architectural affairs

Cities do not have an expiry date, but they all have a desire for the future. Like the idea of immortality, which separates us from other animals. The experience of place-appropriation arises from more or less nostalgic, more or less intimate, more or less autobiographical, more or less filtered mutating memory.
This discursive drive may be geared to mere observation, and yield to a consecration by pleasure and curiosity embedded in the contemporary need to review that identity, or to identify that sceno(geo)graphic mutation.
The points of view of Maia are manifold and, for that reason, the questions and possible answers corresponding to equally different moments are themselves manifold. Landscapes and people convoke new concepts beyond what is established, intersectionalities in which the city takes on a new notion of representational space, either revealed or concealed, based on its urban intermittencies.
The objective of “Maia Biennial of Contemporary Art’19” is to allow for a readjustment of our position in the face of constant mutation and, at the same time, to generate perceptions of the conscious identity of the contemporary orbit. It is about identity in a global world. It is about the consolidation of contaminated creation. It is about same-place-based heterogenous artistic practises, and homogenous different-place-based practices. It is about the expansion of the subjectivity of place as context. It is about the rupture of boundaries between worlds or the dissolution of locus-truncated aesthetical canons. It is about the emerging transposition of bodies and information. It is about the referential universes that we carry and bring along with us. It is about a circuit of terms questioned by the permeability of borders. It is about the invisibility of the world when the world is one, and one only. Ir is about terms that transcend themselves biographically when ‘auto’ is a common denominator. Ir is about the fast dynamics of the process of relationships between creation and cognition, what is lived and what is falsifed, what is kept and what is transformed as the engine for new discourses of culture and art. But is also about the democratization of art, bringing it inside containers to the real territory, for an encounter with the citizens of Maia — at Praça Doutor Vieira de Carvalho, at Parque da Cidade Desportiva, in Maninhos, at Castêlo da Maia, in Mandim, at Feira de Pedras Rubras and at Parque da Pícua.
Twenty-four years was the time necessary for this idea to materialize, under the disruptive guise of the “Import/Export” binomial. It is the exact time to remember the epochal dynamics and establish new narratives to re—appropriate identitary referents between local and global, between origin and destination.
Maybe this leads to the understanding that such discourse could only be possible by operating as dissemination across the territory and by anchoring itself in it as a binomial container, on the one hand symbolic of the paradoxical nature of the theme and, on the other hand as the condition for the (con)figuration of the (re)creation of new plural experiences of the various places and their meanings and (atmo)spheres.
All the works belong to a single exhibition, with multiple locations, allowing for the ambition to illuminate several sides of this stage and question ways of doing from several points of view: Architecture, Visual Arts, Design and New Media.