"Composição Para um Espaço Com Base nas Estrelas e Planetas", de Sérgio Carronha

"Pacto" is a programme that stems from an invitation made to Susana Mendes Silva following the performance "Mariana", which was about the research she carried out at the Museu Regional de Beja (Regional Museum of Beja) on the "Cartas Portuguesas" (Portuguese Letters). The problem of authorship, since the Letters have never been unanimously attributed to Mariana Alcoforado, is still and always a central issue that recurs again in 1972 with "Novas Cartas Portuguesas" (New Portuguese Letters) by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa. The authors hid, as a strategy of resistance, in never revealing who had written which parts of the book.

In response to the invitation for a solo exhibition, the artist proposed the need to convene a constellation of artists - Carla Filipe, Gisela Casimiro, Leonor Parda, Mané Pacheco, Miguel Bonneville and Rogério Nuno Costa - to reflect together on the basis of these fundamental works on the fracturing themes that are still present today and those that are projected into the future.

The programme is divided into three moments around the themes of the Letters and New Letters to the present: 1669-1972-2022.

In the first phase of the project - Laboratory - we presented a program with a diverse set of voices in a feminist and queer party with Cláudia Duarte and Susana Mendes Silva, a collective reading of the Letters and the New Portuguese Letters, a talk with Ana Rita Soares from the LGBTI Education Project of rede ex aequo, a session in which Mariana Ferreira presented the lecture "Artists in Portugal - Feminism, presence and paths", a conversation with the journalist and activist Maria Antónia Palla, and a conference with Isabel Freire on the theme "Declausuras: Three Marias and Three Antonias".

In the second moment - Dialogue -, the gallery space will be occupied by an exhibition in which artists from various generations engage in dialogue: Ana Hatherly, Carla Cruz, Carla Filipe, Dorita Castel-Branco, Gisela Casimiro, Leonor Parda, Luísa Cunha, Mafalda Santos, Mané Pacheco, Maria José Aguiar, Miguel Bonneville, Rogério Nuno Costa and Susana Mendes Silva.

On August 28th will be the finissage where we hope to sow seeds for the Future.