Waterways: 'Geografias da Água', between São Miguel, Loulé and Vila Nova de Cerveira

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DATE

12 Mar 2026

AUTHOR

Ana Isabel Soares

Waterways: 'Geografias da Água', between São Miguel, Loulé and Vila Nova de Cerveira

AUTHOR

Ana Isabel Soares

"The exhibition Geografias da Água is part of the Desaguar project, an "initiative for artistic creation, mediation and circulation" coordinated by the Cerveira Art Biennial Foundation and developed in partnership with Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas and the Loulé Municipal Galleries, with support from the Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art. Structured around the territorial articulation between Vila Nova de Cerveira, Ribeira Brava, on the Azorean island of São Miguel, and Loulé, at the southern tip of mainland Portugal, the project is based on the proposal to create and reflect artistically from geographies marked by water – by its presence, by its absences, by the revelations and concealments it allows, in the ways it conditions and liberates experiences, how it defines and liberates borders."

...the course [of poetry] has no precise end, just as history does not, despite repeated millennial visions. But, like history, it must elicit proposals that are central because they approach the possibility of promoting a confrontation with the reality that exists. And whoever speaks of poetry, speaks once and for all of the other arts.

Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, "Uma Geração Dessatisfeita", Os Dois Crepúsculos, 1981 (ed. Bestiário, 2022, p. 279)

When Joaquim Manuel Magalhães extends to all the arts a kind of commitment to "promote a confrontation with the reality that exists," he suggests one of the topics raised by the exhibition Geografias da Água (Geographies of Water) on display until March 14th at the Municipal Gallery of the Convento do Espírito Santo in Loulé: that of rejecting rigid ends and univocal readings in a perpetual and fruitful relationship with non-artistic reality. Waterways are fluid paths through which water travels: thus, art can be read as flowing matter, simultaneously a symbolic, cultural, and even ecological existence.

The exhibition Geografias da Água is part of the Desaguar project, an "initiative for artistic creation, mediation and circulation" coordinated by the Cerveira Art Biennial Foundation and developed in partnership with Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas and the Loulé Municipal Galleries, with support from the Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art. Structured around the territorial articulation between Vila Nova de Cerveira, Ribeira Brava, on the Azorean island of São Miguel, and Loulé, at the southern tip of mainland Portugal, the project is based on the proposal to create and reflect artistically from geographies marked by water – by its presence, by its absences, by the revelations and concealments it allows, in the ways it conditions and liberates experiences, how it defines and liberates borders. More than a theme, water constitutes a means. It is a structuring element of ecosystems and local economies, a symbolic image, a vehicle for memories and rituals: it suggests displacement and transformation – concepts that underlie the Desaguar project, which proposes artistic residencies to six artists (two from each vertex of the territorial triangle) that involve displacement from their usual contexts. What furrows does water make when its course is diverted? The artistic process seeks to answer this question by taking art as a fluid element of attention and creation situated between new margins. The resulting works become sensitive repositories of experiences, stories, and tensions of territories yet to be known and in the process of being known. This is the second stage of the project, following its presentation in the Azores in 2025. The itinerancy underlines the idea of circulation that structures the program: just as water travels through territories, shaping them and giving them identities, the works and creative processes move between contexts, acquiring new interpretations in each place, playing with spaces for new effects of fluidity.

The artistic direction of the project is by Mafalda Santos; in Loulé, the curatorship was the responsibility of João Serrão (on behalf of the Municipality of Loulé) and Mirian Tavares (from the University of Algarve). The proposed exhibition itinerary prioritizes the dialogue between languages and materials. Water does not appear as a literal representation (in fact, the artists choose to avoid what would be a natural expectation), but as an organizing principle of visual and conceptual processes. Ana Maria Pintora, Bertílio Martins, João Amado, Margarida Andrade, Milita Doré, and Patrícia Oliveira worked in drawing, installation, photography and video, painting, and mixed media. The diversity of their approaches lies in the fact that they all accept the creative relationship with experimental processes, based on the common challenge of researching the connections between territory, memory, and matter.

Ana Maria Pintora's Esteira, a piece made of interwoven rush and painted canvas, and four graphite drawings on paper by Milita Doré, greet visitors at the gallery's main entrance and suggest possible interpretations of the exhibition's theme: on one hand, the local artisanal techniques of working with rush, which require modifying the material through water; on the other, the references to the labor of washerwomen in Doré's drawings. Inside the gallery, a Cascata (Waterfall) of suspended strips of white cotton revisits the experimentation linked to the diaphanous quality that the artist from Rio Grande do Sul develops in much of her work. The suspension underscores the transience of what is liquid, in a dialogue with the mutable nature of water. Patricia Oliveira's imposing sculpture/installation further suggests the form of suspension or interruption: through an amalgamation of textures and colors in the form of an elevated channel and a – yet static – spill onto the ground, it occupies the room's space to question what constitutes passage or transport. In the piece Barrocal, Ana Maria Pintora superimposes "natural materials from the Algarve's Barrocal ecosystem" to compose an explorable horizontal canvas, evoking natural and transformational movements. Hiding and revealing prove that it is impossible to impede the course of water, energy in flux, which generates continuously mutating landscapes. Bertílio Martins has built a practice centered on the relationship between nature and structure. In Geografias da Água, he presents two panels, each divided into twenty rectangles: watercolors on the floor panel (Two sources for the same sea), and mixed media on paper for the wall panel. One is like the inverted image of the other, in a black and white interplay that emphasizes the veins left by water on a surface, combining memory and sensory experience.

The video Enxurrada, by Margarida Andrade, is shown on three screens arranged side by side. It is primarily the image of the seemingly deserted territory that they bring into the gallery. Water, here, is above all absence: even if the vividness of the color and luminosity contradicts an idea of barren land. In a way, the sculptures by the Azorean artist João Amado consolidate the dialogue that is immediately established between the various pieces in the gallery spaces: the playful sculptures become characters as they populate the rooms and, despite being immobile, suggest wanderings and modifications of the body.

Geografias da Água reaffirms the relevance of considering contemporary art at the intersection of aesthetic investigation and critical reflection on the world. Each artist responded differently to "flowing" into unfamiliar territories: the works are not mere representations of water, but result from situated experiences, marked by contact with places and their environmental particularities in relation to that element. By invoking water as a common language, the project brings together artistic practices and diverse territorial realities, transforming natural flows into paths of creation. As the poet and critic suggested, all arts can (and, in his view, should) converge towards a permanent openness to confront reality. In Geografias da Água, this confrontation is driven by the primordial element of instability, which, in a gesture similar to thought, allows us to connect margins, cross borders, and reinvent geographies by rethinking them. Art, like water, is the search for and encounter with paths through which to flow.

The Desaguar project will culminate with the third exhibition, which will take place in Vila Nova de Cerveira, from March 28th to May 23rd.

BIOGRAPHY

Ana Isabel Soares (b. 1970) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Lisbon, 2003), and has been teaching in the Algarve University (Faro, Portugal) since 1996. She was one of the founders of AIM – Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Her interests are in literature, visual arts, and cinema. She writes, translates, and publishes in Portuguese and international publications. She is a full member of CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication.

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