As the meaning of the word “leisure” transformed over time it deviated from its original meaning and migrated towards the ideas of “free time” and “production” especially in the 20th century in the context of the western modern-capitalist project. It was under the threat of this transformation that the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica thought about the concept of “crelazer” (create-leisure), developing experiential and utopian installations that promoted a creative perception of time. Given the current algorithmicisation of life, in which a new app is developed at every moment in time for our instant distraction, thinking about the impasses of our historical process is an exercise that also concerns art.

Leisure School presents, for the first time, in Portugal an important body of work by the artist Priscila Fernandes (1981) and invites us to reflect. Specifically designed for the CIAJG, the exhibition covers her recent series - "Never Touch the Ground" (2020), "Labour Series" (2020) and "Free. To do Whatever We" (2018) - distributed across three rooms of the museum, as if it was a peripatetic “itinerary”.

Different pedagogies are explored in these works: a room where chains are broken (in a kind of “challenge” of liberation); another in which artistic gestures are exercised while wearing roller skates and with other entertainment; and finally a fiction where a TV presenter tries to prove the relationship between the development of leisure and the emergence of abstract art.