The confinement we find ourselves in has forced into a virtual space which is nowadays the only common ground we possess to connect with each other. Since most of our daily activities take place there, we no longer have to merely think of ways in which to adapt the physical world to the virtual one, but also to transfer the digital archives we are currently creating to our material realities. In fact, even though the virtual sphere is commonly conceived as a duplicity of corporeal reality, now that the only way to access the outside world and to insert ourselves in the public sphere depends on this imagined structure, their roles appear to have changed. If we then admit that the digital world can also be an autonomous realm where things rule themselves and not where they are only reproduced, the situation we are experiencing today does not have to simply represent a temporary moment in time in which we exist virtually, but it could be a means to regard and expand our experiences in a new manner.

Instead of refusing to think about the present situation, as if we wanted to subtract ourselves from it or as if we were hoping to maintain our previous modes of existence, the exhibition we are now presenting follows the logics of the virtual world, instead of trying to copy reality. In this sense, playing with the contrasts between natural and artificial spatiality, Turns out it was (never) there exists inside of an organic and potential space in which the works of Aurelia Noudelmann, Ana Paginini, Carmo Pinheiro de Melo, Gonçalo Albergaria, Hala Namer, João Maria Pacheco, Lucía Vives, Maria Appleton and Zizi Ramires successively appear.

These works focus on the juxtaposition and deconstruction of bodies, spaces and languages between the digital and the material spheres. Departing from this idea, the exhibition seeks to explore the ways in which the transferring and overlapping of imagined (virtual) and tangible (material) realities alter our perception on the virtuality and materiality of the bodies and spaces they form, affecting their presence. Moreover,it explores how these bodies and spaces mutually construct the organizational structures of the realities that produce them.

In a sense, Turns out it was (never) there questions the separation between these categories and the idea that things can only gain substance by means of their bodily existence and not their imagination. Not seeking to explore the barriers between the digital and the material world, but hoping to transform our given notions about them, the exhibition tries to find clues that show us how to move from one sphere to the other.



Ana Bacelar Begonha












Organisation
Associação Pousio - Arte e Cultura

Curator and texts
Ana Bacelar Begonha

Design, programming and communication
Marta Vaz da Silva

Acknowledgements
Ana Paganini, Aurelia Noudelmann, Carmo Pinheiro De Melo, Diana d’Orey, Duarte Bénard da Costa, Gonçalo Albergaria, Hala Namer, Joana Tejo, João Maria Pacheco, José Sottomayor, Lucía Vives, Mafalda d’Oliveira Martins, Maria Appleton, Marta Vaz da Silva, Martim Mesquita Guimarães, Vera Menezes e Zizi Ramires.