Life within things
by Joana Mendonça

Collecting stones, leaves, twigs, shells, sand and soil from the sea, and tea plants. These simple, repetitive gestures of gathering fulfil the pure act of creation that a small child recognises so well: creating works of art from raw materials at our disposal without depending on the capitalist process that traps visual artists in a repetitive cycle of reinvention.
We live in a time when collective movement is difficult, costly and largely invisible. However, there are artists who counter these trends by reusing materials, performing alchemical processes and creating rituals, insisting on the repetition of the creative process.
The desire to create unique works of poetic authorship causes swollen fingers and dry skin from kneading clay with one’s hands. It is a creative and constructive gesture, but also a political one, in which the subversive side is a desire for a self-sufficient, independent and solitary way of life. The act of creating is also an act of caring for one’s ancestry.
Through the accumulation of basic resources, the artist creates abundance using alchemical processes that produce something new, making us question the original materials.
Like people, plants and ceramics (among other resources used by Patrícia Geraldes), they are in constant motion, crossing borders and traversing new paths to reach us, reborn from their previous abandonment, with a wonderful light.This journey and her return home allow for cultural cross-pollination and the infiltration of knowledge, creating a memory that persists beyond these journeys. The texture of the pieces recognises the hands that created them, revealing the geographies necessary for their conception, from Trás-os-Montes to Porto’s unique riverside landscape.
The apparent whiteness of the porcelain extending from top to bottom in the cave room is activated by a green light. This light aims to purify, but is in fact radioactive and strangles us in a green capitalism that surrounds and petrifies us.
These are works of raw art that do not seek to save us, but to provoke. In an exhibition where every small element is the product of Patrícia Geraldes’s hands, and where the invitation to reflect is inherent, let us allow ourselves to be flooded and deceived. Perhaps life within things will become a little more bearable.