what has art given us, what have we given to art? Friendships
exposition collective, Sismografo, Porto, 2026
exposition pensée par José Oliveira
Bruno Silva, leftovers (nightlight) - 2026
chaussures trouvées sur la plage, LED
installation de José Oliveira
Bruno Silva, page de route 25
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What has art given us, what have we given to art? Friendships.
José Oliveira
The exhibition had as its starting point the overlapping of the exhibition period with the 40th anniversary of the artist. Thinking about birthday parties and what this period of life signifies - in particular for people/artists who move mainly in independent spaces - what was left to think about were the resulting friendships in contexts of artistic creation.
For Sismógrafo’s space he has created an installation that could be his Gallery/Café/Workshop/Home, to then invite his friends to come over and have a good time, celebrating their friendships through socializing and activities and actions free of expectation.
A gathering about the importance of friendship as a creative force, as promoter of support and motivation networks. Something we could call economies of friendship in the context of visual arts.
With the participation of Luísa Abreu, Ana Allen, Albert Allgaier, Filipa Frois Almeida, João Alves, Miguel Ângelo, Gonçalo Araújo, Francisco Babo, Linus Barta, Elvin Brandhi, Verónica Calheiros, Edgar Calel, Dário Cannatà, Pedro Cardoso, Helena Carneiro, Susana Chiocca, Fabíola Augusta - VOX ABSOLUTA, André Fonseca, Orlando V. Francisco, Kauê Gindri, Veronique Homann, Vitor Israel, Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, Francisco Laranjeira, Rick Lins, Cinthia Mendonça, Lukas Weithas e Manuel Menghin, Andres Montes, Pedro de Sousa Pereira, Patrícia Pescada, Joana Fins Faria, Maria José Pinto, Carla Santos Carvalho e Mafalda Santos, Artur Prudente, Sara Rafael, Nuno Ranha, Selina Reiterer, Ruca Bourbon, Stefan Reiterer, Lena Seeberger, Filipa Tojal, Lena Sieder-Semlitsch, Bruno Silva, Leonor Parda, Silvia Sousa, Svenja Tiger, Andreas Trobollowitsch and Francisco Venâncio.
☟
Friends are for all occasions
Truth is, I thought it mattered—I thought that music
mattered. But does it bollocks? Not compared to how
people matter.
— Danny, Brassed Off character
On the verge of commotion, Danny (Pete Postlethwaite), the conductor of the brass band that has just won a national
competition — for which he has battled for to the point of exhaustion -, refuses the distinction in the name of a greater good: to bring awareness to the tragic moment the mining community he belongs to is facing. The character from Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996) embodies both the ideal of proletarian dignity and the idea of a collapsing body — just as the place where he lives — victim of a disintegrating industry.1 The maestro’s final speech, at Royal Albert Hall, is ambivalent: apparently optimistic and exalting of the collective achievement, it turns out to be deeply tragic. Music, after all, is not able to alter the material reality: the mines will remain closed, the village on the brink of ruin. Nevertheless, the band acts here as collective memory of a community, as a praise to collective organization, ultimately, as an affirmation of art, friendship, and the collaborative processes as motors of resistance to the steamroller of late capitalism.
This is what José Oliveira (Braga, 1986) has been doing for the last 15 years. The artist’s practice, who works and lives between Porto and Bregenz (Austria), occurs precisely in that territory of sharing and collaboration, of encounters, dialogue, and creation, operating, above all, on the network of so-called independent artist-run spaces.
What has art given us, what have we given to art? This double questioning set into the title of the exhibition could be the object of interpretative polysemy, but José Olivera deliberately guides us to the answer: art has given us/them friendship. And we know it, since Aristotle, friendship (which is also love) ‘is a thing most necessary for life’, for it is “(…) ‘together going,’ Homer says, you may remember), because they are thus more able to devise plans and carry them out.2” This must have been what Oliveira thought when, on the eve of his 40th birthday, he was invited for a solo exhibition
at Sismógrafo and immediately decided to mobilize for this moment a constellation of people who have crossed his artistic path: the friends of Porto-based project Rua do Sol, but also the Austrian WGN Projects, collectives in whose programming he has actively been involved: friends form Porto and friends from other geographies.
To do so, he has created what could be defined as an installation, more precisely, a hybrid space between gallery and home and studio/workshop (where, to a degree, old craftsmen workshops echo, suppressed by the industrializing whirlpool), place of rest and also of work, reflection and celebration, where public and private merge creating an other space and that immediately brings forward the indivisibility between art and life, which has been a central dimension to Western art since the early vanguards. In three previously established dates, this other space, which travesties Sismógrafo, will be activated with multiple proposals, from performative and exhibition practices, readings, talks and workshops, or simply this primal act of subsistence and identity construction of commensality. And this idea of sharing, networking, collaboration,
community crosses all of José Oliveira’s artistic production. It manifests in projects such as Café trabalho (ongoing
since 2016), Café CCOP (with Francisco Babo and Joana Ribeiro), The grand opening (2017, in partnership with Albert Algairer — in which a menu was presented, where several real and conceptual toasts were featured, that could be purchased by the public), Cabaré Brutal (in the context of which he has collaborated with other participants in that exhibition) or J.O.Câmbios (which he has been producing since 2018, for the purpose of which he has invented his
own currency, that allows the spectator/participant to access several performances), Meia pensão (2022, a spin-off of Café trabalho, with Leonor Parda), Offside Paradiso (Espaço Mira and, later, Biennial da Maia 2023, in which the artist’s mother, following what had happened in other projects, collaborated in the making of artisanal works — some of the
textile objects in this exhibition were made by her) or even I do not have time to work (2024, with Lukas Weithas). These are examples of works where Oliveira evokes this collaborative network and from where, at the same time, this central theme of his practice emerges; what is the role of artistic work and thus of the artist’s condition, in an art ecosystem whose autonomy has been exalted by modernity, but that, in practice, operates within the constraints of a dominant economical super-system.
These practices of, let’s say, resistance that the artist has been developing and stimulating are generally subsumable in what Claire Bishop designates as socially-collaborative art, in the context of which, as the British author claims, the inherent rewards of collaborative activity are valued, both through preexisting communities and through the foundation of one’s own interdisciplinary collaborative networks. Differently from Bishop, it is understood, in this specific case, that these collaborative actions don’t impact empowerment3 as much as they open cracks in power structures, using art as a means for creating and recreating new relations between people’, as Maria Lind argues4
.
Consequently, affirming such support networks, such collaborative processes, as methodologies to overcome the precariousness inherent to artistic work. Notwithstanding the fact that art and life are indissociable, as modernity has proposed and José Oliveira’s work constantly reiterates. The best art, Bishop argues, is that which is able to fulfill the promise of antinomy: The best collaborative practices (…) address this contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention and reflect on this antinomy, both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception. It is to this art — however uncomfortable, exploitative, or confusing it may first appear — that we must turn for an alternative to the well-intentioned homilies that today pass for critical discourse on social collaboration5.
During his project Flamme éternelle (2014), Thomas Hirschhorn — one of collaborative art’s habitués— stated the importance of the thinking body and the presence of the body as a political act, claiming that, from what could be perceived as social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the highlight was the perception of this necessity of donner le corps, that is, of simply being there, of being present:‘a body next to another body, next to another body, next to another body, with almost no claims and above all without actions, this is important, without political actions.’6
José Oliveira opens the doors to his home. Let us give our body.
Carla Santos Carvalho
PhD student in Fine Arts, FBAUP.
FCT doctoral research fellow.
Researcher i2ADS, FBAUP and CEAA–ESAP.
1 The film’s plot plays out in Yorkshire, after the miners strike, on of the most dramatic episodes from the Thatcher era. Historically, the British brass band is an institution connected to the industrial British north’s workforce and, in this context, an example of how a performative activity with communal roots reconfigures the political.
2 Aristotle, Ethics to Nicomachean (Aristóteles. Ética a Nicómaco. Translated by A. C. Caeiro. Lisboa: Quetzal, 2024.)
3 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” in Right About Now: Art & Theory since the 1990s, eds. Margriet Schavemaker e Mischa Rakier (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), 68.
4 Lind, cited in Bishop, “The social turn”.
5 Bishop, “The social turn”, 60.
6 Flux News, La Flamme éternelle de Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Hirschhorn interview, YouTube video, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrUcWvniyeE