With the aim of boosting local artistic creation, gnration, the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (CIAJG) in Guimarães and Solar – Galeria de Arte Cinemática in Vila do Conde have teamed up to promote the eleventh edition of the Summer Laboratories programme. This year, the artist, researcher and curator Joana Pestana is in charge of curating the programme.
Based on the plant-image used as an emoji, In Search of the Forgotten Image, by Catarina Braga, analyses how a natural plant was transformed into a digital plant that is now used daily in the digital world. Homúnculo, by Dora Vieira, proposes a reflection on the interactions between the organic and the synthetic, biotechnology and the colonisation of the human body, based on the manipulation of matter and the creation of life in an inanimate being. In Electro-magnetic Botany, Mariana Sardon brings to life Cracklebox circuits, a kind of simplified synthesiser with a vast palette of tones and frequencies, which creates sounds that can resemble birds or the clatter of angle grinders. Finally, in a work provisionally entitled Sangue da Pedra, Renato Cruz Santos explores themes such as memory, fictionalised imagery and the deconstruction of reality, through the image of a distant rock that can be seen from Caxinas, his hometown.