No. 6 on Rua Conde Redondo is once again wide open to the city – every Friday. And the new Rialto6 season has included exhibitions by Diana Policarpo and Jumana Manna.

Starting with Policarpo’s Mutual Benefits, looking from the outside in, as the show extends from the storefront to the street (an option that has pleasantly become a foregone conclusion at Rialto6). The ground floor window glows neon blue and we can see a structure reminiscent of a grocery store combined with the twilight of a laboratory. This setting precedes a descent to floor -1, but it also frames the video Summer Grass Winter Worm (2024). In one (arduous and treasured) minute, the footage of a harvest of the precious fungus that nourishes the pharmaceutical industry and traditional Asian medicine. Once inside, on floors 0 and -1, Diana Policarpo continues the narrative. The artist positions Ophiocordyceps sinensis^[1] at the centre of a long research project that spans both art and science, common ground in the artist’s work; depicted here with a dichotomy between sci-fi and documentary. Cordyceps is the protagonist that brings everything together – the sought-after parasitic fungus that turns its host into a zombie, which the gaming industry and the post-pandemic have turned into a post-apocalyptic TV phenomenon.

And if, from the outside, we have witnessed the foreword to this narrative, we now enter the illustrated prologue of a pictorial encyclopaedia. A series of scientific coloured pencil drawings (Underground Allies de II a IX, 2024) take us through close-ups of micelliform roots, neuron branches and other sections of the eyeballs and brain pathways. We go ‘down the rabbit hole’ to find the source of these interconnections, interdependencies and symbioses. The hallucinatory atmosphere is heightened with metal shelves crammed with bags of soil samples and ceiling ventilation pipes. Within this laboratory, Policarpo is testing the ecological impact, and one could say biological effect, of human action on the environment, with the Tibetan plateau as a backdrop, but also in a futuristic space station in orbit. The narrative is not straightforward, we have to unfold the exhibition text in instalments to understand the mutualistic or parasitic nature of the fungus’s symbiosis with bodies. The degree to which Cordyceps (really) merges with its host, mutating it and altering its genetics. Three videos show this relationship between the fungus, bodies, propaganda and the miraculous production of a high performance ‘super power’. The light (electric blue), which at times resembles the intoxicating aesthetic of Wong Kar-Wai’s films, is key to tying the whole text together.

Policarpo concludes Mutual Benefits with Fungal Highways (2024). The light changes in this last room and the crimson tint is provided by a video-animation (a third film genre) that invites us to sit (lie down) and be surrounded by neural cushions. The Yayoi Kusama-esque tentacles envelop us and we journey into the interior of the nervous system, as the visiting figure at the entrance to the room reveals: a celestial body and a brain^[2]. The Cordyceps is now in its host, vocabulary and semantics are blurred, the encephalon is also a mycelium and this is the (disciplinary) crossover Diana Policarpo is keen on.

We head up to floor 1, to Jumana Manna’s Broken, Taken, Erased, Tallied. The artist is holding an exhibition whose visit is divided into at least three moments, one for each of the three films on display: A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016), Wild Relatives (2018) and the most recent Foragers (2022)^[3]. In June last year, Manna turned Porto’s Sismógrafo into a cinema and book club. Filmes e Estudos screened the artist’s films, the ones we have just mentioned and a few more, as well as promoting a debate around seven books. Books and films chosen by the artist herself, focusing on the urgent need to discuss the state^[4] of Palestine.

Manna has built metal shelves on Rialto6’s two half levels, storing ceramic sculptures on one side and bread and newspapers on the other. The text included in the exhibition states that the ‘shapes are modelled on fragments of khabyas, cereal storage structures that were originally constructed in Levantine rural homes and became obsolete with the introduction of refrigeration methods’. Cache (2019) and Water Arm I and II (2018) establish a parallel between ancient and contemporary preservation practices. Two installations/sculptures are in direct dialogue with Wild Relatives (2018) or Foragers (2022). Two films that, between the documentary, the archive and the fictional, enquire, from a different angle and seeking to circumvent the ‘dominant ideology’, what is worthy of protection, why and how? The artist surely disturbs the conservation and restoration purists, stressing the value of heritage (intangible – which was only fully recognised at the beginning of the century), in the ways and means of subsistence, in the farming cycles or in songs and oral traditions. This heritage is on the verge of extinction as a result of oppression and colonisation and stagnant conservation. The installation Old Bread International II (2023) stresses this by revealing the rotting of bread. Prefabricated concrete blocks hold up a ‘grilled’ metal structure, just like the shelves and panelling in the previous room. Newspaper sheets and rotting bread lie on the table. The ‘cereal’ is left to die, a paradoxical gesture when compared to the Herculean effort to preserve the seed.

Diana Policarpo’s Mutual Benefits and Jumana Manna’s Broken, Taken, Erased, Tallied are both at Rialto6 until January 24. These are the final three Fridays to see Wild Relatives on the 10th; A Magical Substance Flows into Me on the 17th and Foragers on the 24th, always between 3 p.m. and 7.30 p.m.

^[1] Ophiocordyceps sinensis is a fungus capable of turning its host, the caterpillars of the ghost moth, into zombie carcasses. It targets the insects’ nervous system, disrupting their behaviour and eventually leading to their death, whereupon they become vegetation.
^[2] Perhaps, with this video’s conceptual simplicity, Policarpo is trying to rescue the ‘beatnik’ culture from the underground as a response to the capitalist massification of crops.
^[3] The latter was awarded Best Documentary at the 2023 Olhares do Mediterrâneo festival in Lisbon.
^[4] Note: ‘State’ is an independent government of a people formed as a nation;
It is a land, a territory or a whole range of circumstances in which a given geography is found.
It is also its current status.