LiMac in Guimaraes

The visitors of the You are Here exhibition are guided by a specially designed map to find paintings installed in the city of Guimaraes. The venues are not white cubes or galleries but places of passage such as stores, bookstores, bars, associations or places of leisure where the employee or owner of each place will welcome you.

The paintings display situations that occurred in the city and the cultural events for the European Capital of Culture and were disseminated to specific spaces. When displaced from their spatial context, the paintings question the accuracy and memory maintained from such events in the mind of visitors.

This experimental exhibition presented photographs from encountered architectonical elements in the ASA factory that reminded of contemporary art works. The pictures were exhibited on the first floor of the LiMAC tower.

The LiMAC residency in Guimarães took place form the 13th to the 27th of August 2012. The goal was to create a LiMAC collection composed of paintings made from situations during the visit of the city in order to reflect its experience as European Capital of Culture. The paintings represent details removed from the image of the city and of its architectonical and artistic landscape. They are exhibited in an experimental manner in public and semi public spaces by annual concession agreement between LiMAC and the owners of these spaces.

The residency intergrated a group of guided tours  in a performance format originiating, initially, from the installation of LiMAC at the tower designed by Joao Mendes Ribeiro for the Curators´Lab #2 – Documentation and discourse. In these guided tours, the exploration of the terminology emplyed by museums spurred the visitor to encounter the museum as a real and ficitonal institution. New types of narratives were experimented regarding production and curatorial practices throughout the exhibition This is not a / ,  You are Here and a staged shop played around the commercialization and fetichism of artistic objects. Following this, the guided tour developed from the dissemination of LiMAC in the city of Guimarães throughout crossed geographic narratives between Lima and the ASA factory. For the period of one year the works will be dispersed and recontextualized in the city as well as on this real / fictional guide which is designed to resemble maps of sewing patterns in reference to Guimarães as a past industrial center of fabric production.