Produced Affections — Affected Production

(solo show)
Museu de Alberto Sampaio, Guimarães (PT)
21.01 — 12.03.2022

© Ivo Rainha

Futuristic Plant Arrangement, 2022;
View of the installation at Alberto Sampaio Museum, Guimarães.

Installation, variable dimensions; 200 plants from
the species:

Agapanthus africanus
Aucuba japonica
Capsicum frutenses
Cotoneaster microphyllus
Cyca revoluta
Fatsia japonica
Juniperus horizontalis
Nerium oleander
Trachycarpus fortunei
Pittosporum tobira

/ Cultivated in the Municipal Plant Nursery
of Guimarães.

Stillframes from the video The Future of Capital, 2022;
16'13".

Produced Affections – Affected Production was an exhibition designed to occupy the Santa Clara Room, the Talha Room, the Chapter Room and the cloister of the Alberto Sampaio Museum, which presented our cultural heritage as entirely dependent on a plant heritage.
While the sound installation From the Forests (2022) in these rooms, (created with sound recordings of various tropical rainforests) transported the museum's art pieces to a rainforest sound environment, our gaze was being directed to the pieces of sacred art, whose material was praised — the religious sculptures and the altarpieces built with wood: oak and chestnut — and unveiled the vegetal elements of the gilded carvings and the paintings. The sound installation activated our vision to see how certain cultural symbols and devices that have accompanied Portuguese culture are, in fact, made of plants.

In the Chapter Room, there was the video The Future of Capital (2022) installed with growth lights, whose narrative called our attention to our temporal conception of History, and the fact that the displacement of plant species has served to capitalize nature, in which the various periods of colonization throughout history contributed to an economic system whose capital was generated from the rapid production of plants (food, medicines, spices). In the end, the video presents the production of new artificial ecosystems, such as greenhouses and vertical horticulture factories — where growth lights take the place of natural light — and opens several links to think about the installation of Futuristic Plant Arrangement (2022) that came from the Municipal Plant Nursery of Guimarães, arranged throughout the cloister.

Among various political issues of affectations and productions presented by the pieces, the exhibition explored the museum space as a place for the production of relationships, affectations and affections, as well as asking us: “Can the museum be a forest?”

From the Forests (2022)
sound, in loop.

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