December 13 — March 23, 2013
Galeria Fundação EDP
Porto, Portugal

Curated by Filipa Oliveira, João Pinharanda and Sérgio Mah

“Musa paradisiaca”’s participation in the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize 2013 took place within a group exhibition presented between the EDP Foundation Gallery in Porto and Casa da Música, bringing together a selection of emerging artists chosen through an international open call. The exhibition operates as an institutional platform where heterogeneous practices are placed in proximity, generating friction between languages, media and conceptual approaches.

Within this context, the presentation marks an early articulation of the duo’s expanded practice across film, sculpture and performative narration.

The film Cena de Caça (2013), shot in São Tomé and Príncipe with Caustrino Alcântara, unfolds between ritual speech, fictional narrative and landscape perception, weaving together local references and constructed sequences of vision and pursuit.

Alongside the film, a series of pitch (bitumen/resin) sculptures articulate a speculative material culture. These works do not represent identifiable objects, but propose fragments of a fictional archaeology — residues of an uncertain system of use, belief and classification. The dense material stabilises form while preserving ambiguity, producing objects that oscillate between tool, relic and artefact.

Souls Commission, an audio performance with synchronised slides developed in São Tomé and Príncipe, operates as a phantasmatic narrative on belonging. Voice, image and testimony assemble into a drifting structure in which belonging is not fixed but continuously negotiated through absence, echo and projection.

Together, these elements form an expanded exhibition environment where film, sculpture and sound circulate as interdependent systems of fiction, perception and material speculation.