MARIONETAS E PAISAGENS
February 3 2015 to July 26 2015
Marionetas e Paisagens (Puppets and Landscapes) is the name of the exhibition that marks the 2nd anniversary of Museu das Marionetas do Porto (Porto Puppet Museum). The museum, dedicated to an author, is centered around the work of João Paulo Seara Cardoso (1956-2010), and is a meeting place and intersection point for other artists.
We highlight the particularity that Museu das Marionetas do Porto is a project in close relation to a company, Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, which allows the exhibits to have a theatrical existence, a kind of soul, and in the museum they acquire another side, the latent life as sculptures and works of art.
The permanent exhibition includes two parts: Miséria and Teatro D. Roberto, two emblematic works of the Company’s Repertory.
In the temporary exhibition there are puppets, props and set design parts belonging to the shows: A Cor do Céu, Bichos do Bosque, O Lobo Diogo e o Mosquito Valentim and Macbeth.
In the gallery, dedicated to guest artists, we present Me LiKe YoU by artist and video artist Ilda Teresa Castro.
Puppets and Landscapes is an exhibition that calls the movement of the imagination through the Earth places. The Sky, the Garden, the Woods, the Forest, are examples where the exposed puppets inhabit, between songs, murmurs, whispers and many good conversations that can make us think.
Animals in the woods are just like us,
They are more or less like us;
They say as we say: Hello how are you?
they don’t look like it, but they have a lifetime, they have a heart
They feel homesick, they have memory, they are characters
of a story resembling life itself.
And so, Puppets and Landscapes is that space between memory and the future, a provocation to change so that the Sky can still be blue even when the day is not Blue.
Isabel Barros
Me LiKe YoU
The plant dies
Women die
Women are plants
The Indian prophet Smohalla, of the Umatilla tribe, shows his strangeness (and a bit of outrage) at the possibility of interfering with the earth’s ground , its rocks or vegetation , that is, how could he mutilate the body of his mother? Similarly, the Altaic peoples do not pull out plants from the ground for the same reason they don’t pull out hair or the beard of humans; members of the Baiga Indian tribe refuse “ to tear the bosom of their mother-earth with the plow”, the Votiaks believe that in Autumn the Earth sleeps; the Tcheremisses don’t sit on Earth when they think it’s ill. We can look at these cases as isolated situations or as metaphors of an understanding and sensitivity connected with the perception that transforming the beds of oil in the earth’s crust into gas released into the atmosphere infers something wrong . The Dalai Lama himself noted that this error implies at least environmental changes too fast to the human capacity for adaptation. (excerpt from I Animal – An Archaeology of The Living, book launch on TMP on a date to designate)
Ilda Teresa de Castro, artist and video artist, develops the post doctoral program – «Landscape and Change – Movements», supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology, a research project focused on the involvement of artistic and philosophical practices in ecocriticism awareness and in the corresponding emergency of theoretical–practical reflection. «Me LiKe YoU» falls within the the urgency of that ecoterritory.
Photography: Carla Bessa
