Covered by sky is a collection of installations and performances centered on the relationships between landscape and art, experience and poetic discourse with the goal of developing a collaboration platform with other artists for a future interactive live exhibition. Conceived by the choreographer and artist Gustavo Ciríaco, the project is driven by curiosity to discuss how space creation and landscape experience intersect in the poetic signature of singular artists from Portugal, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, the United Kingdom and Germany in the areas of music , dance, photography, sculpture, painting and performance.

In Thomas Moore’s Utopia, a very experienced sailorman in his discovery of the world tells about a distant territory he has come to know, called Utopia. There was where civilization had apparently reached its most optimal and fair state. Though this work has become a reference to think about ideals of social contract and ways of living together, utopia is still a word marked by a fantasy-like character. Utopia is thought of as imaginary, nonexistent, an unreachable place, a cliché of a territory that will never be real.

Refreshing the concept of utopia seems to me to be linked to the capacity of fantasizing and manipulating poetically the notion of real. It is in our imagination that lays its strength and its power. Just like in Grandes Sertões Vereda of Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa, in which the landscape becomes a sensorial experience through the language invented by the author which divines the wild, the relief, the shape and the singularity of the Brazilian and remote interior landscape.

Covered by sky is meant to be a journey meeting artists and places, collecting their different perspectives on landscape and sharing their ways of being mirrors of the world, between sensing and perceiving. I am attracted in this project by the possibility of acting as a kind of Hermes, the messenger of the Gods (that ambiguous figure that translates worlds) in this dialogue between artists and their reference habitats. A phony Hermes that is, aware of the precariousness of his translations, but full in his bets. I’m interested in building up convivial places, imagined spaces and update them every time they are experienced and completed by the visitor-spectator-participant. In an immersive installation exhibition, the audience is invited to perform the place, in which, they’ll be both witness and actor. In the same way we take someone for a walk, experiencing the path, the obstacles of the ground, these kinetic dioramas of fruition shall make the experience of the visitors get assembled with the invited artists’ sensibilia and, hopefully, rendered anew and re-appropriated creating an ongoing mise-en-abîme.

With this project I reconnect with two points of my career: the social scientist and the artist. It is the beginning of a response in two powers. It is the continuation of an understanding, but at the same time a step beyond. And beyond is beyond is beyond. Or in the words of the sailor portrayed by Thomas Morus, the unburied dead, they are covered by sky.

VIDEOS

Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas 

Novo Negócio/ZDB

Walk & Talk Arts Festival

Festival DDD-Dias de Dança – Paisagem Boldo

Festival DDD-Dias de Dança – Vastidão

 

Collection

lawal | Javiera Péon-Veiga

va s t n e s s | Michelle Moura

landscape in a line | Luciana Lara

paisagem boldo | João Saldanha

poderiapoderá | João Gabriel

hormiga-Pájaro | Ana Laura Lozza

roda-viva | Cláudia Dias

otro ser | Barbara Hang

um sempre onde nunca estive | Jonathan Uliel Saldanha

::PREVIOUSLY::

Festival Dias de Dança – DDD &  Museu de Serralves. Porto, Portugal. Paisagem Boldo (PREMIÈRE), April 20-24 + Vastness (PREMIÈRE)  April 23 + Landscape in a Line (April 24).

Cia Instável – FAICC. Creative Lab. Porto, Portugal.  April 11-15, 2022.

Espaço do Tempo. Residency (Vastness). Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. March 28-April 6, 2022.

Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporáneas. Creative residency for the project Paisagem Boldo. Ribeira Grande, Açores, Portugal. Jan 17-23, 2022.

Fundição Progresso + MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna. Lab + Residency. Public sharing: Dec. 22nd at MAM. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. December 20-21-22, 2021.

 NAVE. Santiago, Chile. Creative residency. Dec 6-15 + presentations of Landscape in a Line (South American première) + Vastness (pré-première). Dec 16 & 17, 2021

Festival Temps d´Images. Premiére_Landscape in a Line. Lisbon, Portugal. October 22-23, 2021.

Walk & Talk Arts Festival.  Première_LAWAL, installation. Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal. July 16th-25th, 2021. Première.

Museu Serralves & Cia Instável. Creative residency. Porto, Portugal. May 10-14, 2021.

Novo Negócio / ZDB. Creative residency. Lisbon, Portugal. May 5-7,  2021.

Fábrica de Idéias/23 Milhas. Creative residency. Gafanha de Nazaré, Portugal. April 6-18, 2021.

Novo Negócio / ZDB. Creative residency. Lisbon, Portugal. March 1-20, 2021.

Pico do Refúgio & Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporáneas. Creative residency. Ribeira Grande, Azores, Portugal. January, 11-17, 2021.

DEVIR/CAPA – Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve. Residência de criação. Faro, Portugal. November, 16-26, 2020.

DAS THIRD cycle Forum, DAS Theatre. Presentation of prototypes Sticky Fingers and Glory!, based on the experiences of visual artist Rosie Heinrich and performance maker Siegmar Zacharias. DAS Theatre, Amsterdam, Holland. December 2019.

Conception and artistic direction  Gustavo Ciríaco

Guest artists  Ana Laura Lozza (Ar), Barbara Hang (Ar), Cláudia Dias (Pt), Luciana Lara (Br), Javiera Peón-Veiga (Cl), Jonathan Ulliel Saldanha (Pt), João Saldanha (Br), João Gabriel Oliveira (Pt) e Michelle Moura (Br)

Guest artists – DAS THIRD cycle Forum Rosie Heinrich (Uk) and Siegmar Zacharias (De)

Performers- Lisbon  Alina Folini (Ar), Bartosz Ostrowski (Pl), Filipe Caldeira (Pt), Gabriela Dória (Br),  Giulia Romitelli (It),  Mário Martins Fonseca (Pt), Sara Zita Correia (Pt) and Tiago Barbosa (Pt)

Performers – Porto Alessandra Giacobbe, Alexa Papa, Bárbara Ramos, Eleanor Winkler, Inês Oliveira, Inês Pinheiro Torres, Katarina Llijasevic, Lucia Nordhoff, María Poncela, Uatumã Azevedo, alunos dos programa FAICC / Instável Centro Coreográfico.

Performers – Santiago Belén Alfaro (CL), Paz Marin (CL), Francisco Bagnara (CL), Luche Moreno (CL), Trude Flem (CL) y Joaquín Catalán (CL), Camila Peña (CL), Sara Lecaros(CL), Danya Jerez (CL), Macarena Alvarez (CL), Octavia Luz (CL) and Andrea Contreras
Performers – Rio de Janeiro Bruno Levorin (Br), João Victor Cavalcanti (Br), Leo Nabuco (Br), Laura Samy (Br), Milena Codeço (Br), Priscila Maia (Br) and Rómulo Galvão (Br)
Performers – Brasília Carolina Hofs, Clara Salles, Déborah Alessandro, João Gabriel (Br)

Light design Tomás Ribas

Set design – initial stage Mayra Sérgio

Set design and architectonic project Gonçalo Lopes

Technical direction Santiago Tricot

Photos Aline Belfort, Felipe Pardo, Gui Garrido, Gustavo Ciríaco,  João Grama, Mariana Lopes, Mayra Sérgio,  Mila Ercoli, Sara Pinheiro, Tomás Ribas and Thomas Lenden

Administration  Missanga Antunes

Production direction Sinara Suzin

Realization Efémera Colecção – Associação Cultural

Co-production NAVE, Fundição Progresso, Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Teatro Municipal Rivoli

Support República Portuguesa – Cultura | DGARTES – Direção-Geral das Artes
Covered by Sky counts with Ibero-American fund IBERESCENA – Co-production Support for Spectacles 2020-2021 (Apoio à Co-produção de Espetáculo 2020-2021 /IBERESCENA).

::NEXT::

Festival Planalto. Paisagem Boldo / Modern Promenade. Moimenta da Beira, Portugal. July 4th-9th, 2022.

GNRation. Hormiga-Pájaro (PREMIÈRE). Braga, Portugal. September 2022.

El assunto de lo remoto. Buenos Aires, Argentina. November, 2022. (tbc)

 

 

 

 

 

Photos Aline Belfort, André Delhaye, Felipe Pardo, Gui Garrido, Gustavo Ciríaco, João Grama, Mariana Lopes, Mayra Sérgio, Mia Ercoli, Pedro Sardinha, Sara Pinheiro, Tomás Ribas and Thomas Lenden.