EXHIBITION // TALKS
SPELLBOUND
SSENSÍVEL COLLECTIVE
This exhibition project stems from a shared reflection on the place of photography as an aesthetic, relational, and affective practice.
The title SPELLBOUND — whose translation suggests a state of enchantment or fascination — assumes, in this context, a polysemy that refers simultaneously to the photographers' relationship with the images they produce, and to the interpersonal bonds that founded this collective.
On an individual level, "enchantment" refers to the deep and sometimes non-transferable relationship that each photographer establishes with the act of observing and capturing.
The images gathered here often arise from an affirmed, meticulous, almost ritualized attention to seemingly banal situations or objects. However, what emerges from them is not a simple documentation of reality, but the sensitive transfiguration of a moment, where the visible is imbued with lyrical and affective intensity. It is a kind of perceptive spell,
in which the gaze—by lingering on fragments of daily life—elevates them to a condition of strangeness, melancholy, or wonder.
Instead of a purely mimetic record, these images operate according to a fantastical logic, where reality opens itself to the intervention of the imagined, the remembered, and the desired, establishing atmospheres that oscillate between strangeness and wonder.
On the other hand, SPELLBOUND also refers to the affective and communal dimension on which the collective itself is based. Photography, in this context, is not configured solely as an artistic medium, but as a shared space for experimentation, listening, and
coexistence. The creation of the sensitive collective emerges from the affinity between its members, whose artistic practice is inseparable from a relationship of friendship and mutual support.
This linking dimension not only provides for photographic creation, but guides its creative approach: to make visible a grammar of a gaze rooted in the sharing of gestures, ideas, and affections.
The exhibition thus articulates two dimensions complementary to photography: its power to summon intensified forms of presence—which reconfigure the way we relate to the visible—and its role as a catalyst for interpersonal relationships sustained over time.
SPELLBOUND is, in this sense, simultaneously a collective exercise of visual expression and a celebration of the bond established between those who experience photography not only as an artistic practice, but as a way of being.
ARTISTS
Cláudia Simões
João Mendes
Mariusz Kiepura
Patrícia Assis
Pedro Pena
Sebastião Vences
Sofia Estudante