Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema 2025
Technology/Transformation
June 30th to July 4th
Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Free entrance!
June 30th
21:30, Film Screening + Q&A
The Artificial Humors + Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de La Jeune Fille de Pierre + A Brief History of Princess X, de Gabriel Abrantes
Escola das Artes, Auditório Ilídio Pinho
Conversation at the end between Gabriel Abrantes and Nuno Crespo
The Artificial Humors
Fic, 2017, 29’
The Artificial Humors, is a film about humor, anthropology and artificial intelligence. It focuses on how humor is central to human relationships across, used as a form of social control, and one of the most complex forms of communication. The film was shot in Mato Grosso (Canarana and the Yawalapiti and Kamayura villages inside the Xingu Indigenous Park) and São Paulo.
Blending a certain Hollywood aesthetic with documentary approaches, the film tells the story of an indigenous girl who falls in love with a robot that is a rising stand up comedian in Brazil. Gabriel Abrantes' films address historical, political and social matters while discussing postcolonial, gender and identity issues. His works create layers of unlikely readings, altering traditional narratives and touch upon the absurd, folklore, humor and politics.
Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de La Jeune Fille de Pierre
Ani/Fic, 2019, 20’
"Sometimes I wish I was someone else. A brawny bronze Hercules. Aphrodite stepping out of the bath. A stout little Hammurabi."
A Brief History of Princess X
Fic, 2016, 7’
A supercharged history of sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s infamous Princess X, a futuristic bronze phallus that is actually a bust portrait of Napoleon’s equally infamous great grand niece, Marie Bonaparte.
July 1st
18:30, Conference
Even Better Than the Real Thing: Curating the Whitney Biennial at the Precipice of the Twenty First Century, Chrissie Iles
Escola das Artes, Auditório Ilídio Pinho
This lecture by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, discusses the challenges of curating the foremost survey of contemporary art in the United States at a critical moment in the country's history, and the relationship between thediasporic and the global in the formation of what constitutes 'American' art.
20:00, Opening of Exhbition
Karle: Letters, Pedro Huet
Escola das Artes, Sala de Exposições
Karle is the name of a character whose form is unknown, the recipient of a series of letters reflecting on days guided by machines, intersections between nature and technology, between capitalism and work, and the animals that accompany us. Over an hour, these texts are revealed, accompanied by dizzying images where different places intersect to question the way we build and inhabit them - between nature and residential areas, business or industrial.
In Karle: Letters, we travel through these places as if we were doing so in a virtual dimension. As if our eyes were the camera that allows us to capture these images and we could be transported from one environment to another.
July 2nd
21:30, Film Screening + Q&A
O Homem das Multidões, Cao Guimarães and Marcelo Gomes
Cinema Trindade
Conversation at the end between Cao Guimarães and Inês Grosso
O Homem das Multidões
Fic, 2013, 95’
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais: two different stories of loneliness. Juvenal (Paulo André), a subway train driver, struggles with the impossibility of being alone. To feel better, he loses himself in the large crowds of the city.
Margô (Sílvia Lourenço), a station inspector, can’t detach herself from social media, exchanging the real world for the virtual one.
July 3rd
21:15, Film Screening + Q&A
Hacked Circuit + Last Things, Deborah Stratman
Batalha Centro de Cinema
Conversation at the end between Deborah Stratman and Daniel Ribas
Hacked Circuit
Doc, 2014, 15’
A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves us inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, CA. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy.
Last Things
Doc/Fic, 2023, 50’
Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.
July 4th
22:00, Concert
Crepuscule Live A/V, Tujiko Noriko & Joji Koyama
Passos Manuel (partnership witth Porto/Post/Doc)
Having released Crépuscule I & II in early 2023 to great acclaim, Tujiko Noriko has now collaborated with filmmaker Joji Koyama to create a live audiovisual concert. The new live set draws from the moods and themes of the album, tranforming it into a mesmeric, cinematic experience. As Tujiko’s ethereal singing drifts in and out of her otherwordly electronic pieces, Koyama (who worked on the music as well as the album artwork), expands the haunting visual world of Crépuscule – a world that is as beautiful as it is strange. The Crépuscule Live A/V concert premiered at the electronic music and digital art festival Semibreve, in Portugal.
