Cities are as diverse as the layers that compose them. An ongoing alchemy sets on producing sometimes conflicting, yet osmotic inhabitance patterns, sensorial experience and social togetherness. Also the result of many architectural dreams, evolving power structures and contingent local deviations, cities are simultaneously hardware concrete structures and ephemeral realms. In them, we live & die, we meet & depart, we hold together the daily fiction that glues the interstices of the bigger picture of the urban phenomena.

City Lab is a temporary zone of attention for mapping-and-performing-procedures that is installed in critical neighborhoods or urban areas, chosen for its attachment to a local contingent urge or an incipient or persistent sociopolitical question. Traveling through different cities in South America, Europe and Asia with the nomadic and temporary structure of the City Labs, artists Fernanda Eugenio & Gustavo Ciríaco seek to research the singular arrangements and the in situ performativeness of the materiality emergent from the co-operations between geography & architecture, habits & inhabitation, codes & deviations, coexistence & togetherness, ordinary & extraordinary, visibility & invisibility.

Under the frame of a workshop called Site-specific Practices: performing the space, they invite local artists to participate collaboratively in the construction of  site-specific propositions involving diverse art forms. Mixing together ethnographic tools for description-and-circumscription and positional-based mapping approaches coming from contextual art, the collaborative and/or solo propositions assume the form of a simple enunciation, a sentence-task that synthesizes WHAT-HOW-WHERE-WHEN is going to be done, seeking to construct the conditions for something to happen – or, for something to be (or not) performed by/with the city.

In 2015, the duo started the project Steaming Cities, during their artistic residencies in New York and Saigon. In this long run project, Fernanda Eugenio and Gustavo Ciríaco propose to transport sensible operations from one city to another, building, through the invitation to navigate in a sensorial ambiance, a crossed and imaginary space-time through which city vapors can propagate. In December 2019, the project had its premiere at Rua das Gaivotas 06, in Lisbon. The city vapors were brought from their in situ residency in Saigon / HMC, Vietnam, as part of a local edition of the City Lab / Site-Specific Practices, at Sán Art Gallery. In 2022, Steaming Cities travelled to the Philippines for an artistic residency and public presentation at Bellas Artes Projects, in Manila.

For more info, access the website on the project HERE.

 

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With a background in Dance, Anthropology and Political Sciences, Eugénio & Ciríaco have been collaborating with each other and in each one’s projects since 2009, leading an intensive path of works and research around the public space.

Summer School – A.N.D Lab, Escola das Gaivotas, Lisbon. July 2016 and 2017.

Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics – New York University (NYU), NYC. April 1st-30th, 2015

San Art  Gallery Lab, Saigon. January 2015.

SESC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro. August 2014.

Atelier Re.Al, Lisbon. March and June 2014.

Plataforma de Dança da Bahia, Salvador. September 2009.