Serralves em Festa once again opens its doors to students from the School of Arts, who are part of the program for another edition of the event, with installations to contemplate over three days.

From May 31 to June 2, the 18th edition of Serralves em Festa will take place, an annual free event that promotes art and culture in the city of Porto.

Once again, the School of Arts is heavily involved in the event's vast program, including seven installations by undergraduate and master's students, which can be visited on the -1 floor of Casa de Serralves, in the Kitchens Area.

Get to know the works and authors here:

ECLIPSE OF THE MIDDLE
Mariana Machado, Master in Sound and Image - New Media ArtECLIPSE OF THE MIDDLE

The moving image is also a moving device. Here, in similar installments, it is presented naked - without a boundary to enclose it. The piece, made up of five iron structures carrying rotating disks and their own light, distributes specular beams throughout the space, producing silhouettes where the ultimately paradoxical distinction between the projected image and the image of the mechanism to be projected is superimposed. By dismantling distinctions such as projector/receiver, image/object, creation/manifestation, the process of forming the moving image is reduced to its most axiomatic elements as a way of materializing its innate complexities and contradictions.

Filipa Antunes, Degree in Sound and Image

The notes wander without a defined tonal home, exploring soundscapes that challenge the boundaries of known harmony. The chords intertwine in a tumultuous dance of tension and resolution, creating a sound composition that challenges our expectations and leads us to explore new horizons of musical expression. Thus, while the chords resound in a chorus of possibilities, oppressed peoples struggle to find their own voice. It's a dance of resistance and hope, where the silenced notes find an echo in the songs of freedom and equality, where the scars of the past are transformed into melodies of renewal and redemption.

LET NO ONE LOOK AT ME
Francisco Oliveira, Master in Sound and Image - New Media Art

Bell, heart of the village,
Heart, people's bell;
One feeling when it strikes,
Another beating when he feels.
- The magical nature of the ringing of bells (Sep. Revista de etnografia, no. 12)

Creating an amulet presupposes an idea of positioning the individual in a temporal space, typically in the future: I create this object so that something bad doesn't happen to me. It will be stored in one place and hidden in another, always with a very clear idea of where and for how long it should be stored. A bell is an amulet but it transcends its agency. Bells tell us how much time is passing, they announce social events, they are used as a warning sign of some kind of catastrophe. Whether at the top of a church, on the neck of a goat, in the middle of a transhumance, or above a doorbell, the particles that carry their sound have linked directly to this amulet object, and have moved matter inside us.

16MM ESSAYS
SOA-UCP Expanded Cinema Students, Degree in Sound and Image

This installation is made up of short visual essays resulting from laboratory practice on 16mm film, developed and edited collaboratively by the students in the Cinema Expandido course at the School of Arts in the 2023-2024 academic year.

SELF-ABSORPTION
José João Lopes, Degree in Sound and Image

A half-lit listening room dedicated to immersive listening to a durational and cumulative sound piece broadcast via a 2-channel hi-fi system.

SWARM MIND
Maria Rui Duarte, MA in Sound and Image - New Media Art

While not exclusive to it, the notion of the collective mind is foundational to feminist thinking. Community narratives and the sharing of experiences create alternative spaces where knowledge can be generated collectively without individual authorship. In this sense, and as Audre Lorde points out, the collective mind focuses on the pleasure derived from sharing and connection, creating fissures to understand and reframe what has not been shared, made known and thus diminish the latent threat of difference. Using the beehive and the voice as organizational archetypes, Swarm Mind seeks to investigate the dynamics and registers of collectivity and sharing space through a material exploration of convex and vibrational bodies.

SUBMERSE
Lei, Master in Sound and Image - New Media Art

The spacious ambience of nature when treated with respect, allows physical and emotional freedom; it is an outdoor room essential to thought and untraumatic (that is, relatively unforced) development. - Geoffrey Hartman (1997) The Fateful Question of Culture

In a game of scales, Submerso activates the everyday memory of the sound of the sea trapped inside the resonant architecture of the conch, seeking to underline this fiction, and the constructive potential it contains, by making visible the image of an ocean trapped in a small point.

More information about the event here.