DANIEL MOREIRA & RITA CASTRO NEVESPresent Images

Based on the exhibition “Saga” by Bernardo Simões Correia, Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves propose a workshop between photography and sculpture, inspired by the legacy of André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire (Museum Without Walls). The duo of artists focuses on The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture, a three-volume work completed in 1954, with which André Malraux challenges us in his proposal to bring “a presence” of sculpture, and not to make its history. The “Present Images” workshop uses photography to think about its qualities as a tool for analysis, documentation, reproduction, and circulation, as well as its aesthetic, fictional, exploratory, and liberating possibilities. Photography will underlie the small three-dimensional creations to be developed by the participants, between sculpture, the collective memory of images and reflection on self-image. From the representation of our bodies and in dialogue with other representations of other bodies, we will create new bodies: hybrid, ahistorical, introspective, and imaginary.

Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves live and work between Porto and the Beira Alta region. Daniel Moreira holds a degree in Architecture, and set out on a multidisciplinary path between architecture and fine art in 2000. Rita Castro Neves has been regularly exhibiting, teaching and curating ever since she finished her photography training at the Ar.Co - School of Visual Arts in Lisbon and her Master's in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art in London.

Having previously pursued separate artistic paths they began collaborating in 2015, embarking on a long-term project rooted in nature. Through drawing, photography, sound, video and performance, they explore artistic collaboration, different techniques, artistic cultures, territory, science, scale and journey. Influenced by animist thought, their work often stems from the place they find themselves in. Attuned to the different potential of materials, they find simple solutions for complex and large-scale projects often drawing inspiration from traditional and folk knowledge. Since then Rita and Daniel have been exhibiting extensively in solo and group shows, as well as working in the context of artistic residencies, publications and curatorships.In 2020 the duo finished the renovation project of the Escola de Macieira, a former elementary school built within the context of the of the Portuguese dictatorial Plano dos Centenários, in the Serra de São Macário, Beira Alta, where they have started a project for reflecting on mountain culture, nature, the rural world, ecology, biopolitics and environmental preservation. They have been developing the mail art project Caixa de Correio, in their studio in Porto since 2021. In 2022 they launched the book Arquivos de Bouça Fria with the publisher Museu da Paisagem and in 2023 the book Breu with A Oficina/Stolen Books.