ala mar proposes the activation of the outdoor areas of Cais das Artes through installations, sculptures, and open-air educational activities. Curated by Clara Sampaio, it brings together commissioned works and itinerant projects, activating a dialogue between art, architecture, and landscape, transforming different areas of the complex into spaces for gathering, contemplation, and critical reflection.

We propose inhabiting Cais das Artes as imagined by its creator, architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha: fully, as both built form and surroundings — a landscape that enters the building, a building that becomes landscape. This implies understanding the Cais as a continuous territory, where aesthetic experience is constructed both indoors and outdoors, dissolving the boundaries between artwork, architecture, and the city.

In this first phase, the program engages two scales of dwelling that are fundamental to human existence: the domestic microcosm — shelter, refuge, and a primary space of learning — the collective macrocosm — village, settlement, or city — as structures that shape social experience. With their specificities and challenges, both are intertwined, containing and extending one another.

It is from this movement of spatial activation that we situate the role of artistic practice, as it feels increasingly urgent to rethink its place in society. In a time marked by constant frictions and the exhaustion of natural, mineral, and human resources, what matters is to experience art not as an antidote or, in Byung-Chul Han’s terms, an “immunological” response (2010) (1), but as a detour — an opening toward other forms of experience and paths yet to be traced. We understand that actions inherent to artistic practice — investigating, experimenting, creating, presenting, and engaging in dialogue — constitute the axes of an activity that revigorates, disrupts, liberates, and expands our ways of perceiving, imagining, and inhabiting the world.

To care for the time of creation is also to care for the time of attention and contemplation. Far from passive, these experiences constitute a “labour of thought”: they interweave memories, summon imaginaries, and conjure worlds. Within them lies the possibility of interrupting the accelerated flow of everyday life, restoring density to experience and making visible relations, forms of knowledge, and sensibilities that often remain at the margins.

Artistic practice may be situated in this somewhat magical, somewhat alchemical space, capable of transforming matter, imbuing everyday objects with new meanings, and drawing from practices that traverse both the domestic sphere and the multiple forms of collective life. It is within this horizon that the works presented here take shape, activating different layers of memory and experience while creating the conditions for their continued sharing and transformation.

Raul Mourão investigates the urban fabric and its edges, where the social game — negotiation, tension, consensus, and dissent — is actively unfolding. He observes the architectural structures that populate the city, signalling both their operation and their collapse, to rehearse new arrangements and displacements, particularly through sculpture. Situated between the weight of matter and its capacity for movement, these structures challenge initial impressions of rigidity and stasis, becoming elements that seem to move across the landscape. As open structures, they allow architecture and the sea to pass through them, establishing a dynamic relationship with their surroundings while producing their own spatiality. They emerge here like a “raw flower of desire” (2), erupting from the concrete — attentive, insistent, and desiring.

In another perspective of desire, Rick Rodrigues’s work turns to the domestic sphere, revealing its minutiae. He reclaims a mode of attention akin to that of childhood, when colours, textures, objects, conversations, and everyday habits stirred curiosity and shaped perception. In his practice, elements such as the bed, the pillow, and the very outline of the house recur. Between representation and action, the artist mobilises embroidery as a language, affirming the value of forms of knowledge historically associated with the intimate and the feminine. Within this attentive making, modes of transmission take shape across generations, configuring ways of learning, remembering, and being together. By displacing these practices into the space of the Cais, the work gains scale and opens itself to collective creation, shifting the centrality of authorship and revealing the emancipatory potential of both art and craft.

By activating the outdoor areas of Cais das Artes, the program invites the public not only to see, but to be — to move, linger, and take part. A space of encounter is opened, allowing art to operate as a situated practice, capable of establishing — and restoring — forms of attention, coexistence, and presence in the world.

1. BYUNG-CHUL HAN. Sociedade do cansaço. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2010. (Trad. Enio Paulo Giachini)
2. VELOSO, Caetano. “O Quereres”. In: Uns, 1984.