On February 2023, curator Filipa Ramos gave a conference at Artium Museoa as a part of the “Futures of the Museum” series. More than speculating about the institution to come, her conference hinted at a future group exhibition that she was preparing together with co-curator Juan Luís Toboso for for the Galeria Municipal of Porto. Entitled Sylvan and Harsh North, the exhibition would be the outcome of a one-year research, mapping the Northwestern Iberian Peninsula, looking at how the weather patterns and changes, the myths and stories, the rhythms, colours and shapes made the region in its reality and fiction. How could an exhibition, Ramos asked in the talk at Artium, trace an identity that is constantly evolving and map a territory that is composed as much by people than by animals, plants, elements and minerals?  Questions that resonated deeply with our own reflection towards the Basque Country and the future of exhibition-making.

Since such a research is an open and never-ending one, we have come back to Ramos and Toboso, some months after the exhibition finally opened in Porto, to share with us, for AMAonline, their afterthoughts on the project. These take the form of an essay by Filipa Ramos and a poem by Juan Luís Toboso. We also publish this new instalment of “No Time To Spare” while a follow-up of the exhibition “Sylvan and Harsh North” is currently being presented at Normal, the project of space of the University of Coruña, under the title “Fío do Norte” (from October 17, 2024 to the 31st of January, 2025)

Columbus, a Galician lady?

The title Norte Silvestre e Agreste [Wild and Sylvan North] was born undercover and only became public by accident. It was the name I had given to the Word document where I filed and described the artistic, topographical, and geographical references of the research I shared with Juan Luis Toboso on the artistic imagery of the Iberian Atlantic Northwest. It was a title with many doubts and uncertainties. In the mindset of a Lisbon person like me, the north of Portugal appears as a closed, sombre, rural and conservative territory. These are the platitudes of those who know little and don’t have time to imagine, inherited through family transmission and television references interested in reinforcing generic ideas so that everything stays as it is. The idea of calling this project Norte Silvestre e Agreste was a private joke, more about my own prejudices and stereotypes than about the reality I was discovering. Beyond these clichés, the research into Norte Silvestre e Agreste was driven by concrete questions and references: what defines the contemporary artistic and cultural scene of a territory that expands beyond national borders and identities? How do we characterise the common denominators of creative vivacity, expressed between cinema, contemporary art, performance and self-managed spaces, located between the Douro River and the Galician Atlantic? How to identify the character of the Iberian Northwest in its relationship with the environment—meteorology, climate, tone—and with the moods of beings and things based on a progressive movement and a desire to look forward?

The possible answers to these questions emerged through the people, places, images, sounds, works of art and creative gestures that shaped the document entitled Norte Silvestre e Agreste. These answers were found on the move, during the journeys that Juan and I made together along the roads and motorways that connect Porto to Lugo, the Littoral Douro to Galicia, travelling through the meanders that artists, filmmakers, poets, permacultures, weeds, wolves, kittens and wild horses led us to. On the way, were ate undercooked potato tortillas and San Simón cheese, feeding ourselves with what the land of Galicia was giving us. Confirming and surpassing our expectations, we found a dense creative and cultural fabric, tangled and difficult to describe in a linear way. We learnt that places create collectives and not the other way around, as in the case of Cem Raios T’Abram, a group of (then) young artists from Porto who got together in Pitões das Júnias, made a memorable film, and took their separate ways. That the New Galician Sculpture movement, NEG, is both a farce and reality, in its desire to unite the experiences, interests and moods of a series of artists who called themselves NEG almost ironically, as a response to journalistic jargon that invents movements from the identification of common sensibilities, despite diverse visions, as is the case with New Galician Cinema. That the urban exodus is not an illusion given by social media, but a reality, as poetic as it is harsh, of artists and various people who have decided to create a home or return to the place they never came from, in order to establish a deeper and more creative connection to the land. That community is a buzzword that doesn’t always serve to describe autonomous and autochthonous practices that, even if anchored, come up against territories that have been deconstructed and alienated by the lack of political, economic and symbolic interest. That the North, even before being Sylvan and Wild, is a stratified, heterogeneous and plural territory.

Amidst these discoveries, we were careful to avoid saudade and nostalgia, feelings that paralyse creativity and hinder transformation. Nostalgia has been appropriated time and again by the most diverse agendas, from politics to tourism and gentrification, relying on manoeuvres of self-exoticism and cultural appropriation to promote picturesque and ‘genuine’ environments and trends. An export sentiment of Lusitanian identity par excellence, the saudade rarely fulfils its projective function, its desire for the future. It has mainly become a way to revive and celebrate a past that is more folkloric than real. In being Sylvan and Wild, the North also defines itself, resisting with its opacity and remaining incomprehensible to the projection and instrumentalisation of its natural and cultural identity. This experience was particularly evident in relation to Diego Vites’ Cabria, originally a wooden structure used in Muxía, Costa da Morte, for the traditional drying of conger eel, which the artist transformed into an exhibition device. Inside and around it, past, present and future, reality and delirium, artefacts and found objects coexist in chaos and harmony. The portraits of the artist’s patriarchal genealogy, painted in oil on canvas, coexist with the queer festive spirit of the musical performance by Mouræ, Lois Búa’s alter ego, who distorts and reinvents the folk songs of Muxía according to the identity of his mythical-queer duende persona. The group of grave and sullen men also coexist with the small animistic figurations, moulded by Alejandra Pombo Su in fluorescent tones and glitter, and with the speculative documentation on the Galician origin of Christopher Columbus, facsimiled by Vites and printed on large cushions placed at the base of the Cabria.

Columbus might have been Galician, and more. In 1975, journalist María Dolores de la Fe declared live on Spanish television that she was certain that Columbus was a woman. In addition to other arguments, the Spanish journalist saw in the mysterious initials that accompany his signature, S.V.S., the abbreviation for Soy una Señora [I am a Lady]: a coded message to reveal his true gender identity. Paying homage to María Dolores de la Fe’s creative historiography, in 2020 the musical duo Hidrogenesse released the song S. U. S. (Colón era una mujer), which became a centrepiece of our research soundtrack. Combining this delirious speculation with the hypothesis of the navigator’s Galician nationality, set out in Vites’s Cabria, the figure of Columbus emerged as a Galician woman. Had Columbus not been so strongly linked to colonial violence and horror, it would have been fascinating, and fun, to speculate on this possibility within this context. Yet it is his historical figure that needs to be rewritten, rather than a possible change of national and gender identity. However, by exposing itself to such historiographical deliria, which overlay the crystallising readings of an idealised land of humidity and ancestral rurality, this territory reveals an openness to new mythologies and narratives, as fantastic as they are plausible.

Made from heavy eucalyptus trunks, whose complex and arduous installation challenged the logistical capacities of the Municipal Gallery’s technical team, the Cabria, in its materiality, was located at the epicentre of the ecological drama that unfolds across northern Portugal and Galicia. These territories are seriously affected by the monoculture of eucalyptus, a tree imported for the rapid production of paper pulp, which impoverishes the land and makes it vulnerable to massive wildfires. The portrait of these matchstick forests, made up of slender, balsamic-scented trees around which almost nothing else grows, was shown next to the Cabria through the projection, in installation format, of the beginning of Óliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come (2019). The film begins with a nocturnal view of a eucalyptus forest that has suffered a wildfire, illuminated by the powerful headlights of tractors cutting down the burnt trees. Between lyricism and reality, beauty and devastation, emerges another facet of this complex North of anthropogenic landscapes made up of suffering lands. Around it, mythical figures, chimeras of women and horses painted in black and white by Mariana Barrote on the mural in the Municipal Gallery, celebrated the coexistence, through their dances and light movements, of animal life and the desire for eco-feminist regeneration, merging graphic and performative expressiveness, cinematic imagery and aesthetic references with a prehistoric ancestry.

The initial speculations as to what would constitute the terrain, spirit and imaginary of the Sylvan and Wild North were materialised through the works presented, in a combination of new commissions and the display of pre-existing artworks. When the ideas that the Word document contained were properly lined up and the list of artists and artworks was more solid and stable, I shared it with Patrícia Vaz, the Head of Production at the Galeria Municipal do Porto. Out of carelessness, haste or overconfidence, or probably a combination of all three, I didn’t change the title of the file. Patrícia embraced the name unreservedly, promoting it to a common good. From a private joke, it became the official title of this tribute to a North that prides itself on being Wild, Sylvan and obviously harsh, whose artists prove, and at the same time dismantle, the clichés of those who think that the harshness and granite grey of the sky, houses and land are a permanent septentrional reality.

Filipa Ramos, May 2024

“Demons, dilemmas and deaf ear”, a poem by Juan Luís Toboso, 2024 (translated from Spanish)

Click here or on the image above to read the poem.