Joined by curators João Mourão and Luís Silva, I visited the exhibition The Future Rises with Each Dawn on a stormy day, open until November 24 at MU.SA – Museu das Artes de Sintra. The first exhibition of Coleção Vasco Santos, it is far from being an all-encompassing or final view of the collection. It begins with the representation of the human body – either through its presence or absence – to critically and teasingly raise questions of politics, identity and transformation. The following conversation emerges from this encounter.

Maria Inês Augusto: First of all, I’m curious, as two curators who have worked together for many years, how do you develop your ideas together? Is there a specific collaborative process you follow to put on an exhibition?

João Mourão and Luís Silva: This is such a seamless process that we believe there is no particular methodology. The key is dialogue. We work very naturally, very organically. We spend hours on end talking, either about a specific project or other subjects. We debate what would be legitimate to do curatorially with the artworks, what paths we want to take… this in-depth dialogue manifests itself in the projects. Part of the reason we like working as a duo so much is because the dialogue makes us think. Like artistic practice, curating can be very isolating. One person alone may think they have a grand idea and, in the end, they actually don’t… (laughs). Basically, you have a reality check next door. That’s great. Our process is very much like ping pong, throwing ideas at each other, but also about understanding the world, and this is where we get very intimate. Our curatorial practice often comes from our stance on the world, art, cultural institutions, what we think, what we want. How can we add to these practices and what is our contribution?

MIA: Your keen interest in exploring various exhibition formats and languages is well-known. Did you immediately consider an innovative strategy or experimental approach for this exhibition? How did it all start?

JM+LS: It’s all about dialogue, once more. The exhibition emerged from the collectors’ invitation to become curators for this first public presentation of the collection and, before we even began to define the guidelines, we talked together about the collection itself and our role as curators in a first show of a body of work like this. We began by self-reflecting – this is our curatorial project and this is precisely where it starts, how we can transform it into something that is meaningful to us, that drives us and that we can, in some way, see ourselves in – and then we delved into the collection and the collectors. To understand the oddities of the collection, to understand who collects it, where it all comes from… Something we always do quite a lot is to work from the context. Analysing what this collection is, the objectives and works that it has, expectations in relation to a moment as important as this (the collection’s first exhibition)… this is why it comes with a lot of emotion and anxiety. We end up being, to some extent, the custodians of these feelings and we are thus made to bear the responsibility. We have been entrusted.

MIA: Have there been any surprises or awe on the part of the collectors as to the path you have followed? Any constraints? Or were you given carte blanche?

JM+LS: We have always worked on the principle of sharing objectives and ideas, there have never been any restrictions on what we wanted to do, our selection or the narratives we were trying to create. However, there is always a bit of a surprise when you see the exhibition assembled. One thing is to see the pieces at home or in storage, another is to see the whole unit, especially in a space like this. You collect things accumulatively, you keep adding more and more, and suddenly you see the potential narratives emerging and making sense of them, and that is surprising. This is why we believe that, yes, finding out about the narrative possibilities of the collection itself was one of the greatest surprises. We also tried to make it clear that this was a possible vision – the collection is not this, or only that. Many major artists are not featured here, for one. Some are in the collection with large groups of works and we did not want that either. It was never meant to be a solo thing, we always hoped for diversity.

MIA:The Future Rises with Each Dawn: what was the main idea behind the title?

JM+LS: The future is constantly in a state of projection, of construction, and every dawn is a new day in which we can envision whatever we want it to be. Hence the more political resignification of the future as a field of possibilities that is up to our individual and collective action. Halfway through, the exhibition is very much about this, and curiously it has been left in the centre, at the heart of the exhibition. There is a path until we get there and there is a path after we get there, but the core of the exhibition is of a more political nature. Ultimately, the future is what we want it to be, it is what we produce collectively. The very idea of a collection is an exercise in future writing. Right now, these objects are the property of these people, who take care of them… but these pieces will exist far beyond them and,, for that reason, there is this idea that, in fact, you are building for the future.

MIA: Among the 1100 works included in Coleção Vasco Santos, which began in 2001, you selected 84 works by 45 artists of different nationalities. What was the selection procedure like for these diverse artists?

JM+LS: We just spent a long time looking at the works and intuitively realising what could spring from them. When the idea of the body and the representation of the human figure caught our attention, then we started analysing the works, apart from the artists or their names, and we began to explore the idea of building a narrative, taking space into consideration as well. There was a certain linearity and this concept of rooms, which could serve as discrete units within the exhibition’s overall narrative and, as this all began to consolidate, more or less intuitively, we began to explore a set of worries that are our own – questions of representation: men, women, the representation of different continents, particularly Africa, which is heavily expressed in the collection… we wanted the specificities and particularities of the exhibition to be apparent in this first show. We think it was all this that ultimately defined the choice of works. For instance, the last room is already a final stage in the work, something of an important footnote. We were thinking: we are going to do this room, an extra-exhibition so to speak, as a gesture and action of questioning the master’s narrative and artistic genius, in contrast or dialogue with Adriana Proganó’s work. This last moment became obvious and essential when we had already developed the exhibition’s narrative. Especially because we were also interested in using works by artists we never thought we would deal with in this way, Cesariny, Nadir Afonso, Pomar…. We also allowed ourselves that freedom.

MIA: How significant is it to stage an exhibition like this, one that simultaneously presents us with works by different artistic generations, some of whom are well-established and others who are just embarking on their careers? Does this decision engage with the notion of the future?

JM+LS: Art is art. Irrespective of age, career level or geographical origin, art is art, and there is no reason why that would not be the case here. Some themes can and should be brought into dialogue and conflict. We did not want that to be a limit. There are occasions when these notions or premises may indeed make sense, but, for an exhibition of this nature, we could only lose out if we stuck to these issues. Yes, without any constraints, it is related to the notion of the future. The coexistence, critically and possibly even comically, of pieces from the present with ones from the 1970s must be done, opening dialogues and connections that may not have been previously thought of, and that is truly rewarding.

MIA: Was it important for you to tackle a specific time period?

JM+LS: It came about by accident. We started off with the pieces and then that time line was formed. We did not have a time barrier that we specifically wanted to encompass. The works spoke to us, not dates, names… it was the works.

MIA: As far as the curatorial and exhibition process is concerned, what influenced your decisions? Did the exhibition site influence the materiality of the exhibition?

JM+LS: Exhibiting in a venue that consists of a chain of rooms limiting the field of vision is something different. More than its architecture, we were guided by the way the viewer would walk through the space and let the path we had envisioned also guide the narrative of the exhibition. It works like a circle revealing the metamorphoses of the body. This means that, ultimately, the setting defined how we were going to work with the collection. Each room is a unit of meaning, units of connection within the exhibition.

MIA: We are living in fast-changing and uncertain times. Do you think art can anticipate or influence the future or, on the other hand, reflect a sort of critical analysis of the past and present?

JM+LS: We do believe that art has a forward-looking quality. While it may be depicting the present or critically analysing the present in some way, it always offers a possible reading for the future, for generating a future. I think that art offers possibilities for a more ethical way of thinking or a more egalitarian, participatory and democratic world. We believe that art does have this power. All that we do, all human activity, defines the future. Our collective action today shapes the future tomorrow. As a human activity, art determines the future, but no more than any other endeavour. All we do has an impact and defines what tomorrow will be. We believe that art has the ability to metaphorise. It has the ability to make us envision what could happen in another way. It opens a window to other ways of thinking about and living tomorrow. It is very important to have a wide horizon of possibilities. Art tells us that a whole series of possibilities are open to us, it is just a matter of imagining them. It is essential to see what lies beyond the shadows.

MIA: How do you see the future of curatorial practices and artistic output? What sort of innovations would you like to witness in the future when it comes to curating and thinking about collections and exhibitions? What must change and what must remain the same?

JM+LS: That is a tricky subject… (laughs). We need the best practices, that curatorial or institutional agents define a guide to best practices. This is very important. We believe that the quality of work for curators and artists is paramount. These questions have to be taken care of, not instrumentalised, not pandered to. We need to avoid mistreating artworks, not make them do what they are not supposed to do, not push meanings, not close off the field of possibilities for artworks… I think all of this is very crucial and all of it involves good practice. We also think that there needs to be room for small and medium-sized projects. One of the things that has happened is that the big institutions have been taking the breath out of everything else. A lot of work done by small and medium-sized organisations has been increasingly overlooked and I think that this is highly problematic, especially from a political standpoint. Young artists find it very difficult to create exhibition spaces. The matter of renewal, new curators, new artists… how do these practices find a place in an ecosystem when conditions are becoming increasingly insecure and complicated? When you have cities becoming more and more expensive, with greater obstacles to creating alternative or independent spaces, how are these legitimisation circuits possible or not, and what formulas are we all, as a community, managing to devise when what we are witnessing is the complete opposite – the big institutions are taking over these public arenas, the critics, the press… all of this is, in a way, only granted to these same institutions. All these smaller venues that we are talking about, or more spontaneous, one-off manifestations can no longer be seen or even emerge. How can anyone start a project now, how can an artist show their work for the first time outside of university? Young artists are desperate to find a commercial gallery. What has happened to make this such a worry? These are questions of survival, of being able to earn a financial return, but what about all the rest? The room for error, for dialogue, for experimentation?