Project developed by eight students from Escola Mário Beirão, in Beja, together with the artist Francisco Trêpa, guided by teachers Mariana Conduto and Jorge Simão, within the context of an artist residency promoted by the Futurama Festival.
The question posed by the exhibition’s title is certainly vague, yet broad enough to encompass the various universes presented here. Does our skeleton sustain us? Does our family sustain us? Can a piece of music be our sustenance? A practice? A chair, when we sit? And when all else fails, can school take on that role?
In this museum—the Visigothic Art Nucleus—we see the ruins of what once sustained. Columns that symbolized power, which collapsed only to be erected again centuries later. Today, they stand as symbols of the fragility and ephemerality of civilizations, and simultaneously, of the permanence of objects and stones that tell the story of our history. Here we understand that this region of Beja has been inhabited by diverse cultures, as it is today, and as it will be in the future. This is a meeting point between the museum’s collection and the school: diversity.
The students were challenged to look at a colorless, cold collection and return color and life to it. Based on their choices, they developed a painting on a container form (bowls evoking the ancestral importance of storing, sustaining, and transporting), inspired by motifs engraved in the museum’s stones. At the same time, they reinterpreted architectural details of the Visigothic columns, creating small sculptures designed to integrate with and transform the chair where they sit at school—a display device linking the everyday school environment with the museum space.
At the core of this project lies the freedom and significance of creative gesture, as well as the interconnections it can generate within institutions and, above all, among people. The school environment raises numerous questions, one of which is evident: not every student adapts to the school system, for various reasons. This is a reality present in schools across the country and the world. The education system lacks sufficient capacity to adapt to human singularities, one of the major challenges in education.
So, what is the school of the future? And how can it evolve so that teaching finds new ways to reach students, becoming a catapult for those who would otherwise have fewer opportunities? Being successful during the mandatory school years does not guarantee success in life. And, after all, what does it mean to be successful? Success is always a relative measure, perhaps found in simple gestures, such as tending a garden. Yet, school can also be sustenance for many: a space where one learns to recognize the value of one’s own actions and journey.
The ceramic course at Escola Mário Beirão, aimed at 9th-grade students, functions as a necessary deviation from the traditional school system. Through making and experimentation, young people who struggle to adapt to conventional teaching methods find here an alternative, grounded in artistic and craft creation.
The project seeks to consider creation as a place of transmission and sustenance: a shared territory between artistic gesture and pedagogical gesture. The role of the artist is not to teach a technique, but to open space for doubt and discovery. The dialogue with the Visigothic museum is not only formal—between columns and chairs—but also symbolic: between what endures and what learns to sustain itself; between matter that once had a use and that which is still searching for its place.
In this installation, diverse archaeologies intersect: those of the historical past, the traces of Visigothic art, and those of the present, inscribed by the youth who, year after year, occupy those chairs. This is a re-signification of regional heritage and a gesture that allows these eight students to also become part of the history preserved here.
Francisco Trêpa (1995) is a Portuguese artist living in Lisbon. He studied ceramics at António Arroio Artistic School (2013), holds a degree in Sculpture (2017) and a Master’s in Multimedia Art (2022) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. Since 2015, he has exhibited nationally and internationally in various galleries and institutions. His work is included in the Antonio Cachola Collection (MACE), the PLMJ Foundation Collection, and several private collections. In 2024, he was named a finalist for the EDP Foundation’s New Artists Award. That same year, he won the Grand Prize of the Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize. He is currently preparing his solo exhibition, O Baile dos Bugalhos, for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Center, scheduled to open in September 2025. Francisco Trêpa’s practice investigates symbiotic relationships that sustain ecological, existential, and affective systems, using a variety of materials to create sculptures that explore, and ultimately embody, concepts such as transmutability and hybridism. His most recent body of work creates a meta-universe inspired by the plant world, the ties and crosses between plants and animals, such as pollination, conjuring the complex relationships between non-human animals and the impression of humanity in the Anthropocene. His sculptures evoke natural phenomena which are provided by the senses, drawing on both aesthetic and poetic dimensions in order to foster involvement, and ultimately, reflection. In this way, his works weave visual narratives that invite both contemplation and questioning, combining symbolism, emotion, form, and critical thought. His work is prolific, using the generative capacity of imagination to create a sense of reproductive
abundance, as he unfolds and expands the forms that matter (ceramic, wax, wood) assumes in his practice.
Over the past two years, the “main actors” of this meta-universe have been fictional, genderless characters
who tell us their stories and attempt to escape the categories of our world.
