Prototyping the Museum

Following a delayed opening originally scheduled for March 27, maat inaugurates on June 10 a new season under its new director Beatrice Leanza with a museum-wide architecture intervention commissioned to the New York based studio SO – IL of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu.

Titled Beeline, this large scale ephemeral work transforms the Amanda Levete-designed building into a landscape of encounters and conversations by taking audiences through elevated pathways, stage areas and workshop zones, by dissecting the space both in plan and section and connecting the original entrance from the quayside directly with a new access point facing the city. “This not only transforms the way visitors enter and experience maat, but also challenges the implied hierarchies of spaces in a traditional museum and provide flexibility for an ever-evolving organisation,” states Florian Idenburg.  

On view is also the exhibition Currents – Temporary Architectures by SO – IL displaying 12 projects the studio formulated over the past decade organised in six thematic pairs that bring to the fore subjects the studio explores in its temporary and built work. Throughout the exhibition, 1:1 mock-ups, ephemera, models, and books, with graphic design by Studio Geoff Han, texts by Beatrice Galilee and video contributions by past commissioners such as Anne Surak, Berry Bergdol, Eva Franch I Gilabert and Mark Lee among others. 

Across the entire museum, the commissioned installation Extinction Calls by the artist Cláudia Martinho is an acoustic spatialization project designed to offer a diversity of listening experiences that comprises the songs of extinct and critically endangered bird species collected from online archival platforms such as the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “From a sonic activism that highlights the global ecological crisis, to close interspecies vibratory encounters, this soundscape calls for a shift in the way we relate to our environment, towards an ecological intimacy with the other than human” says the artist.

As part of this intervention, the architects designed also a set of 15 mobile and reconfigurable art storage units as well as complementary staging structures that contain two special presentations: The Peepshow – Artists from the EDP Foundation Portuguese Art Collection and Memovolts — Stories from the EDP Foundation Energy Heritage Collection, two repositories owned by the foundation that established maat in 2016.

maat Mode 2020
Beeline was designed to host maat Mode, a six-month long experimental participatory public programme of various events initiated by maat’s new director that is presented as an open-ended exercise in interrogating the role of cultural institutions in society and prototyping the future museum. Co-developed with a variety of international and locally based practitioners, cultural and educational institutions as well as community groups, maat Mode embodies a “transformative gesture that repurposes the museum into a polyfunctional civic arena where public life is debated, probed, challenged and possibly inspired towards a more inclusive and equitable making of the future” says Leanza.

Its topics and modes of public engagement are both tests and a prelude to future programming. Research areas include climate action with a specific focus on the seas and marine culture, like Architecture Follows Fish, a project curated by Andre Tavares with Garagem Sul, Liquid Infrastructure organised by Margarida Mendes with the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University and Disturbing Conservation: Remapping the Avencas (Marine Protected Areas) run by curators Dani Admiss and Gillian Russell. Screenings, talks and “schools” discuss and explore the politics of sustainability, alternative urbanism and social freedom resonating across and beyond the Portuguese context, such as “Journeys to the In-between,” a series of performative city explorations curated by the collective Arteria; “Essa palavra presa na garganta [That word stuck in my throat],” a screening program curated by Ines Grosso with more than a dozen of today’s most renowned Brazilian artists around freedom as a universal right; and the collaborative research “Counter Architecture” organized by efabula centring on the role of the citizen in the design of polices and resulting in the drafting of a green paper for the city of Lisbon, among many others.

Check regularly www.maat.pt and our social channels as we continue delivering our projects both online & onsite.

The new VI of maat is realized by the Lisbon based studio Barbara says….