Mafalda Matos with students from Castro Verde's High School | Observatório em Formas
Castro Verde, June 9th 2023, 12h
Where Centro de Artes e da Viola Campaniça
Free entry
Castro Verde, June 10th 2023, 14h
Where Centro de Artes e da Viola Campaniça
Free entry
Combining education and artistic creation, Futurama invited artists from various disciplines - from performance to visual arts, from dance to music - to develop projects with students from secondary schools in Mértola, Castro Verde and Beja. Stimulating imagination, creativity and empowering students with methodologies of artistic expressions, the result of each of these processes may take the form of an installation, a performance, an intervention in public space, or any other format yet to be explored.
Together with students from Castro Verde's High School, the artist Mafalda Matos proposed a work that departed from photography and image to become object and performance. Starting from the exploration of the city, a creative universe was built around the public space and the relationships established with each body and gaze. Then, the exercise of observing the forms in this common space gained an unexpected three-dimensionality: the register invoking an object. Finally, the artist and the youngsters developed, together, an installation and a performative sharing about this mental path, place and look, to be discovered at Futurama Festival.
Mafalda Matos graduated in Equipment Design at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa in 2014, and became Master in Product Design at Esad.Cr (Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha) in 2017. She did Erasmus at Nuova Accademia di Belli Arti in Milan during her Bachelors, and attended in 2019/2020 a post-graduation in Art Curatorship at NOVA University - FCSH.
Mafalda is interested in subjects such as memory, archive and the study of the human relationship with space and the object, addressing these issues through diverse artistic practices. The use of color, visual composition, textiles and photography are also structural languages in her work, which always bring something playful and unexpected. She likes to integrate projects that make ideas happen – mainly in a team or communal contexts. She defines design as a way of living and thinking, not just executing.
The artist has also worked as a designer in Architecture and Design studios, as well as in the production and creation of exhibitions/festivals. Currently, she concentrates her work in art direction, set design, scenography, object creation and artistic installations.
