Contemporânea

This passage from Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (1928) occupies the foreground of Isadora Neves Marques's film where to sit at the dinner table; and within the broader context of its making, at the heart of Avenida 211, it reads almost as a premonition of what would become Lisbon's most significant incubator of artistic experimentation and collective imagination.

Avenida 211: An Artists' Space in Lisbon is arguably one of the most important and necessary exhibitions of recent years—especially for those who, like me, never experienced that legendary space where so much began, and so much ended. Through an exhibition that brings together deep curatorial research, the archives of its participants, and the recollections of those who built this communal place, I find myself gathering fragments from the testimonies of resident artists and visiting critics, in an attempt to reconstruct the aura of a space where "each artist was given a key and guidelines for cohabitation," alongside a studio and an open community.

It all began in 2006 with António Bolota, a renowned artist and civil engineer with whom the Espírito Santo family reached "a tacit agreement … in a venture of discreet patronage" to lease the building at no. 211 of the Avenida da Liberdade, where he would be free to create "a project that was unrivalled in Lisbon, offering a solution to the problem of the lack of artist studios and non-institutional experimental spaces." On Lisbon's most prestigious avenue, flanked by banks, luxury brands, and office buildings, the wealthy family had commissioned the construction of a mixed-use building in 1888, combining private residential use with ground-floor retail. Having served at various times as a home, an office, and commercial premises, the building would now be recast as a studio, initially occupied by Bolota and his first guests, Daniel Barroca, Virgínia Mota, and Francisco Tropa (his teacher at Ar.Co).

In keeping with the conventions of its time and type, the building's floors were subdivided into numerous partitions, small rooms, and antechambers1, a configuration that quickly allowed the original group to expand and absorb more and more friends, colleagues, and students. Indeed, Avenida 211 became a space of contact between emerging and established artists—more than that, a space of relationality, of proximity and openness, of availability and learning. Many of the exhibitions presented across its various spaces included students from the Faculty of Fine Arts, who found there teachers, peers, community, and sometimes even a working studio. At its peak, "more than forty artists simultaneously had their studios at Avenida 211. (It is not possible to ascertain an exact number, since there were no contracts and everything was based on word of mouth and relationships of trust.)" The Avenida, as it is commonly known, was an ecosystem built by artists for artists—the roles of builder and inhabitant frequently overlapping—in which the absolute, non-negotiable necessity of time and space to reflect on artistic production, cultural programming, and the making of work2  was fully acknowledged.

The reference to artist and teacher Pedro Morais in one of the exhibition's wall texts can be easily overlooked, yet it carries considerable weight. Beyond his presence as a resident artist at the Avenida, Morais was a formative influence on the thinking about what an artistic space can be or do. The founding of Atelier Livre, active from 1979 to 1994 at the Escola Artística António Arroio, where he taught, opened a sustained reflection on the pedagogical structures of art education in Portugal, and directly or indirectly influenced several generations of artists, among them Francisco Tropa, his student and later studio "neighbour." Conceived as an experimental laboratory, Atelier Livre was "a space of open, free, and shared discussion," mirroring the refusal of "the logic of the market and fashion trends" that runs throughout Morais's artistic work, and opening a field in which conversation served not to direct students' practices but to generate new points of departure for other ways of reading production and reception.

Avenida 211: An Artists' Space in Lisbon, curated by Nuria Enguita and Marta Mestre, is an act of recognition for a project that "changed the contemporary art scene in Lisbon and helped retain some artists who might otherwise have left the country (between 2011 and 2014, nearly 500,000 people emigrated, the largest emigration rate Portugal had experienced in 50 years)." Bearing witness to its organic modes of self-organisation, self-sufficiency, and community, the MAC/CCB has assembled a "living archive" of the "history of this simultaneously vital and vulnerable occupation."

The exhibition is structured in five parts, loosely corresponding to different functions or roles of Avenida 211: "A Rear-View Mirror" addresses how the space and its participants related to their socio-political and economic context, and how the public related to the space; "A Studio of One's Own" foregrounds the opportunity Avenida gave numerous artists to have a working space in the centre of Lisbon, with the conditions and dignity they deserved; "An Echo Chamber" refers to the multiple ways in which the space welcomed, and inspired, the artistic production that emerged within it; "A Lighthouse" traces what converged at the Avenida, the initiatives it prompted, and the programmes it hosted; and "Do-It-Ourselves" underscores the multiple dimensions of the space's programming (across its diverse modes of realisation and the flows that co-constituted its community) as exercises in collective self-sufficiency.

The meticulous, tireless research conducted by Giorgia Casara and Sara de Chiara—something every former resident I spoke with emphasised—brings together, across these archives, photographs, works, posters, notes, books, and programme records, complemented by a parallel programme featuring concerts and music curated by Filho Único, as well as performances and readings by a revived The Barber Shop. The exhibition architecture was designed by André Maranha, himself a former Avenida resident. The gathering was complete—save for the irreplaceable João Queiroz, one of the longest-standing and most active members of the Avenida, who died shortly before the opening, which took place on the day of his funeral.

(the Avenida, as it would come to be known) was perhaps one of the most significant and singular cultural spaces the city has known. Self-organised and communal in much of its operation, it enabled the creation of institutions, projects, and artistic exchanges that are now scattered throughout the city.

At that moment, and without any fixed or stable form, one could say that what had taken form on the Avenida da Liberdade was the closest thing Lisbon possessed to an artistic community in the visual arts. That community rested its existence on two fundamental pillars: sociability and solidarity …, central elements in the definition, maintenance, and understanding of a network of connections among artists, even where aesthetic or ideological proximity was entirely absent. (João Mourão, Canal Caveira/Sala de Gessos)

From the Fold to the Work to the Space

 Produced within the studios of Avenida 211, many of the works on view (photographs, measurements, moulds, prints) respond or refer directly to the building itself—and, I would venture, to an underlying awareness that the project already had a planned end. As though seeking to fix their memory of the space against the erosion of time, images of the interiors and exteriors of no. 211 accumulate: from the doorframe to the shadows cast by the windows, the dimensions of the rooms, the avocado tree growing in the interior courtyard. Armanda Duarte's spare, delicate Espaço enrolado por mãos engorduradas is a perfect example: made in 2012 for the group exhibition Logradouro (itself likely a further reference to the building's interior-exterior space), the three small balls of linseed-oil-soaked thread record the length, width, and height of 211's exhibition space. Dating back to 2008, a large work by António Bolota—represented here by its maquette alone—was originally constructed from metal beams and plaster, and suspended from the ceiling of his studio at non-orthogonal angles relative to the access points between the three rooms he occupied, standing as a material translation of the movements and circuits traced by the artist's body within his atelier. From the same year, Liene Bosquê's Interior is a latex cast of the interior surfaces of the space's windows, subsequently displayed outside, thereby bringing the inside out and connecting 211 to the Avenida da Liberdade and the life unfolding along it. The Avenida continued to reverberate beyond its physical boundaries, as in numerous works by João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: having built a camera obscura across two adjacent rooms at 211, the measurement of 3.10 metres—the focal distance permitted by the building's architecture—became the standard unit in the works they created there, and in many they would go on to make after moving studios.

This transversal reading becomes possible only within the specific context of the exhibition: here, for the first time, ideas and works that passed through the same space across an extended period are brought together in one place. Given that few of the works on view will have coexisted at Avenida 211 simultaneously, what might they have to say to one another? What new readings might emerge from encountering these works—so diverse, so representative of different moments and artists—when held together within an ensemble whose shared ground is less spatial than affective? Here, for me, lies the exhibition's true significance, beyond any exercise in remembrance or the archival inscription of a sui generis event in the Portuguese art scene: the possibility of compressing time in order to read a space through its cumulative experience. It is an opportunity to regard making, objects, and relations not as isolated, disconnected acts but as part of an expanded cycle of interrelationality, always contingent upon (and responsive to) the flows of its context. To look at the history of no. 211 Avenida da Liberdade today is to reflect on the city from the inside out, to take stock of the processes by which the right to the city has been eroded, to dream of a life unbound by the imperatives of capitalisation, and to awaken into a nightmare in which imagination can scarcely be sustained.

The Avenida was, in essence, a response to the failure of state and municipal structures to recognise the kind of support artistic production requires—a necessary, rightful support that is not only a matter of money (though money, of course, helps considerably) but of space, constancy, and c(ommun)ity. I cannot help but feel that the possibility of a private, heavily capitalised entity being willing to offer a space with proper conditions of use, and without expectation of financial return, has become increasingly unthinkable. Yet all of this took place on Avenida da Liberdade, which, while a semi-segregated, classed area of the city, is also the stage of protests and collective demonstrations (see 15 October 2012, contemporary with the Avenida, and to date the largest demonstration in Portuguese history). Its moment was itself exceptional, coinciding with the transition to a totalising globalisation, the Western economic crisis, and the presence of the Troika in Portugal, along with the severe austerity it imposed on daily life and on cultural, housing, and labour structures.

Over the course of a process that culminated in the present “financialisation of cities,” the very possibility of artistic communities existing at the heart of metropolitan centres was redefined. In this adverse context, Avenida 211 was like a fold: a space where new forms of action, knowledge, and collective experience emerged. By the time it ended, the city was no longer the same. (Marta Mestre and Nuria Enguita)

 Co-laboration: The Art of Working Together

 Reading the captions attentively, one encounters throughout the exhibition a series of clues that allow for the reconstruction not only of the space and its dynamics but also of the relationships that developed among the artists who shared it. What emerges is as moving as it is surprising: alongside amusingly unlikely situations and moments of affinity, there are numerous episodes, each emblematic of the companionship, participation, dialogue, and collaboration that consistently defined the Avenida. These clues show how the place, its participants, and its artistic production mutually constituted one another as a creative and affective ecosystem, marked by permeability and organic exchange—at one point, it is noted that, from the very outset, all the interior doors separating the numerous work rooms were removed so as not to impede the creative flow. On a screen, dozens of photographs by Susana Pomba document openings and moments when the community opened itself to the public, with artists, friends, and works in constant interaction. I find myself smiling as I recognise faces I hold dear, artists I admire and people I count as friends; and it is heartening to see how many of the relationships—affective and creative, as though such a distinction were possible—forged during the lifespan of this place endure to this day.

I recount here one of the episodes I found most striking, and perhaps most representative of the Avenida's collaborative spirit, for those who may have had less time or inclination to attend to the careful documentation accompanying each work on display. In one of the collective Fine-Arts student exhibitions in 2007, Joana Escoval presented several centuries-old olive trees, brought from a region of the Alentejo where trees were beginning to be cleared for intensive agriculture. Escoval and her colleagues carried them up to the Avenida's first floor, where they remained for the duration of the exhibition. At its close, the trees were donated to Lisbon's Botanical Garden, where they are still planted today. From the collaborative to the participatory goes a small step; and the marks that the Avenida left on the city, through active participation, quite literally took root.

The collaborative force of artistic expressions is visible not only in the relations between individual artists but also in the way the spaces-within-the-space themselves operated. Growing symbiotically within Avenida 211, Parkour was an exhibition space run by eight resident artists from different generations, presenting a new exhibition each month—without funding, but with the full, collectively commitment (and knowledge) of its organisers, in a place where artists could work as freely as possible. As its organisers put it: "Neither a gallery nor an institution can function on this basis of sociality, emotional choices, whims, and fantasies, up to a certain point. Parkour had no need for economic profitability, and its only responsibility was to the context that saw it come into being." The collaborative manner in which both the Avenida and, inevitably, Parkour were built is visible in the smallest details, as in the exhibition Gothic, conceived by Ana Manso and Gonçalo Sena as an extension of their studio into the exhibition space: the pieces, made within Parkour (again, as though attempting to record it), did not merely dialogue with one another but materialised a continuum (which here, as it happens, measured exactly the length of the Parkour wall) between the artists, the works, and the place.

Another episode worth highlighting is Bruno Cidra and Gonçalo Barreiros's Fazer Andar at Parkour in 2013. Studio-mates in the Avenida's basement (both being sculptors, there was no need to carry heavy materials up to higher floors), they conceived the exhibition and all its works jointly, under shared authorship. This form of sharing, of both the work itself and the creative process, is itself an expressive force that drives artistic enquiry—something well understood at the Avenida, and something we increasingly seem to have forgotten. Cidra and Barreiros's collaborative work extended beyond the basement studio and Parkour to the courtyard, where they built a working forge for making their iron pieces: "With the blessing of António Bolota, who was always open to daring experimentation, even though it contravened his rule of 'not lighting fires,' the forge not only produced the Parkour exhibition but also filled the entire building with smoke." Given time, availability, and freedom, anything can become grounds for trying something new.

For this group of younger artists, Avenida was a space where they could experiment—and even fail—without consequences, as there was no pressure from the commercial circuit. When it closed, the space left a huge void, both in terms of the property market and symbolically, insofar as it housed some of the most representative artists of Portuguese art from the last twenty years. 

The Past in the Present for the Future

Far from confining itself to the visual arts, the Avenida was a meeting point between diverse artistic practices and disciplines, such as music, fashion, curating, and programming. From the outset of its public programme in 2007 until its end, the label Filho Único inhabited Cave 211, focusing on musical experimentation—between the acoustic and the electronic, there was room for improvisation and unlikely ensembles. Even after the Avenida closed, Filho Único has continued to programme music in artistic and museum spaces, including the annual "Summer Nights" held in Lisbon, in venues such as the gardens of the Galeria Quadrum and the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, among others.

Like other ecosystems, Avenida 211 was fertile ground for growth: the creative and artistic growth not only of its residents but also of other pre-institutional structures and formulations—"pre-" in that some of them would indeed later become institutions in their own right—as was the case with Kunsthalle Lissabon (founded by João Mourão and Luís Silva) and the now-defunct The Barber Shop (founded by Margarida Mendes). The latter is a particularly interesting case, not only for its founding mission or for the undeniable significance of the visionary programming it developed over its lifetime, but also for having survived nomadically, after the end of Avenida 211, within other "non-artistic" collectivities (including Sport Club Intendente and Associação Amigos do Minho, both since closed), thereby challenging a certain assumption that such programming belongs only to already "consecrated" kinds of spaces. What we have here is the case of a structure for the creation and circulation of thought that accompanied—and lived through, as did all inhabitants of the capital—the disappearance of collective spaces, artistic and otherwise, in the hyper-individualised and capitalised city that 21st-century Lisbon has become.

Structured in a way that seemed to answer directly to the communal desire of its "cradle," The Barber Shop refused to settle into any fixed format or self-imposed programmatic line. Established in the former barbershop on the ground floor as "a transdisciplinary space of listening and encounter," its collaborative curatorial direction was shared among several cultural agents (among them Mariana Silva and Isadora Neves Marques, Avenida resident artists and co-curators of the project from 2011), and carte blanche was extended to curators and programmers to contribute to the construction of as plural a programme as possible. Between conversations, performances, lectures, summer schools, and reading groups, its scope of action seemed undeterred by questions of interdisciplinarity, authorship, or institutionality, operating tangentially yet distinctly from other cultural structures of the time. The ephemerality of its projects allowed for the (im)permanence of agents and discourses from different contexts and places, within a space understood as "a test tube for experimentation," and defined by its founder-curator as "obvious response to the widespread dissatisfaction due to the shortcomings found in the local critical and artistic context, for which the term ‘periphery’ is often used as an excuse."

On the founding of Kunsthalle Lissabon, the testimony of João Mourão and Luís Silva speaks of possibilities that now seem almost chimerical. In 2009, António Bolota gave the two curators a ground-floor space, formerly a Telecel shop, in which this now-established institution began—one that has continuously remained among the most relevant in the city and the country. From the ground-floor shop to the first floor, to which it subsequently moved, and through to its current premises, the consistency of its mission has enabled it to remain both relevant and consequential within the art scene. Supporting emerging artists as well as more established figures absent from the Portuguese context, it alternates between national and international artistic practices while reflecting on the role of institutions in culture and on relational models of making and exhibiting.

What we can see at the MAC/CCB is the (re)construction of the memory of a space-time that now surfaces as an impossibility. And let no one mistake this for mere nostalgia or lamentation for times gone by: Avenida 211 was—and remains—an instance of mourning (and struggle) for all that capitalism extracts without return; a memory and a scar marking the end of possible futures; an echo of all that we dreamed the city, and culture, might (never) become. And here I find myself, caught in contradictory feelings, as with all that is most human: glad that it happened, sad that it ended, desperate in the knowledge that it cannot be repeated. Returning to Isadora Neves Marques's video with which I opened this text, and in reference to the communal, shared mode of life of the Tupi people of Pindorama, a voice reaches us to reflect upon "a way of being in which exchange, rather than identity, is the fundamental value to be affirmed." We do not need a five-storey building on the Avenida da Liberdade, but we need our city, our community, space, and time to transcend our individuality—and some hope to wake us from the torpor of our times.

 MAC/CCB