An art curator and an animal lover; writer, researcher and lecturer; the Artistic Director of the Galeria Municipal do Porto in Portugal, Filipa Ramos, is currently co-curating the 8th Biennale Gherdëina, which between May and September 2022 is taking place in a valley in Northern Italy.

The 8th edition of such an immersive contemporary art festival, merging with the natural environment of the Dolomite Mountains, Biennale Gherdëina, titled this year Persones Persons, is an explicitly eco-activist endeavour of artistic interventions into contemporary critical thinking around individuation and personhood, while either in the wild or dwelling domestically, blurring the boundaries of the interspecies hierarchies, first and foremost giving importance to the rights of the Earth, so painfully ravaged and ruined in the recent decades.

This close co-curation and collaboration with curator Lucia Pietroiusti stems from their friendship and mutual understanding, critical queer feminist theories, shared love and care for ecological entanglements of the human world, which has been evolving over the years. We work as one entity; in Filipa’s own words, curating practice belongs to the body, which is not one; which develops in the mind that is multiple rather than single; which is predominantly performative, interdisciplinary and discursive.

Between 2020 and 2021, Filipa Ramos was also one of the curators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale titled Bodies of Water’. Referring to Astrida Neimanis’ book of the same title, the Biennale foremost highlighted that all individuals create a collective being on this planet, being made of and constantly crossed by fluctuating but balanced systems of liquidity from a physical or political perspective.

While the Biennale Gherdëina is reverberating remotely within its works, Ramos has been developing an over-eight-month programme of discursive and time-based events at the Porto Contemporary Art Department. Under the name of Gallery Energy: Encounters in Art, Music, Nature, and Science, and running between April and November 2022,  this series of concerts, talks, and walks constitutes encounters of extraordinary figures to gather experiences rather than exhibitions and present exchanges of ideas rather than objects.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.