The Museum of Contemporary art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, is programming a series of meetings with agents from the field of art in order to provide a variety of perspectives on the future prospects of museums and their social and heritage responsibility, as well as on the creation of knowledge.

Filipa Ramos: A wild and sylvan North

What constitutes a territory and shapes its identity?
Is it its textures, temperatures, variations and chromatic combinations: what we are used to call landscape but which in this case is a landscape so close and interiorized that it resists such classification?
Is it the moods and ways of life of its inhabitants: the ways of being polite and rude to others, to relate to the environment and materials? Is it their expressions, ways of seeing and speaking?
Or a certain appreciation for rain, a genetic resistance to wind and heat, an interiorization of humidity?
Are borders wise lines that know how to distinguish lands or are they arbitrary separations that ignore similarities, blood and wind affinities, genetic patterns and seasonal movements?
And what role should art museums play in this complex questioning process that brings together nature and culture?

With these and other questions in mind, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, I have been searching for the essence of Iberian Northwest, trying to find the places where it could reside. This talk shares some of the questions that I have been asking myself and others about the modes, rituals, textures and expressive modes that people, animals, plants, elements and minerals adopt when shaping a territory. 

Filipa Ramos is a Lisbon born writer and curator. She holds a PhD from the School of Critical Studies, Kingston University, London and is currently Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the city of Porto.

Her field of research in both her critical and theoretical texts, in addition to her lectures, workshops and publications, focuses on how culture addresses ecology, with a special interest in how contemporary art fosters relationships between nature and technology.

Filipa Ramos: A wild ans sylvan North
8 February, Wednesday, at 7 pm
Free admission until full capacity is reached