X is Not A Small Country Exhibition

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Bricklab, Tactile Cinema, 2021. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira

X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY EXHIBITION

Bureau

ARCHITECTS
Bureau

DESIGN TEAM
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide

PUBLICATION DRAWINGS
Ignacio Martínez Pendás

CURATORS
Aric Chen, Martina Muzi

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Joana Pestana, Max Ryan

CONCEPT DESIGN
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger

CONSTRUCTION DRAWINGS AND DOCUMENTATION
Chiara Pezzetta, Loïs Weber, Katerina Gkimizoudi

CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISION
Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger

WITH PROJECTS
Rupali Gupte, Prasad Shetty, Abdulrahman Hisham Gazzaz, Turki Hisham Gazzaz, He Jing, Liam Young, Paulo Moreira, José Sarmento Matos, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, Wolfgang Tillmans

OTHERS
Bard Studio, Bricklab, Ibiye Camp, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Chão - Oficina de Etnografia Urbana, José Sarmento Matos, Rael San Fratello, Wolfgang Tillmans

PHOTOGRAPHS
Francisco Nogueira

YEAR
2021

LOCATION
Lisboa, Portugal

CATEGORY
Arts & Architecture, Museum & Exhibition Interiors

The exhibition design follows these lines of thought: Fieldwork: the resurrection of Henrique Galvão’s 1934 map, a complex referential transnational framework.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira

Translation: the very actual and misused topic of borders, peripheries, nations dictating conventions on one side of a line against what might happen on the other. Lines: suggested by a deformed, half invisible grid offering potential narratives of referential diversity, blurring north-south orientations.

Geography: an insinuated three-dimensional space grid eludes any clear belonging. Choice: “if I had to choose between The Doors and Dostoyevsky, then – of course – I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?” (Susan Sontag in Jonathan Cott, The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, Yale University Press, 2013).

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira

The grid has a particular power that extends way beyond its graphical presence. In art, it appeared as an optical device for visual explorations on perspective, particularly intense in the times of Paolo Uccello. In cartography, Cartesian coordinates have occupied extensively the world of maps as a reference system since the 17th century.

The particularity of the grid, as Rosalind Krauss has expressed in her 1980 article “Grids” published in the magazine October, is its capacity to mask and reveal, setting a seemingly ordered play of appearance and disappearance.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Liam Young, Planet City, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Performance Mock-ups, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira

What it reveals is what might appear over the grid once it is laid out. What it masks or occults is a pre-existing condition that its own laying out has covered, as an erasing action over a prevailing context.

The discussion about the validity of the grid as a referential system is thus naturally complex, even more so in an exhibition dealing with post-globalism conditions that have placed its pivotal line of thought on a map (Henrique Galvão’s 1934 Portugal não é um pais pequeno - Portugal is not a small country), opening the door to cartography as a colonization tool.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
 © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira

The maps presented specific views of the world with its Cartesian grid, and these views were informed by the martial will of conquering parts of the world presented in those same maps. 

X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY design exhibition modestly addresses this complex and long history, bringing the grid to a three-dimensional level to address the contemporary issues of mapping the world and its transformation in data-based realities.

And it confesses a certain degree of convoluted confusion in referencing the world.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira

Once the power game of north-south or east-west classifications has been blurred, as the geopolitical state of the world obviously indicates currently, what grid system could faithfully order or re-order the geolocation of physical and virtual presences?

Is the Cartesian coordinates grid still politically acceptable? Was it ever? Indirectly, the endless nature of the grid opens a discussion as well on borders, frontiers, and domination agendas.

The particular oval space of the MAAT offers an interesting background to host such a hypothesis of post-global presences.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira

For X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY a division has been traced for the visitors to somehow confront them with an itinerary choice.

The design and art pieces tackle quite openly this sense of dis-belonging following the conventional understanding of national identities.

In the exhibition space, they spread “freely” on one side or the other of a physical and fictional line: a border wall.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira

They appear and disappear in relation to each other, the museum’s architecture, and exhibition design.

The variety of media, physical and virtual is also organized to provide indications about the impossibility to classify. It is the choice of the visitor to re-arrange north-south-east-west logics and to recompose them in a contemporary condition, a renewed historical fiction.

X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Liam Young, Planet City, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021.. Image © Francisco Nogueira


X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
 © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
 © Francisco Nogueira
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
© Francisco Nogueira


X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Axo
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Axo
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Axo
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Furniture


X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Section
X is Not A Small Country Exhibition
Plan