ONGOING EXHIBITION UNTIL 3 SEPTEMBER • FLOOR -1
Eduardo Matos • Fabriqueta

“Fabriqueta”, a solo exhibition by the visual artist Eduardo Matos, creates and operates a small construction that, through an installation which consists of objects, drawings, performances and community workshops, activates the CIAJG’s basement floor. Central to the revolution that crossed landscapes and turned fields into factories, the fabriquetas, small family production sites, almost always incomplete, reveal the revolution’s logic and contingent processes. While production in the Ave and Minho region was thriving, we can still find, in larger settings, countless examples of these rustic and unfinished workshop sites. With the modesty of their ways, shapes and materials, they work according to whatever is useful and practical. They extend themselves within the external space, while they conceal inside that which they are dedicated to.
Eduardo Matos' oeuvre has an archaeological dimension - the excavation, collection and display of remains from the places that he observes is installed with an accurate creation of drawings, objects and current elements composed in ingenious installations. His concern with work, politics, the economy and civic life also led him to become involved with the organisation of his own working conditions - to create spaces for production and exhibition in places that, like the fabriquetas (little factories), offer alternatives to production and resist standardization.
The fabriqueta is a human fossil that has become part of the landscape, along with the ancient boulders and the centuries-old granite dwellings. The one he observed and details for us is a concrete existence - an indication of small hamlets, halfway between the rural world, domestic life and international orders. The artistic installation, like a para-diorama, replaces and integrates the place where his discoveries are arranged: a railing, window, well, pole, bench. Its cement blocks extend across the land and take root with the vines, brambles and tyres, harking back to an earlier time that appears to be rural. It also shows the artisanal power of being able to manufacture whatever is needed.
Overcoming the nostalgic gaze with which he composed a bucolic and inert landscape over the waters and banks of the Ave river, also in Guimarães (2012), in this case he becomes involved with life, body, voice and movement. Throughout 2023, Eduardo Matos and Max Fernandes, also a visual artist, will create and present a set of community performances with workers and teenagers, enabling this little factory to produce new meanings, imaginaries and artefacts. The public programme expands it and invites communities to participate.
Curated by Inês Moreira
On exhibition until September 3
FOR ALL AGES
Online purchase of tickets to visit the shows
Opening hours
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entrances 4:30 pm)
Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 am - 6:00 pm (last entrances 5:30 pm)
Free entrance for all, Sundays from 11:00 am to 02:00 pm

FOR ALL AGES
Online purchase of tickets to visit the shows
Opening hours
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm (last entrances 4:30 pm)
Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 am - 6:00 pm (last entrances 5:30 pm)
Free entrance for all, Sundays from 11:00 am to 02:00 pm
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