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A2 uma conversa-performance

The performance begins with our presence marked by the fact that we are each wearing Samuel's shirt, the same but different shirts, because one is older and the other more recent, and we are carefully walking barefoot along a ledge on the wall of stone, negotiating our passage between us: as the creation of a non-superficial corporeal memory from the real experience of the surface.
The performance continues with the sharing of readings about the body – as a couple, with the unveiling to the public of objects, materials, and photographs, in boxes and in the wallet, and the unveiling of stories that are beyond what we see, hear and touch. They are there, and this other place, beyond the visible and palpable, which can also be a place of fiction. Everything is centered and clarified in the matter of the surface (of the photograph, of a plaster cast of an old jewel, of the shirt worn over a body, of the skin, of the feet on the stone, of the walls, of the different covers of two identical books, of the screen, putting full-screen sunscreen on each other's faces, creating a layer on the face) and of appearance (in the sense in which Susan Sontag tells us, as what we can know) in a conversation based on the possibility of intimacy of two friends, who share clothes, books, affections and ideas, even if, and despite the fact that we know that you are only intimate with yourself as Virginia Woolf would say.
And unexpectedly: a small accident. I take the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water, a predictable gesture in a conversation with text readings in this late summer afternoon, I drink through the neck, and from the bottle, the water runs from my mouth, through my body, to the floor, until I have nothing else inside.

2013, Rita Castro Neves e Samuel Guimarães, A2 uma conversa-performance, A2 Reflexões e produções (em modo de conversa), um projeto André Alves & Juan Luis Toboso, Casa Museu Guerra Junqueiro, Porto.

Rita Castro Neves

Rita Castro Neves lives and works between Porto and Beira Alta. After finishing Advanced Photography at Ar.Co and a Master's in Fine Arts at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she exhibits regularly in Portugal and abroad, in established spaces as well as in so-called unconventional places. Beginning with a photographic background and vision, she has developed artistic projects with diverse support: from photography to the manufacture of objects, through video, live art, installation, as well as site-specific projects. In 2015, with artist and architect Daniel Moreira, she began a long collaborative project about representations of landscape, reflecting drawing, photography and video in an installed way, about artistic collaboration, different techniques and artistic cultures, territory, scale and route. She has had several individual and group exhibitions, artistic residencies and curatorships. She teaches and develops curatorship projects. She founded and curated several festivals and performance events, including Amorph!98 in Helsinki with Stig Baumgartner; Dia E Vento at Teatro do Campo Alegre in Porto in 2001 with Cristina Grande; o, Brrr with Teatro Nacional São João / Teatro Carlos Alberto/ Porto 2001 European Capital of Culture, an international festival with two editions, in 2001 and 2003; from 2006 to 2012, the annual Trama Performing Arts festival with the Serralves Foundation; in 2012, Symptom nº 0 at the Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Porto; in 2013, the Symptoms and Secondary Effects in collaboration with the Research Institute of the Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico do Porto (InEd), co-curated with Fátima Lambert and Rita Xavier Monteiro. As a professor at Faculty of Fine Arts of at the University of Porto, she created and directed the first Post-Graduate in Performance in Portugal (2016-17). She created the group Sintoma in 2012 and coordinated until its end, in 2020. Performance. Investigation. Experimentation, organizing numerous workshops, conferences, artist talks, meetings, public presentations and national and international performance events. From 2005 to 2008, she was Pedagogical Coordinator of the Portuguese Institute of Photography, in Porto. With Daniel Moreira, in 2020, the project to restore the Escola de Macieira, an old primary school in the Plano dos Centenários in Serra de São Macário, in Beira Alta; there, she started a project for artistic residencies as a reflection on mountain culture, nature and rural, on ecology, biopolitics and environmental preservation. (www.ritacastroneves.com)