WORKS LOURENCO SOARES

Lourenço Soares

uma biblioteca feita de estrume e cascas de fruta (compost library)

The exhibition at Lièvre_____ is organized on two floors. The first floor shows Books, a series of works on paper inspired by book covers. Books creates a sort of fictional library for existent and speculative knowledges about nature cultures, politics, and history. While some of the drawings use elements from published books, others combine text, typography, and images from different sources in collages that question scientific classifications and authorship. The colored pencil drawings are also an homage to the work of the often unknown illustrators of scientific publications. A regular grid on the wall behind the drawings is an attempt to trace overlapping and contradictory epistemic worlds.

On the second floor in the attic, the video installation firstpersonsingular@hyper-separation.episteme departs from grammar categories to look at how language represents nonhuman agents and ideas of human exceptionalism and individuality. The installation is presented with a large screen that stands on a landscape of cardboard stones and plastic plants. The image is a montage of 3D models overlapped with diagrams, drawings, and texts taken from encyclopedias, grammars, and theoretical books. The sound is a composition by musicians João Carreiro and Leonor Arnaut who interpreted a score by Lourenço Soares made up of word classes, pronoun declensions, and verb conjugations from the Portuguese grammar.

The capitals created by the financial market are thus virtual in a sense in which the virtual is neither the real (what is tangible) nor the possible (what does not yet exist), but that which, because of the fact of a publicly agreed representation of the future, becomes present and active in the present and at the same time modifies it (Deep-sea Mining Edition)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Milton Friedman & Co. and how they fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die

2023
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Empire Green OR The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere (Arthur Conan Doyle)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

A large part of the value crystallised in the goods produced by human labour actually comes from the ‘work’ (in the sense of transformation of energy into matter) of the biosphere, where the time-scale may be 1 million years

2022
Color pencil on paper
50 x 40cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

The Power of the Market, or Why the labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear, tear, and death, must be continually replaced by an equal amount of fresh labour-power

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

The Problem of Agency OR why philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood

2023
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Monocultures of the mind (Of Gardens by Francis Bacon, philosopher)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

An Encyclopedic Knowledge of Commodities

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

sotnemirbocsed OU a antropologia como anamorfose discursiva das etnoantropologias dos coletivos estudados (after Holbein)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Primate Visions (Donna Haraway)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

The Age of Mammals OR that the monsters were practically brainless, that there was no room for reason in their tiny cranial cavities, and that if they have disappeared from the rest of the world it was assuredly on account of their own stupidity, which made it impossible for them to adapt themselves to changing conditions

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Meditation on the geological text (Robert Bakker)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Bildschirmfoto 2023-02-13 um 16.10_edited.png

How to model the diversity of the living forest on the uniformity of the assembly line (Linnaeus)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

2'400.- CHF
2'400.- USD

if the alternations of the seasons suddenly ceased and the weather remained constant from a certain day onward, this would represent a change of data in our sense, that is a change relative to expectations, although in an absolute sense it would not represent a change but rather an absence of change

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

A boa antropologia não é um espelho (Viveiros de Castro/ Maniglier) (Dinosaur-girafe after a drawing byJohn Conway)

2022
Color pencil on paper
52 x 42cm

1'200.- CHF
1'200.- USD

Lourenço Soares is a research-based artist working with epistemic ecologies. His work is informed by speculative fiction and deconstruction and focuses on the ways western knowledge represents nature. Understanding natural history as a political tool in the Western project of domination and control over nature, Soares analyses the history of ideas to trace the relationships between science and politics. Lourenço Soares uses different mediums — like video, 3D animation, and drawing — and is influenced by scientific illustration and knowledge visualization.

Lourenço Soares Portfolio

Selected Exhibitions & Screenings

2022

Fossils: a Critique of Political Imaginaries, Material, Zurich, Switzerland

Fossil_images: table i, ii, iii, Kunstlokal at Sauriermuseum Athal, Switzerland

Living With a Couple & Jerry the Cat (performance), Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon

Plattform 22, Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland

2021

The Naturalist‘s Doubt, Keinraum, Luzern, Switzerland

There‘s Always Tomorrow (diploma), Löwenbräukunst, Zurich, Switzerland

2020

Oops a daisy!, Dietikon Projektraum, Dietikon, Switzerland

Museu de História Natural, 989offspc, Zurich, Switzerland

2019

Digital Ecologies, Center for Contemporary Art and SKLAD, Plovdiv, Bulgary

In Opacity, Muthesius KHS Projekt Raum, Kiel, Germany

Open Visit, Project Space ZHdK, Zurich, Switzerland

2018

Multispecies Salon (with Uriel Orlow and ZHdK), Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy

2017

a vida de j. sobre paisagem sonora (w. João Carreiro), Igreja Coração Jesus, Lisbon

2016

inpossível - com n..., Arquipélago Arte Contemporânea, Azores, Portugal

2015

X-MAS Short Film Madness, Porto, Portugal

Fuso - Video Art Festival, Lisbon, Portugal

Curatorial Projects

2020-22

Founder and co-curator, Dietikon Projektraum, Dietikon, Switzerland

2020-21

Co-curator, al_vista, Zurich, Switzerland

2019-20

Co-programmer Archeologies of Memory, Kino Toni, Zurich, Switzerland

2019

Co-production The Animal World with Live Soundscape, Kino Toni, Zurich

Artist Talks

07.10.2022 Artist talk with Anne-Laure Franchette, Material, Zurich

10.09.2022 Artist Talk with Cynthia Stucki, Kunstlokal, Sauriermuseum Aathal

14.06.2022 Artist Talk at Plattform, Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal

06.11.2021 Artist Talk with Filipa Ramos at the Naturmuseum Luzern, Switzerland

11.09.2020 Roundtable „I might be wrong – vol.3“, Oncurating Project Space

Artistic Residencies

5.2022 OSSO, with Living With a Couple and Jerry the Cat, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal

Funding

2021 Pro Helvetia — Studio Visit

ZHdK-Avina Projektfonds

2020 Kuratorium Ökologie (with Jonathan Ospina and Mélia Roger)

Education

2022 WAVES: postgraduate studio seminar, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland

2018–21 MA in Fine Arts, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich, Switzerland

2013–16 BA Multimedia Art, Belas-Artes - Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

with exchange program at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Finland

2009-13 BA in Architectural Studies, Faculdade de Arquitectura, Lisbon, Portugal

with exchange program at Facoltà di Architettura La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

Lièvre