An artist residency entails a relocation. An artist in residence, outside their familiar context, reflects, reconsiders and questions their work and way of doing things. Residencies are a meeting place, a dialogue, sharing and exchange between artists, curators, the public and the place itself. The artist is presented with a new context in which to develop their work, an experience that brings something to their practice. It is also expected that something should remain after they have passed through the place, either physical or from the realm of memory.

Celeiro Air, a former painter’s studio and once a barn, is part of a farm with olive groves and agroforestry and is the site of today’s artist residencies, located in the Serra da Arrábida Natural Park, across from one of Portugal’s largest quarries. Encouraging a dialogue between art, the environment and education, Mariana Viegas’s residency promotes ties between production, work and sustainability, all values rooted in the history of the place itself. It accommodates projects dealing with environmental issues and the local community, with a view to sharing this unique context.

‘There is an underlying idea of unity between geographies, city and countryside, of unity between isolation and community and culture and agriculture,’ Mariana Viegas tells us. Far from the city context, yet close to it, Celeiro Air proposes a journey back to the innate emotional connection between humans and nature – described by Edward Wilson in his book Biophilia -, which has been eroded and even become dominating, in the sense that people have been violently imposing themselves on nature in a way that is extractive, colonising and utterly contemptible. It also proposes looking at others as peers in a collective spirit of community, sharing and exchange. Reuniting this connection will lead to a more sustainable, ecologically and humanly respectful way of life. This is all related to a necessary slowdown and consequent connection with the present time possible in this place.

For eight weeks, the resident artists are expected to engage deeply with the local context and community and organise open days and workshops. The artistic work is overseen by curators and taken to universities, namely the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where the artists present their work and their experience in the Serra da Arrábida to the Art History department students and the latter are invited to join the workshops and open days organised by the artists.

Besides the Art History Institute of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Celeiro Air enjoys the support of DGArtes and is a partner of DICUL, the Culture and Heritage Department of the Municipality of Setúbal, and of several venues in the Setúbal and Palmela regions that the resident artists can use, including Casa d’Avenida, Gráfica, a centre for artistic creation, and Down Town Palmela, a place housing ceramics, screen printing, metalwork and carpentry workshops.

The first residency at Celeiro Air was with the duo Landra, Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo Camacho, whose practice and research focus on environmentally ethical living. Rui Horta Pereira was the second artist in residence, during which time he experimented with materials found on the farm. ‘A Materia’ harks back to ‘a feeling of origin with mother earth/Mother Nature, convened here through a process-based dynamic of recovering and reconverting obsolete and previously found materials, (…) giving them new meanings and life possibilities’, according to Vanessa Badagliacca on the Ditongo[1] exhibition text.

The third residency was held in the autumn of last year and was monitored by Margarida Brito Alves and Leonor Lloret and included the duo Pedro Valdez Cardoso and Vítor Serrano. It was the first time they had worked together in a residency format, and both artists found language to be the common thread between their very different practices. Music was part of their entire stay at Celeiro Air and was a crucial element in their sharing. They invited the audience to embroider phrases from the playlist they had both created onto textile fragments, in a community creation workshop format, on the open day. Photographs, drawings, quotes, masks, short sculptural installations conceived from the different objects found in the studio are rooted in the urban punk or counterculture culture specific to the artists’ work, and are part of the work developed by the duo.

The residency ended in an exhibition at Casa d’Avenida in Setúbal. A project room whose title Playlist is a nod to the work done during the residency, without intentionally disclosing what was achieved during this period. The caps bearing the initials of both artists at the exhibition entrance suggest the DJs missing from this playlist. The historical Casa d’Avenida building has unique and valuable features. The sloping floors and doorframes are indicative of the events witnessed in those spaces. Pedro Valdez Cardoso and Vítor Serrano have found there a starting point for the installation they have conceived for one of the Casa’s rooms. Struts throughout the place hold up the ceiling, revealing threats of collapse. Between the two, there are ceramic pieces whose fragility is in sharp contrast to the tension the struts provide. They bear quotes such as ‘pleasure is everything’, ‘waking the witch’, ‘I float alone’, ‘where dreams go to die’, ‘I am invisible’, ‘forever young’, ‘fabulous muscles’, ‘all we ever wanted was everything’, ‘loud places’, ‘take me home’, which were all lifted from the playlist that gave the exhibition its name. The ceramic pieces came from the last surviving pottery factory in Setúbal, a region that once had an abundant clay extraction business, and were later intervened on by both artists. All the pieces selected are utilitarian, tureens, plates, bowls and jugs, drawing on the domestic scenes of the dwelling that Casa d’Avenida once was.

This exhibition was specifically designed for the Casa venue, without uncovering the work undertaken by the artist duo during their residency at Celeiro Air. A fanzine which, in Pedro Valdez Cardoso’s words, ‘reproduces our working process and experience during the residency’, was published as a testimony to the residency and as a complement to the exhibition. It contains fragments of the process, images of the studio space and the open day, the animals living on the farm, centipedes, woodlice, the artists’ pets, the locations they visited that are intimately bound up with the work developed, some pieces designed during the residency period, multiples, among others.

A community creative workshop, an exhibition, a fanzine and the exchange of their residency experience and their individual artistic practices with university students all characterise Pedro Valdez Cardoso and Vítor Serrano’s time at Celeiro Air, in the Setúbal region and in the Serra da Arrábida Natural Park. An experience and a work resulting from sharing and the challenge of partnering outside a familiar context, in front of new audiences, new actors, a new environment. A mutual generosity between those who have arrived and those who have stayed.

At the same time, Casa d’Avenida is hosting the exhibition a_riscar, which brings together the work developed by Ana Caetano and Katie Lagast during their residency at Viarco – Fábrica Portuguesa de Lápis in São João da Madeira. According to João Silvério in the text accompanying the exhibition, drawing, closely linked to gesture and body movement, is a fundamental practice in the work of both artists. Ana Caetano uses it in a performative sense while Katie Lagast explores details of the urban space, an exercise evidently related to memory.

In another room, Mónica Capucho presents Concrete Reality. Luísa Santos’ text suggests that the artist ’places concretism alongside reality, an impossible relationship in the definition of concrete art.’ The exhibition questions relationships and assumptions of art history through the various pieces distributed throughout the rooms of Casa d’Avenida.

The three exhibitions can be visited until February at Casa d’Avenida in Setúbal.

[1] Available in https://files.cargocollective.com/c1691165/Folhas-de-Sala.pdf