☰ LANDRAS
Landras / The Body in the Middle October 2025 Event programmed by Institution(ing)s CAM - Gulbenkian Fundation, Lisbon We Are Nature - Park Conference Programmed with Coimbra Centre for Functional Ecology Serrvales Foundation, porto |
Hyperspace February 2023 Event programmed by Irruptive Chora Ikectik Art Lab, London Debaixo das Cidades a Revolução April 2022Group show curated by José Maia & João Terras Espaço Mira, Porto Košice Seed Library: Seeds That Move February 2022 Group show curated by Borbála Soós Šopa Gallery, Košice, Slovakia |
Performance, video, installation and workshop |
Nowadays, modern lifestyles dominate the west, where populations - even in rural places - are gravely dependent on industrial objects and processes, whose production and distribution they do not control. This form of social and economic organisation is a great problem, for it disastrously sets things out of balance for people and, consequently, for all ecosystems in this planet.
Unlike the grains of the Poaceae; the family of plants like wheat, rice and corn, upon which entire empires have been built (if only to then miserably collapse), landras (acorns) are the fruits of perennial plants. They come from majestic trees, which, beyond living many many years, demand barely no work to harvest the copious amounts of produce they offer us and other animals every year.
Acorns are incredibly nutritious (rare thing these days) and, in local history, where folk tales and traditional knowledge remains safeguarded and alive, landras play a paramount role as symbols of freedom, abundance and autonomy. No wonder they were banished by dictatorial corporatist fascist regimes, whose overarching plan for the countries they ruled was to eradicate people's ability to sustain themselves.