fictional grounds
berru
Curated by Nuno Crespo
Opening 20th Oct at 19:00
Until 17th Feb 
Schoolf or Arts Exhibition Hall
Free Entrance

berru is a collective of artists who have been developing a series of works based not so much on the idea of artistic discipline, but rather on the exploration of very diverse mechanisms, concepts, and materials.
They work indistinctly with moving images, sculpture, sound, and new media, always incorporating a performative and highly dynamic element in all their works.

This dynamic element is present both in the conception of their works and in the way the audience experiences them. It is not about participation or activation, but rather that the devices created by these artists require the audience to engage in some form of activity.
Here, vita contemplativa gives way to vita activa, where the audience is invited to follow the dynamic process of the development of their works.
These works are not immediately finished but remain as an ongoing process in which we are all called to participate and, in some way, complete.

The exhibition they developed for the Escola das Artes at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, titled fictional grounds, brings together simulations of the soils of an imagined territory, through which traces of minerals with energetic potential can be sought.
The samples of soil, gathered from different origins and with varied compositions, are meticulously examined, stored, and arranged in a two-dimensional plane.
One cannot help but think about how this exhibition, critically and with a sense of urgency regarding the current ecological catastrophe, establishes a subtle relationship with the world of earthworks—the land-based works of pioneering Land Art artists such as Robert Smithson and Richard Long, or with Walter De Maria’s famous exhibition when, in 1977, he filled a New York gallery with 140 tons of earth.

Nuno Crespo