In other shoes: the Mutants between CCB’s theatre and museum

In order to reflect on and question the artistic devices that cross between the performative and exhibition experience, the second edition of Mutants – between the theatre and the museum took them to the Centro Cultural de Belém and MAC / Museu de Arte Contemporânea.

Over the course of four months, this participatory project by BoCA, coordinated by Sara Franqueira, invited a number of artists whose practice has contributed to accelerating the discussion about boundaries and connections between territories, devices and artistic formats.

This year’s guests were choreographer João Fiadeiro, writer and multidisciplinary artist Patricia Portela and visual arts duo Musa paradisiaca. The process of this edition concluded on 15 December with the performative occupation ‘in someBODY’s shoes’. The power of the encounter and of the collective continues to inspire and dictate ways of travelling – mutants are, after all, what we all are.

in someBODY´shoes

“Determinations are created by people; other people make norms to fulfil them; the determined rules are thus drawn on the spaces; the spaces are marked on the bodies of all the other people, the bodies of countless people are marked on the works of art and the works of art mark the already marked people by drawing normative spaces. And what do we do with what doesn’t fit into the norms, what’s left over from the determinations, the desires that exceed the rules of the spaces, the dreams that dream up other bodies? We take off our shoes, put our feet on ground that hasn’t yet been trodden, remake our bodies with the shoes that are next to them.

In this durational performative occupation, we set out to discover the economic gesture that changes the norm, the infinitely small action that displaces determination, the serene invitation that changes the design, the simple and unusual rule that remakes the body. In different rooms designed by the exhibition format, small invitations/challenges are thrown at the body so that it achieves a performative format.

To see in another way, to sit in another format, to move at another pace, to pay attention to something else, to see the other, to be the other, to be the same in the other’s shoes.”