Lisbon, 2018. Photo by Monika Szewczyk.

Fogo Island Arts (FIA) presents Fogo Island Dialogues: Atlantic Codes, a two-day gathering of interdisciplinary thinkers and makers exploring the Atlantic’s historic and present codes of economics, travel, and dominion through artistic and scientific debate.

Launched in 2013, the Fogo Island Dialogues is a series of international and interdisciplinary conferences that bring together artists, arts professionals, architects, academics, economists, geographers and other distinguished participants to consider the relationships between local communities and the trans-national networks that constitute the backbone of our contemporary living.

Following previous editions on Fogo Island, in Chicago, New York, Berlin, and Vienna, the 2019 Fogo Island Dialogues will take place in Lisbon, across the storied ocean from Fogo Island.

The constant point of return for this edition of the Dialogues will be the Atlantic Ocean near which we gather. The Atlantic is understood not only as a place but as processes (of making, knowing, wondering and destroying) that have connected very distant locations. As notions of “Europe” are being debated and reshaped, this is also an opportunity to reimagine trans-national but also trans-local networks linking Canada and Portugal; new networks forged from the old.

Connected by Atlantic cod fishing economies for centuries, Newfoundland and Portugal have shared ways of knowing embodied in “hand-lining,” fishing from small punts or dories, and salting cod. They also share unresolved questions: If entire economies, ecologies and forms of making were shaped by the presence of abundant cod in the North Atlantic, binding distant communities, what is to be made of the accelerated extraction which depleted Atlantic cod populations to the point of near extinction in the last century? What features of today’s economy, politics and culture remain embedded in the asymmetrical models of exchange imposed by Portuguese-, Spanish-, Dutch-, English- and French-speaking powers around the Atlantic Ocean? Given the violence and trauma of many processes that constitute the Atlantic, how to navigate between the need to remember and mourn and the desire for renewal and progress?

Gathering distinguished authors—grounded in diverse disciplines and variably connected to Lisbon and Fogo Island—Atlantic Codes is a collective attempt to cohere common threads, storylines, algorithms or ways of moving and making. The project builds upon the role of Fogo Island Arts and Shorefast as international cultural agents, operating at different scales. It unfolds over the course of two days at various resonant locations in Lisbon.


Programme
Free and open to all but space is limited

Participants
Leonor Antunes, Nadia Belerique, Jürgen Bock, Paul Dean, Manthia Diawara, Ângela Ferreira, Marina Fokidis, Fabrizio Gallanti, Laurent Gutierrez, Ayesha Hameed, Grada Kilomba, Anniina Koivu, João Laia, João Mourão, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Walter Scott, Luís Silva, Monika Szewczyk, André Tavares, Gaëtane Verna

Day 1: Friday, November 8
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

5pm Introduction
Fabrizio Gallanti (Founding Prinicipal Fig Projects, Montreal), Nicolaus Schafhausen (Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts), and Monika Szewczyk (Director, De Appel, Amsterdam)

5:30pm Keynote
Grada Kilomba (artist) and Gaëtane Verna (Director of The Power Plant, Toronto)

Day 2: Saturday, November 9
Auditorium at Padrão dos Descobrimentos

10am-12:30pm Art Initiatives Worth Their Salt
Nadia Belerique (artist), Jürgen Bock (Maumaus/Lumiar Cité), Marina Fokidis (Kunsthalle Athena/South as a State of Mind), Anniina Koivu (ECAL Lausanne), João Mourão & Luís Silva (Kunsthalle Lissabon), and Nicolaus Schafhausen exchange strategies.

3-5:30pm The Science of Atlantic Storytelling
Leonor Antunes (artist), Manthia Diawara (film essayist), Ângela Ferreira (artist), Laurent Gutierrez/MAP Office (artist-architect), Ayesha Hameed (theorist), João Laia (curator), Manuela Ribeiro Sanches (scholar), and André Tavares (architect) take turns sharing experiences; with Walter Scott (artist) as principle witness.

6pm Exhibition Opening at Lumiar Cité
Tonio Kröner: Vou-Ihes contar uma história de amor Halfway down the stairs



Atlantic Codes is a project organized by FIA Advisory Board members Monika Szewczyk and Fabrizio Gallanti and is presented with the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Maumaus / Lumiar Cité, and Padrão dos Descobrimentos.


Further information:
www.fogoislandarts.ca