A broader field

Andreia Magalhães and Isabel Carvalho

Andreia Magalhães earned her PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto, with a thesis about the dissemination of film in the visual arts in the 1960s and ’70s and its integration into exhibitions and gallery collections, and meanwhile worked on designing part of the doctoral programme at MoMA in New York. Since 2000, she has worked with various museums and art spaces, primarily in collection management, programming and exhibition production. In Portugal, she has worked at the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts (Porto), the Soares dos Reis National Museum and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Outside of Portugal, she has worked at the Netherlands Media Art Institute / MonteVideo, the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo. Since 2017, she has been artistic director at the Centro de Arte Oliva (CAO) in São João da Madeira, where she has curated exhibitions, including Jaime: vi uma cadela minha com lobos [Jaime: I saw one of my female dogs with wolves] and Feixe de luz: escultura projetada, cinema exposto [Light beam: projected sculpture, exposed cinema]. As director of CAO, she works with Treger Saint Silvestre collection, one of Europe’s most important collections of art brut. It was in the context of this new role and stage of her career that we spoke with Andreia about how the category, or genre, of art brut came to be, about the stereotyped conceptions that have put a limit on it and how, more recently, they have been called into question, namely through curatorial and exhibition strategies that respond to new theorising in the field. We also talked about good institutional practice and how it can improve the well-being of everyone, be it the employees at the art centres, the public that visit or in the local community.

Isabel Carvalho 

Just as soon as you’d started working at the Centro de Arte Oliva in 2017, you were placed personally in charge of the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection (TSS), one of the largest collections of art brut or outsider art in Europe. And from what I gather at the time you hadn’t had any experience with curatorial work in the outsider art field beforehand. Nonetheless, your research and gallery work were already bent toward types of art that were at some time or another marginalised or undervalued in art history, so for example art which used ephemeral media, like performance art, or more or less non-plastic media like video. At this point, these media are entirely accepted and consolidated within the art world. But this acceptance process is incomplete with so-called art brut or outsider art. And so I imagine coming on board with the project must have presented particular challenges for you personally and professionally. I want to ask you about the first challenges you encountered when you began “caring” for a collection grouped under the label of outsider art or art brut.

Andreia Magalhães 

You’re right. When I arrived at CAO, I did face several challenges. In the case of the TSS Collection, one of the first issues was my limited background in the field of outsider art/art brut and how little acquainted I was with the artists that formed the collection. I had to do a lot of reading, studying and had to seek out a lot of information. I realised that there wasn’t a huge dearth of knowledge and research in the area, much less in Portugal; there also seemed to me to be a degree of homogeneity in the way the works were discussed, even within institutions devoted to it. At the Collection d’Art brut of Lausanne, for example, the work is often discussed as a function of the circumstances of the artists’ lives. But over time, I started coming across different kinds of projects like the one at LaM Museum in Lille [Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d'art brut], where you consult online document archives and read about curatorial projects that have been developed in other museums like the Reina Sofía [Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía]. I also became aware of the ethical questions that arise when dealing with many artists and their work and saw how the discourse often sharply divided outsider art or art brut from “established” art. And seeing these things acted as a spur for me to make myself more critical and sceptical of contemporary art discourses. All the same, I should say that despite these challenges, we have an enormous advantage at CAO, which is direct access to the works themselves. With over 1,500 works by 400 artists, it’s a great place to study and gain insights into a wide variety of art forms and creative processes. The collection also obliges us as curators to do research, reflect and act as mediators, and naturally our approach to this has evolved over time. The CAO also brings together two fields often kept separate in institutions: outsider art/art brut on the one hand and contemporary art on the other. And this unlikely conjunction of elements lends it greater scope and allows us to reflect on the ways we categorise and classify art. And these are things we’re trying to achieve at CAO. The boundary between public and private presents another challenge – and it’s important we give some context to the work we’re doing with the TSS collection at CAO. The TSS was initially a private collection, started over forty years ago in France by two collectors, Richard Treger and António Saint Silvestre. However, since 2014 it has been on long-term deposit at the CAO. Private collections are born and evolve along different lines to public collections; they show the stamp of their collectors, so to speak. They are the result of certain sensibilities or tastes to which the objects, in the end, become tethered. When the artworks are transferred to the public sphere, they are forced to undergo a kind of conversion as a result of curatorial and museological practices. The study of the works opens up new avenues for interpreting the pieces, and these interpretations may be quite different from those of the original collectors. In the specific case of the TSS collection, it was begun in opposition to, or at least outside of, the established mainstream in contemporary art. This outsider quality was there at its genesis, and it’s precisely this that gives the collection its unique character. Nevertheless, the collection has been opened to other perspectives at CAO. Situating the artworks amidst the broader artistic landscape allows, I think, for a better understanding of the work and the artists themselves; likewise, these works are now contributing toward that significant broadening of scope and diversification that we are seeing in Portuguese contemporary art.

Isabel Carvalho 

I began our conversation by talking about a part of exhibitions of so-called art brut that have always made me uncomfortable – the insistence on providing detailed biographies for the artists and trying to give a “diagnosis” for them. How is it that the classification of this type of art became so interlinked with the terminology of illness and disease, and how is this reflected in the collection today? And also, how can these “diagnoses” – which, until recently, might be inferred from specific episodes, war traumas or sexual behaviour considered deviant at the time the artist was living – have conditioned the way we look at this sort of art? And what do they tell us about the way we conceive mental health? You gave the example of schizophrenia, and how Margarida Cordeiro, who came from the world of psychiatry, came across Jaime Fernandes. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Andreia Magalhães 

This is what I meant when I mentioned the difficult issues related to ethics, scientific knowledge and art criticism earlier. With exhibitions of art brut, I think the biographies reflect an attempt to legitimise the work in the way that actually makes the least possible sense. In such cases, the artist’s value is a function of their biographical particulars and less of their work, which is ironic because often, almost all the artist has left behind is their work. Biographical explanations are usually placed alongside the works with significant dates and episodes in the artist’s life, with particular emphasis on traumatic or life-changing events, traditionally identified as moments that stimulated their artistic production. Sometimes they allude to mental health diagnoses, like “schizophrenia”; others make vague references to “delusions”. Some of the biographies are highly romanticised, and occasionally they are oversimplified. They condition the viewer and demarcate the possible interpretations of the work. I don’t know where or at what point this biographising became the predominant mode. We don’t see it in Jean Dubuffet – if we consult the catalogue of one of the most important exhibitions he held, which remains our primary source for understanding his critical approach to art brut, titled L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels, the only information we get about the authors are their names, followed by a list of works on exhibit. Whether or not biographies are given in exhibitions at the CAO is at the curator’s discretion. In any case, our biographies are revised and updated regularly according to the information we gather from art catalogues and critical reviews of exhibitions and include details like the artist’s inclusion in notable collections and exhibitions. And yes, the case of Margarida Cordeiro and Jaime Fernandes is a perfect example through which to explore this issue. Margarida Cordeiro was a psychiatrist; if anyone was going to make clinical or medical deductions from the drawings that Jaime Fernandes produced and that were held at Bombarda Hospital, it would have been her. But that wasn’t her focus. Instead, she was concerned with the artistic qualities of Jaime’s drawings and the value in sharing and preserving them. How – as she would say in interviews – could she make claims about a patient she’d never met? All they had were the drawings, and so it was the drawings they – Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis – worked with. And it’s principally thanks to them that we know about and continue to care for the work of Jaime Fernandes today.

Isabel Carvalho 

Something that puzzles me a little is the “outsider” label and why it still hasn’t been abandoned. When speaking of art categorised in this way, that is, as made by those “on the outside” – excluded perhaps because they have been institutionalised – are we not dealing with a remnant of a kind of fetishisation of madness, one that still sees madness as linked with a certain distinctive mark of originality and genius? 

Andreia Magalhães 

All these classifications, “art brut”, “outsider art”, and many others that have emerged with a view to replacing or offering alternatives to these first two should be taken up and disseminated with some caution. The former terms were created in particular historical and cultural contexts, and we tend to cast them aside either because they are obsolete and now fall short or because they are obviously not fit for purpose. Regardless of the name we use, we are always referring to a form of artistic production that has traditionally been seen as existing outside of modern or contemporary art. The partition of the two camps has a long history, which isn’t linear and has its basis in various critical theories, arguments and institutional contexts. That being said, I also don’t think we should abandon the old labels entirely since they can also be an aid in allowing us to raise a critical eye to our history. When we use these terms, it’s similar to the way we find ourselves interpreting an artist’s work in terms of their relationship to some artistic movement or another, movements whose boundaries and characteristics are being continually renegotiated and understood in new ways. And I should say again that when we look at art placed under the banner of “art brut” or “outsider art”, mental health conditions have not been the only criteria for an artist’s inclusion – the classification has also been based on a lack of formal artistic training in the artist and on their absence from or lack of participation in the established art circuit. Naturally, the background and life events of the artists reveal themselves through their work, but that isn’t something unique to art brut. What is it that means an artist with some condition or disability is framed as an outsider artist rather than just an artist full stop? I think it has to do with the institutional context, which gives (or does not give) the artwork legitimacy. The history of art abounds with artists who have struggled with mental health issues or with addiction, who experienced trauma and/or lived through traumatic events that catalysed their art or somehow shone through in it – and all without their work being relegated to the camp of outsider art. And I don’t think the cornerstones of what is termed outsider art or art brut are even inextricably linked to mental illness or social isolation in artists. There are many notable exceptions to this “rule”, all the way back to the work collected by Jean Dubuffet, who invented the term art brut to describe “work produced by people uninvolved in artistic culture”, among which he included artwork he found being made in mental hospitals by artists like Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wolfli, but also works by self-taught artists like Gironella and Scottie Wilson.  

The history of art abounds with artists who have struggled with mental health issues or with addiction, who experienced trauma and/or lived through traumatic events that catalysed their art or somehow shone through in it – and all without their work being relegated to the camp of outsider art.

Isabel Carvalho 

You mention Dubuffet’s hunt for artwork produced by patients in mental hospitals – and there, we see a recognition of the value of creativity for mentally ill patients, something which undoubtedly has therapeutic benefits. In psychiatry, around the same time, this was beginning to be understood and put into practice, and there it drew renewed attention to the arts. And furthermore, through public exhibitions of their work, these artists could acquire a certain degree of visibility, and it was possible for them, in some sense, to connect and get feedback from the outside world. Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, these public exhibitions continued to draw rigid boundaries and pigeonhole the work. It was art, sure, but always art brut. In other words, it was still the product of “outsiders”. These boundaries regarding what was considered art were upheld according to a standard picture, usually based, if I’m not mistaken, on an artist’s education and/or training. In what ways would you say such criteria for becoming an artist have been called into question? And if we eliminate these criteria, what remains to distinguish what outsider art is left over from establishment art?

Andreia Magalhães 

Let’s start with art brut, a term I prefer over outsider art, which was first used by Roger Cardinal in 1972. Art brut was a label Jean Dubuffet came up with and began using after 1945, at the end of the Second World War, when he started tracking down art produced in psychiatric hospitals across Switzerland and France. These were not the only sources for the collection that would emerge – he also included work produced by mystics or spiritualists, prisoners (some of these also housed in psychiatric hospitals), recluses or just people who lacked any formal artistic background. He established a collection that served as the material basis for his theoretical formulations – and he used it to support his claim that what he called “cultural” or erudite art was all false. He argued that art brut revealed the essence of the human and the creative impulse more authentically and freely than cultured artistic production, which he considered formulaic and domesticated. But here, things become a little unclear. Dubuffet founded a collective named the Compagnie de l’art brut, whose members included a significant number of artists, poets and intellectuals – André Breton, for example, was a member – and all the work done around the collection, including exhibitions and publications, were carried out under the auspices of the Compagnie. He toured his collection in Europe and the United States, presenting it mainly to artists in exhibitions and public lectures. I see Dubuffet’s project as a manifestation of a countercultural movement, one that should be understood in its historical context. Europe had been the theatre of two world wars and was plunged into complete ruin; people’s belief in society’s core values had been profoundly shaken. In the art world, this was perhaps part of what led to an interest in non-Western art practices, which were linked with the notion of the primordial and were believed to lend greater importance to the human subconscious and altered states of mind in the creation process. I think Dubuffet and Breton were more interested in the subconscious than in madness. Suely Rolnik talks about the extraordinary importance of Freud and how he reintroduced a link between the human spirit and our psychological drives in his writings on psychoanalysis. I think all of this is interconnected. It’s why both Dubuffet and Breton were interested in artwork produced in psychiatric hospitals or by mystics whose images were created while in a state of “rapture”. Their contact with these alternative means of image and object production significantly impacted their own creative practice – one can see a link here with automatism and the broader incorporation of brut aesthetics. The incorporation of this aesthetic can also be observed in other artists’ work. About two years ago, Hal Foster wrote a book about the brutal aesthetics characterising the work of several leading artists of the post-war period, including Jean Dubuffet, Eduardo Paolozzi, Claes Oldenburg and Asger Jorn. To round off your question, these partitions, rough groupings and shifts in meaning are anything but straightforward and are still subject to variation today. 

Isabel Carvalho 

Going back to the link between madness and being unique, exceptional and original, which I mentioned earlier – it’s a characteristic we see everywhere in modernity. By appropriating their art, it inevitably led to the exploitation, of the marginalised, of the mentally ill, but also of women, children and racialised people – done in ways that seem distasteful to us today. So is there perhaps a certain contradiction at play when it comes to so-called art brut or outsider art and the contemporary art scene, given the latter has gradually moved toward including people who have, for various reasons, experienced marginalisation? In other words, does it still make sense to make such distinctions, or have they become redundant?

Andreia Magalhães  

Here I’d point again to psychoanalysis, whose development and diffusion happened alongside that of modernism in art, and again mention how Suely Rolnik describes Freud’s recoupling of psychological drives with the existential dimension in humans. It’s something we often see manifested in the artistic process. These developments also speak to the importance of the relationship the artists have had to the environmental, social and mental ecosystem (per Guattari) they are part of – and I think this applies to that distinctive mark of originality or genius you’re talking about, one defined by a pronounced “authorial imprint” which can be seen in the images, objects, buildings, ideas, music an artist produces, or indeed in any material manifestation of the artist’s consciousness, even if it doesn’t fall neatly into any category. 

In a text, she wrote about Jaime Fernandes, in the catalogue of the exhibition about him we did at the CAO, Maria Filomena Molder argues, quite brilliantly, “that for Jaime the drawings were a search for a kind of cure – there’s a cathartic dimension to them, and their subjects reflect this, but at the same time, the cure seems always just beyond reach, and so between 1960 and 1969, incessantly, Jaime continues to draw, to paint and to write.” This “psychic burden” (“pressão emocional”) she is talking about – the term originally comes from António Reis – can be discerned in the work of many of those creators placed outside the traditional art context, but is also present in the work of those who move, who think and who produce well within it. But I think, at the same time, it’s important to scrutinise and combat the misleading notion that suffering or a disturbed mind can endow somebody with special artistic powers. 

And I don’t make distinctions between different sorts of artists. I really like Paul Thek, and his work is informed by high-brow cultural and religious reference points and is also marked by an existential character. Paul Thek was one of the forerunners of environmental/installation art – from 1968 onwards, he began to produce the pieces he called “processions”, which are born out from a melding of religious elements, popular folktales, archetypal dreams, theatre (he often collaborated with Robert Wilson) and sculpture. He took up using wax as a medium in an important series of sculptures called “meat pieces” after coming across Jasper John’s encaustic paintings. I think these works of Thek’s embody that connective ritual I was mentioning and were the genesis of an individual cosmology that searches for a way of healing himself, for a cure. Any conflict between outsider art and contemporary art proper is construed post hoc, some time after the act of creation itself. These restrictive partitions and classifications are things we fabricate in museums, in our theories and histories of art, and should never be taken as a given – and it’s a good thing they are continuously being revised and renegotiated. 

Isabel Carvalho 

You mentioned that what has been labelled as art brut or outsider art has varied both over time and between cultures. In Europe, it’s linked with the backdrop of war and other traumatic events. In the US, it’s connected to racial segregation … is there anything left to save the classification of outsider art from being totally incoherent if we disentangle it from its history?

Andreia Magalhães 

Well, the category of art brut or outsider art came from Europe, sure – where there has been more to link it with a kind of art practice that sees art as the sublimation, or transposition, of mental imagery or visions – and to some extent, this link persists. But I think it might be worth highlighting at this point that a great deal of the work now being collected as “outsider” was not initially produced with any artistic intention in mind, and the people who produced it didn’t imagine or anticipate that their work would be put on public display. And this isn’t only something that happened long ago – it’s still the case, for example, with work found in the TSS collection. There’s Adelhyd van Bender, for example, a German man who spent his life in Berlin and passed away in 2014. After he died, hundreds of dossiers were discovered in his apartment, each containing hundreds of diagrams. These schematic drawings were produced according to a special code and done on A3 and A4 sheets, which were then organised and filed away in individual plastic sleeves. These many thousands of sheets include typewritten and photocopied passages of text and geometric diagrams coloured in with ink markers according to a codified system he had been working on for years. The walls of his apartment were also covered with similar cryptic designs. Van Bender’s drawings began circulating and have been displayed at exhibitions, including recent shared exhibitions at contemporary art galleries. His work has crossed the boundary between “insider” and outsider art, but before that, it underwent another transition, acquiring an artistic valence after its initial creation. 

Going back a little, you’re correct to say there are cultural differences between Europe and the United States. In the US, the term “art brut” is used far less than “outsider art”, which is also associated with what are known as “folk” or “vernacular” forms of art. One of the most well-known examples of a folk or vernacular artist is Bill Taylor, an artist born a slave in the 19th century, whose work was only reappraised in the 1980s, several decades after his death. In the US, the naive or folk art category is employed, as Lynne Cooke says, to distinguish between artists with and without “credentials”, something usually demarcated along social and racial lines. It’s important to point out that the interest in work by vernacular artists grew alongside and at the same time as the rise of modernism in art, the founding of certain collections and the first attempts to write down the history of American modern art. It’s also important to say that such art was collected mainly by other artists. Vernacular art sparked the interest of numerous art curators in the early decades of the 20th century, with the most significant example being the first director of MoMA, Alfred Barr, who acquired works by artists he called the primitive moderns (also occasionally subtitling them “artists of the people”) for the collection of the gallery which was then still in its early stages. In 1943, he organised an exhibition named Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists, where he exhibited work by well-known artists alongside work by self-taught artists, who were at that point relatively unknown to the public, and he incorporated their work into the overarching narrative of both his exhibitions and writing about art. At that point, he’d already organised the exhibition which would take the name Masters of Popular Painting (1938), bringing together the work of both American and European vernacular artists, and this exhibition was actually restaged, at least in part not so long ago when the museum re-curated its permanent collection. However, the movement in this direction wasn’t unique to MoMA. In 1924, the museum that would later become the Whitney Museum (then called the Whitney Studio Club) held an exhibition dedicated to “early American art”, which again made no distinction between artists’ backgrounds, with many of the pieces on display coming from artist’s private collections, placing insider and outsider art side by side and highlighting the relationship that existed between the artists in both traditions. Lynne Cooke has been organising exhibitions that delve into this history, like Outliers and American Vanguard Art (LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018), which takes a fresh look at the story of American art and works to properly situate a wide array of forms of artistic expression in their historical context. This reveals that inclusion, integration and assimilation of this kind of art by art institutions is only a recent thing; by the same token, it has never been the rule. Recently we’ve been observing a move toward greater integration, and this is most obvious at shakeups like the one we saw at the 2013 Venice Biennale, but nonetheless, we are seeing more and more exhibitions pop up that integrate artists that at one time circulated under the banner of outsider art and are now being “discovered” by the art world.

These restrictive partitions and classifications are things we fabricate in museums, in our theories and histories of art, and should never be taken as a given – and it’s a good thing they are continuously being revised and renegotiated.

Isabel Carvalho 

You have been working on encouraging people to offer new perspectives on the motives undergirding the collection at CAO. Last year you put together a seminar titled “Culturas Paralelas” [Parallel cultures] at the Art Faculty of the University of Porto (FBAUP). Your work there was taken up again in an exhibition which opened in February at the faculty’s gallery. What conclusions have you drawn from these experiences?

Andreia Magalhães 

They came out of my wanting to help make the field I’m working in broader and more diverse, more current and attuned to the developments occurring in other intellectual disciplines. I’ve always thought the defining feature of the projects we do at the CAO has been the considerable variety in the kinds of art we get to work with. And the way they all interrelate with each other gives us a greater scope in what we do. I’ll give you an example. Two distinct but connected factors inspired the exhibition on Jaime Fernandes: the first was the presence of a number of Jaime’s drawings within the TSS collection and the second was people’s exposure to António Reis’s film about him, released in 1974. Each was an important seed in the development of the Jaime exhibition at CAO, where we tried to bring together as many of the drawings we could locate as possible, including those that had ended up abroad. That exhibition paved the way for a later show, Ninguém, Só Eu [Nobody, just me], curated by Antonia Gaeta. For that exhibition, we solicited the participation of ten artists working in Portugal somehow responding to the work of Jaime or António Reis. Some of the artists were well acquainted with both the film and the drawings, others with just one or the other … naturally; their having some prior connection to the work wasn’t a prerequisite. The most important thing was that an exhibition of the work of an artist who died over fifty years ago was sowing the seeds for a new exhibition, and in many cases inspired new art by artists practising today. It was gratifying to see Jaime given the role of artist’s artist and to see how the collection fostered this relationship between Jaime and other artists. 

I’ll also say a word about the “Culturas Paralelas” seminar from 2022, which I did as you say in partnership with the FBAUP, and which was focussed precisely on discussing the categories we’ve been talking about, inviting critical, curatorial and aesthetic perspectives on how terms like contemporary art, outsider art or neurodivergent art can be distinguished, brought closer to each other or even fused together. The seminar worked as a starting point for setting these thoughts in motion at the arts faculty and helped publicise projects that are working to question or expand the limits of these categories. So, for example, one of the speakers/curators who participated was Charlotte Laubard, who has dedicated herself, both in her capacity as professor and curator, to studying the changes that digital globalisation has had on art paradigms, addressing, in particular, the fraught and problematic notion of the self-taught artist, and these concerns were the basis of an exhibition she organised in 2021 entitled the L’Énigme autodidacte in 2021 at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne (or MAMC). The “Culturas Paralelas” seminar was followed by an exhibition with the same name, held this year in the FBAUP exhibition space. The exhibition brought together work by artists usually pigeonholed as outsider artists but who have gradually come to be collected and exhibited beyond that (relatively narrow) arena, i.e. at important contemporary art exhibitions. In the exhibition booklet, all we had for the artists, besides the places and dates of their birth, were a selection of important exhibitions of their work. There was a core nucleus of artwork produced by artists in Dubuffet’s Compagnie de l’art brut, but it also included many more recent pieces. I think it was an important exhibition, not least because of where it was displayed – it was visited by students and future artists. Professors came and gave lessons in the space and assigned curatorial and artistic exercises to their students based on the exhibition. Overall, it has felt very worthwhile, if only because people have responded to these projects with a lot of enthusiasm. I think part of this is because such projects can shake up even long-established prejudices concerning art. The collection, its artists have acted as a means for supporting projects of many different kinds. I’d also mention finally that we’ve been working on a special library collection of art brut/outsider art, and we hope that next year it will open to readers, once the library itself is finished being built.

Isabel Carvalho 

We are seeing now that more and more art and cultural institutions are committing to raising awareness around mental health issues. I’d like to ask you what strategies you’ve devised and put into place at the CAO that function to foster the well-being of everyone involved, be they collaborators, on-site workers, the visiting public or the local community.

Andreia Magalhães 

I’ve been trying to make the organisation more inclusive – it is, after all, publicly funded, with a museological purpose and a level of social responsibility. This kind of inclusivity, which we hope will only grow broader and broader, champions a range of “diversities”, be they social or physical or otherwise, though we’re still in the first stages of the process. As it happens, one of the most long-standing projects we have is a weekly workshop hosted for the patients at the mental health ward of the Entre Douro e Vouga Hospital, and that’s been going on since 2016. We currently have about eight regular participants in the programme, who are exploring different ways of making art together with artists from the outreach programme from the CAO. As for community projects, I’d mention, in particular, the weekly art classes we run in collaboration with a local community organisation directed at single-parent families, where we work directly with the youngest children. In 2022, we made the first steps toward a plan that’s now taking shape, which aims to make our exhibitions more accessible to blind and deaf people. As part of this effort, we do Acesso Cultura (→ 1) training sessions for the entire CAO team as well as external collaborators, and these are also open to the wider community of culture professionals. We still have a lot of work to do on this front. We want to expand the scope of the projects already underway, make them better and initiate others, like the one we’ve got now in the planning stage, aimed at members of the older population with neurocognitive diseases. 

Drawing: © Clara Batalha / Isabel Carvalho, 2023.

Translation: Vita Dervan.

Leonorana magazine presents “We Care A Lot”, a series of conversations that place mental health at centre stage in understanding contemporary culture. Produced in partnership with maat for maat extended, this special issue of the magazine bears witness, through dialogues in different voices, to experiences of community, mutual care and happy interdependence currently being practised in the fields of art and culture. Recognising the breadth and nuances of contemporary thinking about care, this series – conceived by Isabel Carvalho and boasting the participation of Susana Caló, Nina Paim, Andrea Magalhães, the Pedreira collective and the Kosmicare collective – seeks to shine a spotlight on ways of living and thinking collectively, and allows us to see the ways mental health care practice asks us (and this is a good thing) to exist in relation to other beings, be they human or otherwise.