After one year in charge of the Artistic Directorate of the Galeria Municipal do Porto (GMP) and the Contemporary Art Department of the Municipal Agora, Curator and researcher Philippa Ramos Leaves. The decision was made by the company itself, “due to personal reasons,” Agora’s communications division told PÚBLICO.
The company that manages municipal activities and structures linked to culture and sports “thanks all the work done by the Director of the GMP”, which has chosen not to make statements to PÚBLICO, stressing that it will “continue to cooperate from time to time” with the municipality and more specifically in pursuing the programs it has envisioned for the institution and which It will be fully implemented by the beginning of 2024.
There are still no predictions about who will succeed Philippa Ramos, and in what ways. In the Department of Contemporary Art of Agora, the programmer was also responsible for the Fonoteca Municipal do Porto and Pláka, a platform that brings together projects “in support of contemporary art practice”, including Criatório, Shuttle, InResidence and the acquisition of the Municipal Art Collection.
Philippa Ramos will effectively cease her managerial duties at the end of March. The resignation follows, in less than six months, the dismissal of curator Nuno Faria from the post of artistic director of the Museum of the City of Porto, another structure dedicated to Ogura, now led by Jorge Soprado, former advisor to the culture of Viseu and current leader of the CCDR-Norte.
When news broke about Nuno Faria’s departure, sources who requested anonymity told PÚBLICO that there was “growing tension between management structures and programmers” in the Porto Chamber field. On this subject – in a brief interview with PÚBLICO the next day, on the sidelines of the press conference to present the programme Energy Gallery – Philippa Ramos commented that there are “visions that she is trying to negotiate that are not without friction and resistance on both sides.” The coordinator also mentioned that administrators and programmers “must learn to coexist”, and that “harmony is needed”.
The departure of Felipe Ramos from GMP It happens a month after the space reopens. The gallery was closed in February 2022 for rehabilitation work that did not take place, without official clarification from the municipality. In the aforementioned interview with PÚBLICO, the programmer explains that the reasons given by the mayor, Rui Moreira, relate to the crisis in the supply of building materials.
Infiltration has also been discovered in the library [Municipal Almeida Garrett], whose construction is shared with us. It would not make sense for us to carry out the structural works we were thinking of: the president considered that the delays would be so great that I would be without the exhibition because I do not know how long, ”adds Filipa Ramos, who has been active during the period of space closure, in different parts of City , Energy Gallery, a program with national and international names that is divided into conferences, concerts and other forms, and is largely based on dialogues between art and the environment, which is the curator’s main research topic. The final session of this program will take place on Friday at the GMP, with a lecture by Spanish engineer and writer Andrés Jaque.
The schedule for this new season of GMP will be presented on March 15th. The next exhibition begins the following week, on the 25th: Cravings: Lithium Mining and Rebel Mountainsa group exhibition curated by architect Marina Otero Verzier that follows the Colectivos Pláka cycles, thought and discussion groups integrated into the homonymous platform.
Among academia, coordination and writing
Born in Lisbon, Filipa Ramos holds a PhD in Philosophy from Kingston University in London, the city that became her main home, and where she will now return. Curator of the Cinema Department at Art Basel, one of the most important international contemporary art fairs, Portuguese co-founder, 2013, Cinema Chamber Connected Vdrome, where the work of filmmakers and artists is showcased at the intersections between cinema, the visual arts, and the motion picture.
Before succeeding Guilherme Blanc (now artistic director of Batalha Centro de Cinema) to head the Department of Contemporary Art in Ogura, the researcher approached Porto: she was one of the curators. Clay feetwho held GMP in the summer of 2021, and co-curator of the 2019 and 2020 editions of Future forum (the latter in book form, Vita Novain response to an epidemic).
With a broad international curriculum built between academia, values and writing, Filipa Ramos has also been part of the curatorial teams for the 13th Shanghai Biennial, in 2021, and the 8th Girdina Biennale, in Val Gardena, in northern Italy, in 2022. Collaboration on Projects that have passed through institutions such as Tate Modern in London, Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, or Ambika P3 Gallery in London. He has published texts in exhibition catalogs and in many international art journals, such as freeze or the moose. your next book, environmental artistthis year by London publisher Lund Humphreys.
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