“Intertidal” is the opening exhibition of the Mnemonic Pavilion. The artist Miguel Teodoro, through his exhibition project, invites the visitors to look at the complex relationships between the coastal landscape and ecosystems and the ecological knowledge intrinsic to the traditional practices and maritime economies of Minho.
Aiming to enlarge the spectrum of approach and significance to these themes, Intertidal confronts us with the conflicts and correspondences between time scales, places and gestures.
Intertidal is the starting point of the first moment of the project precisely because it is connected with the idea of understanding the common ground between terrestrial and oceanic human/nonhuman realities.
In Miguel Teodoro’s pieces exhibited in this first iteration of the project, one can grasp the multiple dimensions of the research.
The piece “Timefullness” is a sculpture that reflects on the tensions between the overlapping timescales one can understand by looking at the territory.
A carved marble pallet, refers by its form to the contemporary update of the archetype of many traditional instruments connected to the extraction of natural resources, such as seaweed and marble. Although through its materiality, it bridges it to the fact that the geological origin of marble starts at the seabed, through sedimentation of living creatures and sediment through the course of hundreds of millions of years . On top of the cargo palete it is placed a found geological sample of a basalt icnofossil of sea urchins (the traces of the biological activity of organisms).
Discussed with a local geologist it became evident that this sample is also a indicator of the evolution of the shore line, enabling to understand the sea level rise at the course of history.
This overlapping geological times become an analogy for the interconnectivity between places and temporalities.
The materiality of the space invites the visitor to enter this oceanic imaginaries while walking thorugh the two rooms of the exhibition. “Holdfast” is a video and soundscape piece that questions how marine technology can able us to shift to a more sustainable way of relate to sea resources. “Ler/Ser Paisagem” is a sculptural measuring device carved in marble that looks into the history of ocean studies by reenacting and performing data collection methodologies with a poetic and speculative gaze.
Hanged in the center of one of the rooms there is a cyanotype print entitled “Floating inscriptions” describing transoceanic narratives through the inprint of debris found in the low tide that had drifted throughout the ocean.
The exhibition is a first expansion of the research and therefore entails many layers and raises many questions that provoke the visitor to question their own relationship with the ocean by looking and hearing the entanglements and correspondences the project is been exploring.
MNEMONIC PAVILION, 2021