Filipa Guimarães, Born in 1983 in Porto, Portugal
Academic Background
2008 Masters Degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices, Porto University School of Fine Arts.
2006 Degree in Visual Arts Painting, Porto University School of Fine Arts.
Solo exhibitions and Projects in public space (p.s.)
2009 CCB Fora de Si Festival, Resíduos Urbanos project, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (p.s.).
2009 Outonarte event, Xardín and A Castañeira projects, A Coruña (p.s.).
2008 Informal presentation of Acervo de heterónimos project in the Balleteatro auditorium, Porto.
2008 Galeria Ambulante, Cirurgias Urbanas apace, Porto.
2008 Heteronymus (Azul, Vermelho, Preto), streets of Madrid (p.s.).
2008 Semi-Quadrúpede Prisioneiro, streets of Porto (p.s.).
2008 Lépido Sacripanta, streets of Lisbon (p.s.).
2007 Férias na Praia dos Leões, performance at Praça dos Leões (p.s.), Porto.
2007 Galeria Ambulante, Miguel Bombarda street and at the entrance of Serralves em Festa (p.s.), Porto.
2007 A fazer uma Obra de Arte, Sala Maior art gallery, Miguel Bombarda street, Porto.
2007 JARDIM, Plano B cultural space, Porto.
2007 A fazer uma Obra de Arte, Metropolitan Stations of Porto (p.s.).
2007 VOLTO JÁ, Praia da Luz space, Porto.
2007 JARDIM, streets of the centre of Porto (p.s.).
2006 ASERÉJÁ, Foz do Douro (p.s.), Porto.
2006 Dar pombas ao milho, Ribeira (p.s.), Porto.
2006 Tiraz, Praça da Batalha (p.s.), Porto.
2006 Bela Adormecida, Foz do Douro (p.s.), Porto.
2006 Lixo, Boavista (p.s.), Porto.
2006 Passagem de Peões, Porto (p.s.).
2006 Guarda-chuvas, Torre dos Clérigos (p.s.), Porto.
Group exhibitions and Festivals
2009 Performance and exhibition at Mariana Jones Gallery, Estendal project, Porto.
2009 Invited to Festival dImages Artistiques Vidéo, Catania, Italy.
2009 Invited by the commissioner Nilo Casares for the Outonarte 2009 event, projects Xardín and A Castañeira, A Coruña, Spain.
2009 Selected to the festival CCB Fora de Si, organized by Centro Cultural de Belém, Resíduos Urbanos project, Lisbon.
2008 Invited to the En Tránsito Festival 2008, organized by La Casa Encendida (presentation of Acervo de heterónimos project in the auditorium), Madrid, Spain.
2008 Invited to the commemoration event of the 15 years of Ernesto de Sousa Scholarship Contest of Intermedia Experimental Art (a joint initiative by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-American Development Foundation and Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NYC), Espaço Avenida, Lisbon.
2007 PACK, exhibition of Postgraduation, curated by Fernando José Pereira and Cristina Mateus, Chancellery of Porto University, Porto.
2007 Exhibition of the video of Tiraz project in Batalha Cinema, Porto.
2007 Performances ASERÉJÁ and Servartes, Servartes cultural space, Porto.
2006 SET festival, organized by ESMAE (School of Music and Performing Arts), Porto.
2006 POST-IT CITY [porto] CIUDADES OCASIONAIS-Centre D´Art Santa Mónica(CASM)+Centre de cultura contemporània de Barcelona(CCCB), Artes em Partes Space, Porto.
2006 Barrigas de Freira exhibition of Painting Course finalists of Fine Arts School of Porto at Corpus Christi Convent.
Grants, Awards & Artist Residencies
2010 Selected to Takt Kunstprojektraum Artist Residency, Berlin, Germany.
2009 Criar 2009, National Contest of Creative Ideas European Year of Creativity and Innovation.
2008 ANTECIPARTE 2008 Contest, Lisbon, Portugal.
2008 Artist Residency organised jointly by La Casa Encendida and the University of Alcalá via Aula de Danza Estrella Casero, Madrid, Spain.
2007 Detachment of the artistic project by Jury in the Contest for the Artistic Residence at Casa de Velàsquez Madrid, Spain.
2007 Honourable Mention in the 2006/2007 Ernesto de Sousa competition (a joint initiative by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-American Development Foundation and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NYC)).
2006 MUGATXOAN Artist Residency, coordinated by Ion Munduate and Blanca Calvo;
Arteleku (Donostia - San Sebastián), Spain
Fundação Serralves (Porto), Portugal
Other
2007 Greatest classification in the project for Circuitos Artísticos discipline, teaches by Jürgen Bock (director of MauMaus School of Visual Arts in Lisbon, and curator of portuguese participation in Venice Biennale 2007).
2007 Responsible of the Logotype drawing to Pedro Abrunhosa (Portuguese musician, singer and composer) new music album LUZ and his BOOM Studios music firm.
2007 Workshop of performance by Miguel Pereira (Portuguese performer).
2008 Invited to a presentation of the personal artistic project in the discipline of Performing Arts of Art History course at Philological Faculty of Porto University.
What I create is defined by the difficulty of definition.
The goal is to attain the indecipherable, sinuous and deviant side of the real.
To break the border between dream and reality, confronting one with the other, placing them side by side. It is as if reality and the contexts that constitute it were the scenery, making the dream clearer and moreover more conscious.
It is a dream that considers and questions reality, which interferes in reality. Basically, this dream is the will to glimpse reality from another point of view and the attempt to give it to others.
2009
Estendal
(Clothes hanger)
This performance consists in hanging and catching clothes (paintings on paper), in a repetitive and uninterrupted action. The intention is to reflect on the routine of domestic labor, blind and monotonous which becomes mechanical, automatic. The performance is a reflection about an anti-reflective practice. It's an action that touches the absurd and which represents in an exaggerated way certain necessary everyday functions.
Xardín
(Garden)
The first part of this project was made at Real Street, at A Coruña on the event Outonarte 09. I was planting more or less fifty flowers in the floor, accompanied by a garden specialist and I was watering each one. After planting a flower I gave a map (on a sheet of paper) of that street with all the flowers to people passing by.
After the performance intervention in the street, I did an installation at Casa da Cultura Salvador de Madariaga. This installation consisted of a big map of the city A Coruña (painted with pastel and chalk on the floor), with the total number of flowers planted in that street.
The concept of this project was about the defense of green spaces in the city and the preservation of nature.
Resíduos Urbanos
(Urban Waste)
This project was part of the CCB Fora de Si festival, organized by Centro Cultural de Belem in Lisbon.
At first glance and only superficially, the painting on the floor may be seen like a mere realistic garbage representation. However, in a more distant view, we can discover the various senses and interpretations contained in this Pop universe. By representing common objects, I expose a common fact that is the accumulation of domestic residues, reflex of a consumerist culture. There is an ambiguity here: the garbage on the floor next to the content derives for uncivilized acts or it is the result of a society that has no more space for such crowd of residues? Metaphorically, this painted garbage have the particularly of being biodegradable and washable (ephemeral). So, in the same act of dirty the floor with pastels, my intention is to fight for a clean floor.
2008
Heteronymus
(Heteronymous)
This project was supported by La Casa Encendida, in Madrid and it is composed of three different parts that corresponds to a character/heteronymous that I created for myself (Blue, Red and Black).
Blue
Azul (Blue), transports a cage that works like a metaphor of life, like a symbol of the imprisonment. This cage is deep and only has the sound of my voice recorded in loop, chirping mechanically like a request of help. It is an imprisoned being, whose body is out of the cage, in supposed freedom, but an apparent and fictitious freedom. I am a bird without wings, subordinated to the land and human restrictions. Im saying: Hola! Soy un pájaro Azul, libera-me, por favor. (Hello! Im a Blue bird, give me freedom, please). The opening of the cage is the symbol of the impossible freedom, of the imaginary freedom.
Red
Vermelho (Red) has a portable radio, is bearer of a culture and a different language from the context in which is travelling. The cassette recorded intentionally for the action, contains portuguese music, from fado (traditional portuguese music) to rock and a spanish music that functions like the only point of connection and communication with that context. The fact of not knowing all the letters of the songs, reflects an unconcerned attitude related to the rehearsal, giving space for improvisation and mistake, understood like important elements in the creative process. Red is the pleasure of walking in the streets of Madrid with the portuguese culture. It is the desire of sharing my culture to the others that have a different culture.
Black
Hola! Quieres abler comigo? Estoy aqui. Atiende! (Hello! Do you want to talk with me? Im here. Listen!) This is the discourse of my voice recorded in loop, into the telephone. Preto (Black), is the expression of the nonsense, the attempt of communicate through the impossibility of communication. This heteronymous is always repeating the recorded discourse, sometimes changing the order of the discourse and saying other words or sounds. The telephone is an object of communication, but here it represents the subversion of that communicative logic.
2007
Férias na Praia dos Leões
(Holidays in Lions Beach)
Inserted within the art system, the artist is bound to certain structural rules which condition their creative freedom. Férias na Praia dos Leões is a project that offers an alternative to the artists condition of subjection. A paradox is present, since at the same time that the artists work is produced, the artist is on holiday. The aim is to demonstrate the irony of the situation, where there is an obligation to produce work that so often imprisons the artist, taking away much needed time for contemplation. In this project we can see an alteration of space through the subversion of the Praça dos Leões (plaza) into the Praia dos Leões (beach). The swimming costume, dating back to the period of the Fountains inauguration (1886), takes us to a past which is transported forwards to the present day, to an exotic and utopian location, at the heart of the city of Porto.
Galeria Ambulante
(Mobile Gallery)
The Ambulant Gallery project was realized in June, in the day of inaugurations of Miguel Bombarda galleries and, the next day, in the entrance of Serralves em Festa.
Miguel Bombarda: Ambulant Gallery is a gallery that circulates in the street of art galleries that cant move. 0 (zero) euros is the price of this paper ice-creams that put in evidence the value of the work of art outside and inside of the gallery. This project puts in question the gallery while a space that is confined to the market laws, and how it can constitute an impediment to fundamental values in art, like freedom and creativity.
Serralves em Festa: The Ambulant Gallery, in the entrance of Serralves em Festa, and out of the spaces of Serralves Museum of art, in spite of containing the same meaning, has some new connotations. Far from the other art galleries, is simply turned into an ice-cream trolley that is almost confused with the seller of popcorns that is near it. Whereas the seller of popcorns sells real popcorns, I offer not real ice-creams, but drawings of ice-creams.
Ambulant gallery is the dream of a free gallery!
A fazer uma Obra de Arte
(Doing a Work of Art)
A fazer uma Obra de Arte is the title of a performance realized in different subway stations and consists of doing a wool shirt during four days, in a normal work time-table. Obviously, the work of art is not the shirt itself, but the process and context of its execution. The shirt is only the product of an artistic action that functions here like a metaphor of painting, resulting from the mixture of primary colours. In general, what I pretend in this project is to create a form of resistance to the stress of the city criticizing the routine through the routine that is the act of doing a shirt. At the same time, I want to give identity to a space that is characterized as a non-place. The intervention is like a small Utopia that conducts the passer-by to the conscious of his mechanical condition, providing him an escape to the similar day by day life.
2006
Passagem de Peões
(Crosswalk)
Out of context is the keynote of this work. The idea is to question rules and laws (laws of street code) that are imposed to us. On an almost desert place, the crosswalk adopts a new sense. Its configuration is simultaneously familiar and strange, it takes us to the concept of unheimlich. On the other hand, the pink colour of chalk incorporates a certain irony. Luigi Pirandello said to the purpose of humour, that it participates in the process through whose each thing is transformed on its opposite and enters in consonance with a more essential and subterranean reality, than that one that is presented to us by logic. The non sense of this work results precisely on the subversion of common reality. If this subversion exists in the painting and the performance, it becomes more evident in the video when I manipulate the reality in order to transform a quiet place, in a place of big affluence of traffic. This work only exists in digital support now, because of its ephemeral nature.
Volto Já
(I'll come back soon)
I thought it would be interesting to go through a street like a loose piece of a puzzle. This puzzle would only become complete with my body. Various images invaded my thoughts. One of them consisted of a sign that is frequentely seen on the doors of some commercial establishments in Portugal saying VOLTO JÁ ( ILL BE RIGHT BACK ).
Links to some press releases and articles:
http://www.laopinioncoruna.es/coruna-metro/2009/10/09/nilo-casares-futuro-arte-sera-invasivo-terminara-meterse-casa/325295.html
28 August 2010
Photoautomatraum project video: Motion 5/Differential Performance Festival, curated by Richard Rabensaat, project space Kurt/Kurt, Germany - Berlin
3 - 5 September 2010
Performance: da2010 - direct action performance art festival 2010, project organized by Stefan Riebel, Institut für alles mögliche, Germany - Berlin
Filipa Guimarães
T: (00351) 91 8459887
E: pintaragir_gmail.com
