Interestingly, the mirror – a model from another artist’s exhibition – also features Sara’s body, which, through pink paint strokes, has been transformed into an oasis, with its light reflecting on the floor of the exhibition area, similar to the Casa de Serralves lakes.

Everything is part of the body: the power and fragility of human existence. The ten heads are like elusive faces, staring at us in the darkness with their illuminated eyes. Once again, the artist’s hands are the yardstick, where we find her fingerprints. But they also bear the imprint of her stay in the studio. Located just a few metres from Bairro da Pasteleira, one of Porto’s most heavily drug-dealing and drug-consuming areas. These sculptures are also inspired by these inert, inanimate, poisoned bodies.

Yet, besides the darkness, the visceral and the vagueness, in the Sacristia da Capela da Casa, illuminated by a large spyglass, a series of drawings on cardboard are presented. Just like the sculptures in the gallery, they were made using materials found at the Foundation. The drawings are an extension of Sara Bichão’s artistic thinking and practice. They are connected to the installation insofar as it was from this meditative act that she began to embody many of her ideas. We see some similar shapes, colours and textures in them. An addition to the installation setting and another angle on the artist’s working process.

Lightless, a deliberately ambiguous title, raises questions about hope and the lack of it. The duality between light and darkness, life and death, presence and absence. How these contrasts that mix and merge are necessary. The suture helping to heal the wound. The perpetual transformation of all beings and forms of existence.

Sara Bichão’s Lightless (Quando não há luz) is on show at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves until November 3, 2024.