Unoccupied monastery returns to be the stage of the art biennial of Coimbra

The monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, which is unoccupied, will continue to be one of the stages of the anozero art biennial, in Coimbra, said today the curator Agnaldo Farias, who also wants to enhance the relationship with the University.

After the second edition, in 2017, the biennial of contemporary art returned to the city the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, an unoccupied space that assumed itself as the central place of the event with works of light, sound, video and sculpture , the edition of 2019 will return to bet on the protagonism of this building of the seventeenth century.

It is a beautiful space, with a lot of potential, but it also implies very particular and very demanding works, “the curator of the year-long Lusa told the Lusa news agency. 2019, Agnaldo Farias, who is in Coimbra to visit spaces that could integrate the next biennial edition.

However, faced with the imposing dimensions of a large building with 200 meter corridors, the former monastery “invites to projections, sound works and with light – environmental interventions.”

During the visit to the city, the team of curators also looks for other spaces that can host exhibitions and interventions of the anozero in 2019, an edition that should further enhance its relationship with the University of Coimbra, he explained.

Agnaldo Farias intends to relate the affinity between artistic and local lines, looking for spaces that may suggest the “approximation” of works by artists related to botany, medicine or high technology, he exemplified.

In the next edition, besides wanting to draw attention to the heritage of the city that is hidden and bring to the present the present history in urban spaces, the curator wants to show that Coimbra “is a living city that produces knowledge and not a theme park” .

At the same time, he emphasizes, he wants to take contemporary art “from a niche, a place of reverence or respectful silence” and ensure a relationship with the living city, especially with young people.

During these days, the team of curators will also begin to define the names of the artists who will participate in the biennial in 2019, he said.

The next edition is entitled “The Third Margin of Rio”, and these days, the team (with the assistant curators Julia Buenaventura, Lígia Afonso and Nuno Rocha) are visiting the city to define the various places where they will go to go to the anozero.

The visit is carried out in collaboration with the Department of Architecture (DARQ) of the University of Coimbra.

DARQ director José António Bandeirinha stressed that “the historical past needs contemporaneity and present to be valued,” and that the biennial may have this ability to rescue forgotten heritage in the past, but also bring these spaces into the present.

“This visit helps to choose the sites [for the biennial], but above all to understand the best way the city can participate and relate to the biennial,” he said.