This exhibition moment is not intended to be an extension of the perceptive digression surrounding contemporary Portuguese art that constitutes the exhibition On Above, curated by Victor Diniz, present at the CAPC Sereia.

In this founding space, products of the experience and ways of being of the CAPC appear and revive, in their operational weaknesses. Without pretending to highlight a historiographic hypothesis of what the CAPC was and is, these objects donated by the artists themselves, others of unknown origin, and still others left by their authors, are organized, here, in the physical place where the heroic antiquity of the CAPC was domiciled, as possible study material about a time when, for an artistic community committed to the task of thinking about a new relationship with the idea of Art, the acronym CAPC referred to a laboratory of expressive practices of reflection and artistic activism, and concrete, for a space of enormous conceptual openness about modern artistic practice. Forms of artistic achievement from a specific era that carried with them the desire for emancipation, for overcoming history, tradition and conventions; critical and interrogative impulses about the Western artistic regime, these objects serve to accentuate the perspective of the CAPC in the present temporality, to overcome its current limits, the conditionalities of its “today” and to deepen its identity.

Carlos Antunes, Pedro Pousada and António Olaio
Coimbra, September 28, 2010