September 19—20, 2015
Serralves Museum,
Porto, Portugal

Performance

Canteen Machine unfolds as a sculptural and performative installation centred on systems of circulation, maintenance and collective dependency. The project approaches the canteen not simply as a functional site of nourishment, but as a social and emotional infrastructure in which bodies, objects and routines are continuously organised through acts of distribution and repetition.

The installation combines sculptural structures, moving image and spatial intervention to construct an environment suspended between industrial mechanism and domestic architecture. Machines, containers and supporting elements appear simultaneously utilitarian and theatrical, oscillating between practical function and symbolic projection.

Rather than presenting technology as autonomous or efficient, Canteen Machine focuses on the fragile forms of labour and care that sustain systems of collective life. Mechanical processes are treated as extensions of bodily rhythms, producing a perceptual field where nourishment, exhaustion and maintenance become inseparable.

Across the installation, objects behave less as stable tools than as intermediaries within chains of transfer and dependency. Materials circulate between states of usefulness, obsolescence and fiction, generating an atmosphere where industrial logic becomes strangely intimate.

The work proposes a reading of infrastructure not as neutral support, but as a condition that shapes emotional and social relations. In this context, the “canteen machine” functions simultaneously as sculpture, organism and metaphorical body: a device that feeds, regulates and transforms collective behaviour.

Rather than constructing a closed narrative, the installation operates through accumulations of gestures, material traces and operational fragments, allowing the exhibition space to function as a temporary ecology of maintenance and coexistence.