The Post-Summer Laboratories 2026 exhibition is the result of the 12th edition of the Summer Laboratories’ Programme for the Support of Artistic Creation, a partnership between gnration in Braga, the CAAA –Art and Architecture Center, in Guimarães, and Solar –Cinematic Art Gallery, in Vila do Conde. Through an open call for artists born or residing in the district of Braga and the municipality of Vila do Conde, the programme supports new artistic projects developed during residencies at the partner institutions. The 2026 edition brings together four installations by Bruno Mesquita, Marisa Carvalho Fernandes, Sandra Teixeira, and Maria Amaro and Calgon. The exhibition will tour the three partner venues between September 2026 and May 2027, taking on different configurations throughout its itinerary. During the presentation at Solar, on December 12, Maria Amaro and Calgon will also present a performance-concert at Espaço Praia, in Mindelo.

Ecology has moved beyond merely denoting the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments to become a way of thinking about the world based on the relationships that constitute it. From this perspective, organisms do not exist in isolation, but in relation to their surroundings. It is from this idea of porosity that the works brought together in this exhibition converge, questioning what happens when the boundaries through which we organise the world cease to be airtight.

A territory is not confined to the outline of a map. There are always other lines that cross it, other scales from which it can be observed, other stories that overlap with its geography. It is in this disconnect between the place and the ways of representing it that we find Quantos lados tem o monte? by Marisa Carvalho Fernandes, and O que corre por baixo by Bruno Mesquita. Whilst, in the Sameiro mountains, two territories share the same landscape, on the River Ave fiction speaks to us of reality. Here, ecology emerges not merely as a concern for the environment, but as a way of thinking about the relationships that give a place its existence: between territory and memory, between what is made by man and what is made by nature. In both installations, the place emerges as a kaleidoscopic reality, which transforms as different planes reorganise themselves.

Just as different ways of looking can rise to different landscapes, so can the image return our gaze, becoming an active presence. In Prova de luz by Sandra Teixeira, a leaf from a begonia and a sheet of photographic paper process light in different ways. In ENTRE-LINHAS, by Maria Amaro and Calgon, music and video are composed in parallel and in real time. Drawing on analogue processes, the two projects bring sound and image together in a transformative relationship: the image can become sound, just as sound can become image. The image thus ceases to be static matter and becomes a trace of a process of metamorphosis, in a transition from the invisible to the visible. What we see and hear depends on the relationship between light and matter, signals and devices, in a chain of transformations that is never entirely predictable.

Reflecting on these relationships implies recognising the contingency of the ways in which we perceive the world. In the notion of ‘intra-action’, developed by Karen Barad, entities do not first exist as autonomous units only to subsequently enter into a relationship; it is within the relationship itself that they are constituted. This perspective allows us to consider the works brought together here as relational processes. Natural and cultural, human and more-than-human, document and fiction, analogue and digital, become categories in flux. The exhibition is situated within this fluid space, where artistic production itself becomes a means of investigating the relationships that render the perceptible world.

- Filipa Valente