Situated Performances

Site-specific works generated from the collaboration between the Modus Operandi AND & the Situated Performances.

Steaming Cities

Fernanda Eugenio and Gustavo Ciríaco propose to transport sensitive operations from one city to another, inviting to navigate in a recreated sensorial ambience, a crossed and imaginary space-time, through which urban vapors can propagate themselves - and a poetic-experiential journey unfolds as a shared experience in the here-and-now.

Following the vapors of the city on a journey, between flight and dive, through the plane of sensations, Steaming Cities proposes an infiltration into the daily flow, "pinching" the cushioned senses of urban living and calling attention to a necessary revaluation of the transit times and the playful and imaginative relationship with inhabited spaces.

Triggered from the handling of ineffable sensation blocks, Steaming Cities is an open invitation to a reconnection with the emanations that come out of the lived experience that can only be experienced within a relationship of direct involvement.

For the duo of artists, crossing vapors from different cities is a way to collaborate for the sensitive reopening to the being in places, in times of virtualization of relationships and praise to the fleeting consumption of the place. The desire to capture and share vapors is in line with the reactivation of a sensibility less marked by the hegemony of sight, that encompasses all senses and calls the public to a re-enchantment with what is already there.

The invitation to immerse ourselves in this landscape of vapors intends to create a suspension to the zapping mode of screens, without denying their changing and fast operationality, which is also present in cities, but providing a new relationship between the more direct senses of sight and sound and the less hegemonic zone of touch, smell, and taste, mixing them all in our spatial and subjective drift.

For each city, a different format is adopted in its translation, between installation, performance and interactive show. The sensorial propositions, at times, propose to transport experiences from city to city, and, at other times, seek to recreate them in the same city where they appeared, but in another context. For this, the duo combines different site-specific tools to create imaginary devices crossed by multiple space-time intersections.

Steaming Cities is a nomadic site-specific work, which is dedicated, each edition, to a city through which the artists have passed, and seeks to capture the uncapturable, the ephemeral that constitutes the presence of a city, its most delicate yet characteristic features: the emanations of its everyday life.

The work seeks, on a broader level, to navigate important issues related to the activation of artistic sensibility as a generator of reflection, collective wisdom, and active empowerment.

Past editions:

Steaming Cities #1 - New York City, in New York, 2015

Steaming Cities #2 - HCMC/Saigon, in Lisbon, 2019

Steaming Cities #3 - Manila and Baatan, in Manila, 2022

City Labs

Cidades são tão diversas quanto as camadas que as compõem. Não param de voltar a emergir, de se re-performar ao olhar e de nos envolver com as suas atmosferas imperiosas e inevitáveis, acidentais e náufragas, frágeis e fortes, banais e extraordinárias. São alquimias sempre em processo, que vão produzindo padrões por vezes conflitantes, ainda que osmóticos, de habitação, experiência sensível e (des)agregação social. Além disso, resultantes de muitos sonhos de arquitetura, da mistura espúria entre fantasias utópicas, soluções improvisadas, estruturas de poder e desvios locais contingentes, as cidades são simultaneamente formas concretas e territórios efêmeros. Nelas vivemos e morremos, nos encontramos e nos despedimos, mantendo a ficção diária que une os interstícios do panorama mais amplo dos fenômenos urbanos.

City Labs são laboratórios temporários de atenção, mapeamento, criação e performance in situ, instalados em bairros e vizinhanças críticas de diferentes cidades, escolhidos pela ligação pertinente a questões políticas e afetivas locais. Com esta estrutura itinerante, Fernanda Eugenio e Gustavo Ciríaco têm viajado, desde 2009, pelas mais diversas ambiências urbanas, na América do Sul, nos EUA, na Europa e na Ásia, colecionando uma multiplicidade de acoplamentos e arranjos, situados entre as operações urbanas, e pesquisando a variabilidade performativa da forma-cidade.

Nesta colaboração duracional, os protocolos da Etnografia como Performance Situada, de Fernanda Eugenio, entram em conversa com os procedimentos de criação contextual, que Gustavo Ciríaco emprega na construção das suas peças imersivas e relacionais, gerando proposições por vezes transportáveis para outros sítios, por vezes irrepetíveis, além de serem partilhados através da oficina conjunta Práticas Site-Specific