The objects are ambiguous, their status oscillating between non-art and non-non-art objects, referencing the mechanisms of exhibition displays, the art market, parking problems, audiences, the ceiling height of the Maumaus gallery Lumiar Cité, a Portuguese pastry (half the diameter of a rice cake), furniture systems, beech framing, Enver Hoxha’s writings at the United Nations Headquarters in Genève and notions of translation in Spike Lee’s film Inside Man, libraries, film and society, Family Guy, news channels, conversations between hydraulic platforms and photocopy machines, football museums, the unionist Maria João, artists Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro and João Viotti, the ethno-poet Hubert Fichte, Pina Bausch’s failed millipede dance, and the theorists and film-makers Alexander Kluge and Manthia Diawara.
Functioning as both a primer and a form of documentation, this publication brings together essays by Stefanie Baumann, Filip De Boeck, Sabeth Buchmann, Avery F. Gordon, Tobi Maier, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Gertrud Sandqvist, Alberto Toscano, Giovanbattista Tusa and Emily Wardill, alongside visual and textual material from the exhibition ‘Parting with the Bonus of Youth—Maumaus as Object’ in an attempt to render notions of pedagogic complexity visible by negotiating the terms of art, education and the exhibition as medium itself. Partly a response to the relocation of the Maumaus Independent Study Programme, partly a public examination of the school’s self-interpretative gestures, and partly a search for a way out of both, the exhibition and publication expand each of these walk-on parts into a formal intermission: ‘Maumaus as Object’. A play in one act. A meta-theatre of self-legitimacy.

Parting with the Bonus of Youth – Maumaus as Object
Galerias Municipais, Av. da Índia
22.06. - 08.09.2019

Major funding for the exhibition and the catalogue has been provided by Galerias Municipais / EGEAC and tthe Portuguese Ministry of Culture / Directorate-General for Arts.