ROOTS 2024 > Guest Artist > Márcio Carvalho (Portugal)
Coming from a family made up of Angolans and Portuguese, Márcio Carvalho shares ancestors from two different geographies, with distinct epistemological and belief systems, and it is from these that he complicates the notions of autobiographical and collective memory. His work examines public life and archives, autobiographical memory and collective memory, with a focus on the acts of remembering and their biological, cultural and social influences. Whether through drawing, film, installation or performance, Márcio Carvalho’s art attempts to create modes of public participation, where the historical and memorial realities of the city are challenged and co-created by groups of citizens and their memories. His artistic projects try to separate memory and the act of remembering from the traditional idea of an archive – a fixed repository of information – in order to give memorial activity the status of a social, discursive activity and cultural practice, thus ensuring that memory and the processes that create it remain a creative, ephemeral, continuous and unfinished process.
Carvalho holds a Master’s degree in Performing Arts from the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin and is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Carvalho has participated in events and artistic projects on five continents, where he has had the opportunity to collaborate with artists, curators and local communities. Highlights include the RAVY biennial, Yaoundé, the Curitiba biennial, the National Arts Festival, Johannesburg, the Thessaloniki biennial, the Gemäldegalerie museum, Berlin, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the MUCEM museum, Marseille and the Africa Museum, Turven.
Funding: Direção-Geral das Artes and Lagos Municipality
Support: Museu de Lagos, Município de Caldas da Rainha / Centro de Artes, CAAA – Centro para os Assuntos de Arte e Arquitectura (Guimarães), Messe Militar de Lagos, Teatro Experimental de Lagos
