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

Cities are as diverse as the layers that compose them. They keep re-emerging, re-performing before our eyes and enveloping us with their imperative and inevitable, accidental and shipwrecked, fragile and strong, banal and extraordinary atmospheres. They are alchemies always in process, producing sometimes conflicting, if osmotic, patterns of dwelling, sensorial experience and social (dis)aggregation. Moreover, born from many architectural dreams—the unruly mix of utopian fantasies, improvised solutions, power structures and contingent local deviations—cities are simultaneously concrete forms and ephemeral territories. In them we live and die, meet and part, maintaining the daily fiction that links the interstices of the broader panorama of urban phenomena.

City Labs are temporary laboratories of attention, mapping, creation and in situ performance, installed in critical neighbourhoods chosen for their relevant connection to local political and affective issues. With this itinerant structure, Fernanda Eugenio and Gustavo Ciríaco have travelled since 2009 through varied urban ambiences in South America, the USA, Europe and Asia, accumulating a multiplicity of couplings and arrangements situated among urban operations, and researching the performative variability of the city-form.

In this long-term collaboration, Fernanda Eugenio’s protocols of Ethnography as Situated Performance enter into dialogue with Gustavo Ciríaco’s contextual creation procedures used in the construction of his immersive and relational works, generating propositions that are sometimes transportable to other sites, sometimes unrepeatable, and shared through their joint workshop Site-Specific Practices.