BELO CAMPOInformation
Belo Campo is an epiphyte space for contemporary cultures initiated and run by artist Adrien Missika, currently curated by Francisca Portugal and hosted by Galeria Francisco Fino. It is located in the basement of the gallery in a former wine cellar.
Belo Campo is a not-for-profit structure that aims to infuse and diffuse ideas, experiment with space and time, propose and question formats of contemporary cultures.
Founder and Director: Adrien Missika
Curator: Francisca Portugal
Artist
ExhibitionDate
Diogo PintoDiplomacia
24.01.2025 - 03.05.2025
Inês Mendes Leal and Maria Máximo
Force Majeure 28.11.2024 - 18.01.2025
Emmanuelle Lainé & Benjamin Valenza
Apenas nós dois02.05.2024 – 14.09.2024
Henrique Biatto curated by Ana Grebler
Canil17.02.2024 – 20.04.2024
Bruno Bogarim, Beatriz Neves Fernandes, Fox Maxy, Sofia Montanha, Mariana Tilly curated by Pedro Barateiro
Private Property13.12.2023 – 27.01.2024
Ana Manso, Geum Beollae 금벌레, Bernat Daviu, Ana Santos, Gonçalo Sena, Shreyas Karle श्रेयसकर्ले, Rosa Tharrats, André Romão and Hetamoé curated by Joana Escoval
Good evening. Do not attempt to adjust your radio. There is nothing wrong. 24.03.2023 – 17.06.2023
Kinga Kielczynska
Wild Type, Desired Property 05.12.2022 – 15.03.2023
Mané Pacheco
Bestas 15.09.2022 – 19.11.2022
Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld
Ironing Materialism 19.06.2021 – 06.01.2022
Hannah Rowan
Triple Point 18.09.2020 – 22.10.2020
Bless studio, Marta Costa Reis, Ligia Dias, Raquel Dias, Jorge Dias,Patrícia Domingues, Julien Fronsacq, Jenna Kaës, Katie Lagast, LRC designers, Vera Pinto
The Corner Piece 18.09.2020 - 15.01.2021
Carlos Monleón curated by Margarida Mendes
Gastrula Stage 03.05.2019 – 27.07.2019
Saâdane Afif, John M. Armleder, Kinga Kielczynska, Fabian Knecht, Isa
Melsheimer, Steve Paul Steven Paul, Mandla Reuter, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton curated by Adrien Missika
SAM M LUNG 15.02.2019 – 20.04.2019
David Horvitz
Água Viva 14.05.2018 – 28.07.2018
Diana Policarpo
Dissonant Counterpoint 27.01.2018 – 01.03.2018
Gina Folly
Follow You 11.11.2017 – 11.01.2018
Bruno Bogarim, Beatriz Neves Fernandes, Fox Maxy, Sofia Montanha, Mariana Tilly curated by Pedro Barateiro
Private Property13.12.2023 – 27.01.2024
"Spirit Shop was invited by Adrien Missika, who runs the program at Belo Campo, to think of a project for the gallery’s basement. The gallery is located in the fast-growing neighbourhood of Marvila, following an overall interest of real estate and venture capital in this part of Lisbon. The changing scenarios of this neighbourhood and the city are the background for speculations of all types. New developments and constructions take shape at a fast pace, coffee shops and craft beer define our current mood, while the living costs rise quickly fast, making it more and more difficult for lisboners with normal salaries to live in the city. The economic is growing, so they say, and these are its growing pains.
The exhibition titled Private Property departs from the film Maat by Fox Maxy, a Payómkawish and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians filmmaker based in San Diego, California. Maat means land. This compelling, playful collage film constantly ignores and challenges the rules of what film should be. The film revisits sites that belonged to Indians in South California before the settlers arrived to colonize the land. Time and again, activism squeezes itself forward through the background, which gives the entire film an inescapable political layer. Fox Maxy uses self-archive of films, phone videos, found footage, and computer game screen recordings, giving invigorating expression to contemporary Indigenous culture and identity, the film shifts between temporalities while mixing instances of sociality, play, dance, and activism.
Private Property is an exhibition about the obsessions with ownership and the constrains of development. In the frame of post capitalist neoliberalism, property is a guaranty of privilege and class. Property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operations for profit. Ideas about and discussion of private property date back to the Persian Empire, and emerge in the Western tradition at least as far back as Plato. Prior to the 18th century, English speakers generally used the word "property" in reference to land ownership. In England and Europe, "property" came to have a legal definition in the 17th century.
In the 19th century, the economist and philosopher Karl Marx provided an influential analysis of the development and history of property formations and their relationship to the technical productive forces of a given period.
It is argued by critical race theorist Cheryl Harris that race and property rights have been conflated over time, with only those qualities unique to white settlement recognized legally. Indigenous use of land, focusing on common ownership, is distinguished from private property ownership and Western understandings of land law.
The works presented in this exhibition claim their own position within certain forms of presence and escapism. Mariana Tilly presents a group of two drawings, Suíça (2021), a depiction of a coffee cup from the now extinct Pastelaria Suíça in Praça do Rossio closed due to real estate pressure, and the drawing Mercator Contents World Cup (2021) shows a cup where the map of the world is printed in the way we’ve been accustomed to within Western imperial narratives that define the global north and global south. Beatriz Neves Fernandes sculptures reflect the presence of a body and the instruments of transformation of that body in the space. Sofia Montanha presents the work Bella Rosa (2023), appropriating a readymade object of a blue rose incapsulated in a glass dome, protecting it from aging. The tent-like structure that overtakes the former object, stretched by a blue silk ribbon reflects on the delicate yet precarious forms we create to protect any living body. Bruno Bogarim’s cutout sculptures are inscriptions in the cave-like space of belo campo, creating a contrast between the golden shinny surface of the works and the exposed cement walls of the space.
A gallery deals with property in a particular manner. Artworks perform an idea of value that is similar to the action of selling/ buying any object, a car, an apartment, a piece of furniture, a piece of land, yet completely different from other objects. Artworks have, ideally, an intrinsic value besides the material value, an intellectual component that establishes or not its relevance and necessity. Legally, when an artwork is sold, the artist is in a way “letting go” of the intellectual value, that stays fixed in the object. The property of one, the artist, becomes the property of another, the collector, in a transfer that enhances the particularities of this object.
The production of capital is about an obsession with form, or rather, the processes to engender form, to objectify. It’s the obsession to contain, to tame, to own, to find significance in something, and to create a representation of it. And art isn’t something you name, and it’s not even the opposite, the unnamable. It just doesn’t work like that, I think. There’s an object and everyone calls it art. You can buy it and then you think you own it, but you don’t, really. You can possess certain aspects of its appearance and physical characteristics, but you don’t really own it, it owns you. Artworks have the capacity to belong to everybody. It’s the immaterial aspects, the things you can’t actually grab with your hands that make an artwork."
PB, November 2023
© Carbonara Studio