Opening of the exhibition "Seventh Continent, Confidential Report [volume 2]"

Curated by: Paulo Mendes, Antonio Olaio

Featuring:

Antônio Caramelo

Bárbara Fonte

Fabrizio Matos

“It seems easier to imagine the absolute deterioration of the Earth and nature today than the end of late capitalism; perhaps this is due to a flaw in our imagination.”

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time

Starting from a comprehensive idea of ​​Freedom, shared by the exhibition proposals of the entities that constitute this RPAC program project, the curatorial project taking place at the College of Arts advances to the Duchampian conception of the artist's condition in his labyrinth, to present a proposal against the lassitude of thought in the age of impotence, against ideological abstinence, communicational anesthesia, the decadence of the passive multitude incapable of idealizing a utopian project: “Beyond Space and Time, in the Seventh Continent”

"Utopology revives parts of the mind that have long been dormant, organs of political, historical, and social imagination almost atrophied from lack of use, muscles of praxis that we have long ceased to exercise, revolutionary gestures that we have lost the habit of rehearsing, even subliminally. This rebirth of futurity, of the postulation of alternative futures, is not in itself a political program, nor even a political practice: but it is difficult to see how lasting or effective political action could emerge without it."

Fredric Jameson, Valences of Dialectics

The exhibition project “Beyond Time and Space, in the Seventh Continent” presents a transversal set of works by approximately thirty Portuguese artists and performers, stylistically and generationally differentiated, in which the subjectivity of their dystopian visions is the factor that unifies their works, works that evoke fictions activated by complex realities, mapping individual mythologies, in this turbulent social and political time we are going through.

A seventh continent of utopias that projects itself in counterpoint to the six that constitute our geographical places, which occupy the memories of the collective social body.

Premonition of a redeeming or terrible future, born from the speculative-creative game between reality and fiction.

As Fredric Jameson states in his book The Political Unconscious: “what is effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily utopian.”

Paulo Mendes _ 2025

This exhibition takes place within the scope of the “In Freedom” project supported by RPAC | The Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art, which includes the College of Arts, MIRA FORUM, AiR 351 and Lugar do Desenho.