The Palácio das Belas Artes (PdBA) Lisboa is a memorial practice that experimentally engages past and present through forms of digital and public art. It draws its curatorial and artistic framework from the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, developed by artist Bernhard Garnicnigin in Vienna, Austria, and now directed by Seth Weiner. Similarly to the Viennese project, the PdBA Lisboa addresses the multi-layered spatial and historical complexities of a physical building, now transposed into the digital realm. The palace in question is the Palácio Iglésias, located at the Largo da Academia Nacional de Belas Artes, 2, in Lisbon, Portugal, underwent multiple reconstructions, taking the form of a spatial palimpsest. Better known as the Palácio das Belas Artes due to its proximity to the National Academy of Fine Arts, the palace was initially built as the main residence of the Iglésias Viena family and later served as headquarters of two important governmental departments, housing the Ministry of Economy in 1971. It has remained vacant for decades and in 2015 bought for an astonishing 18 million euros by the Pension Funds of the Bank of Portugal, which through other recently acquired buildings in the historical centre of Lisbon profit from luxury apartment rentals amidst the city’s critical housing crisis. The palace’s multiple layering of spatial reconfigurations is therefore deeply intertwined with Lisbon’s turbulent economical and social history, where matters of property ownership have critical reverberations in current affairs.

Bits of the Planet is an experimental online platform that explores the life and work of Waldemar Cordeiro (Rome 1925—São Paulo 1973), a leading Brazilian post-war artist and theorist. Bits of the Planet highlights throughlines in Cordeiro’s practice by linking together his experiments in Concrete art, landscape architecture, and visionary theories about what he termed “arteônica”–computational art in an era of global challenges. In so doing, Bits of the Planet foregrounds new readings of these seemingly divergent practices, bringing them into conversation and revealing their intersections. The platform incorporates select artworks, documents, notes, plans, drawings and essays from Cordeiro’s archive into its database, allowing visitors to navigate through these materials in a variety of modes inspired by Cordeiro’s formal interests.

Gaspar Cohen (b. 1992, Brazil) is an artist and researcher interrogating the capital-colonial complex embedded in digital technologies through process-intensive computation. Their work often involves digital manipulation of images and sound, experimenting with noises, technical errors and systemic failures. In Nem Daqui, Nem Turista [Not from Here, Nor a Tourist], Cohen delves into the speculative potentials of the digital to reflect on the spectrality and displacement of power that are embedded in the colonial gaze and its current reverberations. 

Drawing from images of the last standing tropical palm tree of the Palácio Iglésias’ long-lost ‘exotic’ garden, Cohen presents us with an audiovisual piece that simulates the viewpoint and task of a future entity that attempts, with great difficulty, to grasp the form and purpose of this ‘unattainable’ object. Through its gaze, we are called to reflect on this evaluating gesture, its dislocation of value and meaning, and positioning of power – tasks with striking similarities to the present work of curators, museums, artists and researchers. As the title suggests, this inciting gesture is expanded towards Lisbon’s present conditions where the colonial past of resource exploitation and trade sits amidst a tourist-focused economic destabilization of its urban and social-political environments. 

Curatorial: Lia Carreira

Exhibition Design: Seth Weiner & Bernhard Garnicnig

Funded by the City of Vienna (MA 7) and the BMKÖDS of Austria.

Here, we present the Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa in Portugal as a memorial to the promises and potential pitfalls of the concept of multidirectional memory. Following Palais des Beaux Arts Wien in Austria, this model is an attempt to avoid the potential problem of occupying space for a singular purpose even to arise. Without keys to Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa, we are forced to continuously (re)invent ways to point to the past and its transversal connections while occupying the present. Yet, as we offload the cognitive labor of remembering to institutions, Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa will still be in direct competition with the process of forgetting. If this fallibility of human memory and reciprocal humanity is the “natural” cause we try to resolve with memorials as institutions, how can these memorials be non-competitive? Or, perhaps they should not be considered memorials at all but rather a space for multiple mental models of considering what is “past” and what is “present” by addressing all registers of data and matter and pointing to all lines converging in that specific space.