Curated by KWY (Ricardo Gomes with Gabriela Raposo and Miguel Mesquita)

Our proposal aims to foster an approach that isn’t restricted to urban contexts, one that incorporates a vision of an interdisciplinary reading of territory and landscape. This baseline led to a reflection into the juxtaposition between works of art and their context, and the interpretations of the spatial transformation these interactions might promote. We aspire to trigger a series of actions that create a dialogue with the selected locations, allowing the appropriation of different spatial understandings to foment into functional and symbolic dimensions. In the context of operating under highly-specific territorial conditions, we began looking for entry points of intervention which question the dynamic between the natural and the built heritage.

We identified three spatial typologies to be transformed. The square – seen as a void or an open space, integrated in the urban fabric, acting as a symbolic meeting place of social interaction and exchange of knowledge. The garden – interpreted in this case as a parcel of nature which is integrated or constructed into an urban void, and whose relevance as a contemporary spatial device is a place for questioning. And lastly, landscape – a reflection of an insular territory’s relationship with nature and the ocean, and which, in the case of an island’s geographic schema, is directly linked with notions of perimeter and route.

Through this aspect, it became essential to identify ways of acting that could result in distinct ideas of space, utilising each chosen artist as critical – and individuated – discussions about certain spatial situations. In the immediate proximity of the interventions, in their relationship to the surroundings and in the intersections between each of them, we encourage an extension of the work beyond the adjacent spaces to create complementary understandings of the curatorial question.

Our selection privileged artists who have shown their ability to articulate their work within the historical, economic, and social contexts that we wanted to address, and who can adapt to the local materials and techniques geographically available. These reflections are connected through an idea of interventions in space which call for a sense of a total work of art. We looked for a sensibility in the integration of the work through the materials used in relation to those of the site or context.

Whether it is about the various forms in which art can manifest itself – from the physical to the immaterial and through channels as diverse as the rubrics of architecture, sociology, and other complementary fields – the works produced offer communications as metaphysic of spatial reflection: they are thoughts on the dialectic of how, through the processes of making, a space happens to function.


The Island Circuit had the support of Merrell Portugal.