Portuguese visual artist Susana Mendes Silva is set to deliver a conference exploring her multifaceted artistic practice, spanning drawing, installation, performance, archival work, and encounters with the public, spaces, history, and peers.
The conference, titled "On Artistic Practice," will showcase how Susana Mendes Silva's work transforms historical and political references into exhibitions, objects, and actions that transmit both poetic and political messages. Central to her approach is the extraction of the banal, the everyday, and the intimate sphere to trigger performances and create what she terms performative spaces.
The artist has consistently demonstrated an interest in taking mundane, daily things or those from the intimate sphere to spark performances and create artistic projects that function as performative spaces.
Her practice addresses a pressing concern articulated by curator Antonia Gaeta, who has observed that the object of Mendes Silva's work is often the observation of the absolute absence of collective and egalitarian spaces of thought capable of determining social engagement and inspiring free behaviour.
Mendes Silva positions the artist not as someone who provides answers, but rather as a questioner — someone who prompts reflection and introduces audiences to worlds they haven't experienced before. The conference will explore these ideas through the works and projects she presents.
The event will take place on the 6 of December, at 3.30pm, at MAC/CCB.
More information is available here.
"Other Spaces" Conference Series
The conference forms part of Outros Espaços (Other Spaces), an annual conference series resulting from a partnership between the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) and the School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) and the Research Centre for Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (CICANT) at Universidade Lusófona-Centro Universitário de Lisboa.
The partnership aims to bridge academic and scientific production with the wider community, providing opportunities for knowledge transmission whilst creating a space for pluralistic dialogue. The collaborative programme encompasses thematic synergies ranging from visual arts, cinema, performing and sound arts, to communication and culture, architecture, and new digital devices.
The conferences take place once monthly on Saturdays at 3pm in the MAC/CCB auditorium at the Centro Cultural de Belém, with programming running from March through December.