For over fifteen years, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela have been exploring film and video, in dialogue with photography, drawing and sculpture. State of spirit is the most comprehensive presentation of the duo’s work to date, bringing together a wide selection of existing pieces alongside new, previously unseen works. Its guiding thread is the idea of community, understood as a dialogue between culture and nature. Through images that shift between light and shadow, like fables reflecting the fleeting and transitory nature of life, social dynamics emerge—beliefs, habits and rituals linked to the seasons, rural labour, family life, and ancestral forms of orality and spirituality.
In an immersive, dreamlike atmosphere that captures the magic inherent in both the lived and imagined possibilities of everyday life, the exhibition unfolds as a stage where acts of devotion, memory and pleasure are performed.
Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela live and work in Porto and have been collaborating as a duo since 2010. Their practice is developed through a particular focus on moving images, both through the production of films and in intersection with immersive and site–specific environments, in conjunction with drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture. Their artistic work consistently reflects an interest in the dialogue between the biological, the vernacular, and the cultural.
