Coletivo Lab.25 procura potenciar reflexão e discussão sobre a condição contemporânea da cidade, através da criação de situações expositivas conscientes do enquadramento e do território em que se inserem. O complexo exercício de compor cidade implica pensar a relação entre vazios e cheios, harmonia e silêncio - entenda-se silêncio não como ausência, mas como momentos com intensidades produtivas distintas, momentos de pausa. Reatualizemos a visão romântica de vazios como territórios intocáveis, onde a relação com a ruína e o expectante é apenas contemplativa e pensemos a condição temporal de tais lugares como potenciais para criar discursos e ressignificar a experiência do lugar. O coletivo tem como centro especulativo e investigativo estes lugares que se configuram como intervalos na cidade, analisando a sua relação temporal e espacial com a envolvente. Os seus processos e metodologias, que se constituem como parte central da natureza conceptual dos projetos do coletivo, decorrem de um olhar que se pretende atento, sensível e crítico de uma realidade transitória e volátil. O Coletivo Lab.25 é constituído por Álvaro Oliveira, Miguel Teodoro, Rodrigo Machado e Rui Mota

“Overflow”,
Video, 6'27'', color,
Sound, 2'55'' mono,
2021.
Perpetuating the search for re-signification of urban interstices, the Lab.25 collective finds in the water reservoir of an old industrial complex, the investigative and speculative field from which Overflow results. Using its containment architecture as a stage, the experience incorporated in the space raises reflections on the contemporary condition of the city as the performativity of this presence reactivates a stagnant water reservoir that once fed the surrounding territory. At the Maia Forum, alongside the video recording of these actions, the spatial experience is unfolded by the presence of industrial pipes found at the site. This, in addition to its readymade characteristics, is used to amplify and organize the soundscape emitted from its interior (captured in the cistern on which the performative action was built), in which, again and perhaps for the last time, the water echoes.

Exhibition View from Ágora _ Bienal de Arte Contemporânea da Maia 2021 Photography by @Hugo Adelino;

Photography by @Coletivo Lab.25.

“Apparatus”,
Tropismo Fotográfico Residency, integrated in Ci.CLO 21 Bienal de Fotografia do Porto,
2021.

"The colectivo Lab 25, was formed in 2019 as a dynamic laboratory of artistic experimentation claiming its name from No. 25 of the old Rua da Palma (Porto), where the very space that gives motto to this residency is located.
Accumulated in the rubble of a provisional building site, the staging of these follies, which take us back to the universe of picturesque gardens, are as if submitted to the ritual of cataloguing protocols, in a game of critical conservation of objets trouvés to be inscribed in the museological collection of the faculty in times of displacement and expansion of its heritage."Developing a project of urban archaeology that was exhibited in Morar/Murar (2019) and Promenade (2020), they now rehearse, in the series Apparatus (2021), the composition of follies images that assimilate the performativity of the photographic act with the encounter of dysfunctional and dispersed objects. These are images of works at work that privilege the indistinction between activation and creation and challenge notions of authorship and artistic recognition.

Text by Susana Lourenço Marques (excerpt from the text Aviso/Pausa)

Photography by @Coletivo Lab.25, @Dinis Santos

“AZIMUTE”,
Installation in Espaço Mira,Porto,
2021.
Between photographic film and territory, the images of Azimute, found in the abandoned factory Fogões Meireles in Bonfim, propose a possible cartography of correspondences between temporalities and scales. Resulting from the concerns that have been occupying the practice of the Lab.25 collective, issues related to the right to the city are mirrored in them, in an attempt to re-signify urban voids from reflections on heritage. These disappearing images are placed as surfaces of transmission between realities, whose biological decay of photographic film summons up another reading of the time and scale of images. Through the perishability of the slide object, the awareness that these images are not fixed is restated. Whenever revisited, they are transmuted, the result of a slow process of contact with the surface and with the dynamics of the territory. Their corporeal and abstracting nature introduces in the images the possibility of speculating on the direct correspondences between scales and time. Due to the context in which they were found, the images generate direct relationships with urban reality, thinking about the ruin and consecutive rewriting of the city itself. They are gleaned objects, re-appropriated and re-signified to think about the possible futures of the city.

Photography by @Patrícia Barbosa

“PROMENADE”, 2021
A fragment of wall is dislocated from Bonfim to INSTITUTO.

The bodies that transport it become an effective and operative extension of the object, moving it by action of the body- prosthesis that brace, push and pull-mediating the movement that is only possible through the inherent relationship between bodies and object. The object acquires the depth of a monument at each stop. Promenade is a project that looks at new ways of relating to public space, reclaiming it as one that can be reconfigured by the movement of the bodies. If on the one hand walking through the city today updates the practise of flaneur under the light of contemporaneity; on the other hand, to associate this movement to the physicality and weight of a fragment of ruin rewrites and re-introduces the myth of Sisyphus on the 21st century, acknowledging the poetic and political dimension of everyday actions.

Exhibition view Anuário 20, Galeria Municipal do Porto
Exhibition View O INSTITUTO, Photography by @Franco Atsoc

“MORAR.MURAR”,
Galeria do 1o andar, FBAUP, Porto,
20219

It is from the place that a thought begins.

Coletivo Lab.25 is a dynamic laboratory, created for an experimental and artistic exploration of the city’s current paradigm. Having as a place of investigation the Palace J. Narcizo D’Azevedo and the adjoining Ilha e Fábrica Fogões Meireles, it was possible to explore their temporal and spatial relationship with their surroundings, and revive the spaces by producing narratives and poetic situations. In a place of accumulated temporalities, an archeology of the urban materializes. At the heart of this thinking is the transitory condition of the lot, a space with a singular temporality, floating between an
inhabited past, an expectant present, and a distant but promising future. Thus, a visual archive of projections, encounters, creative speculations, and appropriations of space was created.

Morar - Murar materializes a small part of the research carried out during the last four months. A place that condenses within itself the structures representative of Porto’s identity - a microcosm of a city that, in a movement lacking consciousness, quickly transforms.

Photography by @Coletivo Lab.25