Contemporânea

On the unstable terrain of ecological and epistemic transformation, Fluid Prospections emerges as a performative investigation into fluid and oceanic materialities, metaphors, and methodologies. It is part of a broader project by Contemporânea, under artistic direction of Celina Brás, which investigates the hybrid as a process of negotiation and dialogue fostering new forms of knowledge, reinforcing both the potentiality and the political dimension of art. It articulates moving image, performance, sound, and editing, convening artistic practices that problematize the hybrid as an unstable and fragile condition of fusion or alienation—a sensitive matter, a field of action and production of multiple possibilities. These instruments of interrelation and contamination constitute, in contemporary art, a privileged space of freedom, consolidation, and confrontation of forces and dynamics associated with the poetics of hybridity, transnational imaginaries, other identities, cultures, and discourses.  

Fluid Prospections, held in Porto in June 2025, between Praia da Granja and the independent art space Rampa, brings together artistic practices that flow between mediums and disciplines, confronting dichotomic positionings—between land and sea, human and non-human, nature and culture, historical legacies and contemporary ecology. As a situated program, it negotiates the Atlantic threshold between the coast and the urban area, and dialogues with feminist, posthuman reflections of oceanic anthropologies and Black Atlantic legacies. It proposes performative events not of fixed identities or stable categories, but of hybrid interrelation and immersion processes. 

Water, as Astrida Neimanis refers, is not simply that which sustains life, but that which (recon)figures life anew. We are not merely beings that contain water; we are bodies of water—porous, gestational, relational, involved in hydrological cycles that precede and exceed the individual (Neimanis, 2017:1). An aqueous ontology corrupts the Enlightened fiction of the self-sufficient subject, displaces the patriarchal and colonial illusion of coherence, autonomy, and domination. Alternatively, Neimanis argues, our embodied condition becomes a “more-than-human hydrocommon,” where distinctions between subject and environment dissolve (2017: 2).1 To figure ourselves as aqueous bodies is, in a certain way, to embrace an ethics and politics grounded in fluidity, situatedness, and continuous becoming. 

In this sense, Fluid Prospections weaves connections between a politics of location and the expansion of the hybrid through the lens of fluidity. It summons the interstitial and metaphorical spaces evocative of the oceanic: the liminal, hybrid, and often neglected zones where matter, memory, and meaning circulate in submerged flows. Each artist stages a unique entry point into these aqueous epistemologies, collectively composing embodied responses to ecological precarity, the colonial legacy, and the urgent need to rethink relationality. 

The program began on the Atlantic coast with a Caminhada de algas [Seaweed Walk], led by Elina Stolde of the Gata da Mata collective, a knowledge-sharing and degustation workshop on various seaweed species from the coastal ecosystem of Praia da Granja. This act of walking with and among the seaweed—of tasting, naming, and learning—resituates knowledge in a sensual, multispecies tessitura. It recalls, to some extent, Neimanis's call for "gestational" modes of knowledge (2017:7), and foregrounds the temporality of experience and collective and situated sharing. Here, seaweeds are not mere resources, but agents of relation, connectors between local terrain and planetary metabolism. The edible becomes political: recovering ancestral and communal forms of nutrition, resisting extractivist economies, and shredding the threads between body, territory, and nourishment. 

The fluid epistemologies initiated on the coast continue in the subterranean layers of speculative thinking in Invenção do pensar [Invention of Thinking], by António Poppe. In dialogue with a brain coral, Poppe invites us to imagine cognition as something more than human—a porous and polyphonic process in which thought floats through word, minerals, and poetry. The coral, as an hermaphrodite plankton-producing organism, becomes an emblem of what Stefan Helmreich describes in Alien Ocean (2009) as place where the boundaries of life are continually reconfigured, connecting "the microscopic to the macrocosmic, bacteria to the biosphere, genes to the globe" (Helmreich, 2009: ix).2 Poppe's performance-soliloquy collapses the gap between organism and thinking, making cognition a metabolic process—that resists the dry abstraction of Cartesian logic and returns thought to the fluid depths of embodiment. 

O meu útero não está na europa [My uterus is not in Europe], by Raquel Lima, articulates voice, moving image, and ritualistic evocation, offering an epigenetic, holistic, and artistic investigation into the relationship between uterine ancestry and intuitive movements. It retrieves embryonic relationships between the jaw and the pelvis, the voice and the trauma of the Black diaspora, seeking practices of self-care, healing and liberation. Departing from the knowledge that "the head rationalizes, the voice expresses, but the uterus holds memories,"3 Lima reactivates the silenced affective archive carried in the bodies of people historically excluded from rationalist and Eurocentric narratives of subjectivity. In her words: "Some uteri scream in silence what others would say, had they not been historically silenced."4 This assertion articulates a profoundly decolonial epistemology, that resonates with Paul Gilroy's appeal to center the counter-histories and fugitive knowledges of African diaspora. 

In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy theorizes the Atlantic not simply as a space of colonial violence but as a fluid and transnational cultural formation—a “counterculture of modernity” that emerges through the displacement, exile, and resistance of Black peoples in Europe, the Americas, and Africa (Gilroy, 1993: 1). In this framework, the Black Atlantic is constituted by routes rather than roots, by a network of circulations and creolized practices that destabilize the fixity of national, racial, or cultural identity. Raquel Lima’s refusal—“my uterus is not in Europe”—is an act of epistemic displacement. It disidentifies from the normative geographies of colonial knowledge and insists on a diasporic remapping grounded in the lived, embodied, and intergenerational experiences of Black women. 

Raquel Lima's performance enacts this multiplicity through voice, gesture, and body, refusing the division between affection and intellect, between somatic memory and political critique. If, as Gilroy argues, the legacy of slavery produced a "double vision" of the self—fragmented yet critical—then Raquel Lima's performance becomes a site where fragmented consciousness is not pathologized but reclaimed as a strategy for healing and reparation. 

Gilroy's rejection of cultural nationalism in favor of hybrid, intertwined genealogies finds a vivid echo in Lima's insistence on the uterus as a site of shared memory—not limited by biology or geography, but shaped by overlapping histories of violence, resistance, and care. In this way, o meu útero não está na europa articulates the aesthetics and ethics of the Black Atlantic: mobile, hybrid, embodied, and defiantly open. 

Colónia, by Mariana Vilanova, deepens the program's engagement with microscopic life, underwater imaginaries, and post-anthropocentric thought. Her performance immerses us in the invisible—the gelatinous, vibrant, and slow-moving world of marine microbial colonies, taking algae as an example species. As Helmreich observes, microbes have become central figures in contemporary marine science, embodying a double vision of the ocean: as a familial home and a radical one (Helmreich, 2009: x–xi). Vilanova's work resonates with this oscillation. Articulating sound, moving image, and performativity of more-than-human matter, it invites us to listen to creatures whose temporality and scale escape human perception, but whose vital processes sustain entire ecosystems. In doing so, Colónia destabilizes anthropocentric hierarchies, evoking a reimagining of attention, and scale. The ocean, here, beyond being merely vast and sublime, becomes intimate and strange—a place of fragile interdependencies and microbial kinships. 

The performance cycle concluded with Waterbowls, by Tomoko Sauvage, a concert that translates the aqueous into the vibrational. By transforming porcelain bowls filled with water into electroacoustic instruments, Sauvage gives voice to the inaudible, to the minimal, to colliding air-water matter, to what evaporates. Her work is a meditation on the resonance, feedback, and performativity of matter. By animating "the inanimate," Sauvage listens to the very agency of water, its rhythms and moods, its potential to shape and be shaped. In her soundscape, the undulation of Neimanis's more-than-human ethics is reiterated—an ethics that emerges not from control or domination, but from attunement, amplification, and co-becoming. 

Together, the performances in Fluid Prospections stage a series of encounters with liquid multiplicity: its capacity to nourish and destroy, connect and dissolve, remember and transform. They articulate in hybrid fluidity as spaces of possibility, unlearning, and reconfiguration. 

As Neimanis recalls, "figuring ourselves specifically as bodies of water emphasizes a particular set of planetary ensembles that demand the urgency of an answer" (2017:5).5 Fluid Prospections responds to that call. It stages fluidity not only as an object of reflection, but as a site of experience. It questions modalities of the liquid margins of contemporary life. How can art—through its capacity to rehearse, disturb, and speculate—help us reimagine the relationships with, through, and as aqueous beings? What futures might emerge if we allow ourselves to be guided, literally, by the fluidity of interdependence? 

Fluid Prospections proposes sensibilities and, to a certain extent, stages hybrid forms of hydrocommons: thoughts between the human and the nonhuman; generative recoveries of the memory of the Atlantic and Black diaspora; oceanic micro-territories as alien as they are prolific; electroacoustic improvisations of water and sound. Refusing stagnation, individualism, and exceptionalism, the hybrid provides time and space for a politics of identity fluidity, more-than-human and relational, recognizing that environmental justice is inseparable from a planetary transcorporeality.  

Programme

Friday 27th June, Praia da Granja
10:00 -13:00 — Gata da Mata, Caminhada de algas, talk and tasting

Saturday 28th June, Rampa
17:30 — Opening
18:00 — António Poppe, Invenção do pensar
18:45 — Raquel Lima, o meu útero não está na europa
19:30 — Mariana Vilanova, Colónia
20:15 — Tomoko Sauvage, Waterbowls
21:00 — Closing

Bibliographic references 

—Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic. 
—Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press. 
—Helmreich, S. (2009). Alien ocean: Anthropological voyages in microbial seas. University of California Press.