Exhibition ‘Virgínio Moutinho - at the Architect's Workshop’ occupies various spaces in the block

Curated by Marco Ginoulhiac, the exhibition explores Moutinho's playful and inventive universe, crossing design, kinetic sculpture and urban art, with an emphasis on the workshop - a space for technical, manual and poetic experimentation. The exhibition features a wide range of works from handmade toys and automata to large-scale sculptures, grouped by conceptual and formal affinities, creating constellations of meaning between techniques, eras and languages.

 

The inaugural programme includes a guided tour, a screening of the film Virgínio Moutinho - Arquiteto em Movimento, a live performance and talks with guests such as Artur Santos Silva and Norma Pott. At the same time, Casa da Arquitectura is organising intergenerational workshops, meetings with the author and an international colloquium, delving into the themes and practices that mark Moutinho's work.

 

The exhibition invites the public to immerse themselves in a universe of free creativity and craftsmanship, where architecture combines with childhood, movement and wonder. A celebration of the pleasure of playing - with form, ideas and matter.

 

‘Still crazy after all these years’, Gino (Virgínio Moutinho) continues to make machines that are eager to play (eager for what, anywhere in us, is still capable of childhood). 

They are machines of erasure, made of poor, elementary things: wood, sheet metal, wire, air, movement. And, above all, of wonder. Childhood, too, was once made of the dazzling material of dreams. Now, of our dreams, papers remain on the floor, debris. And there remains, like an ancient gnome, Gino picking up our dreams from the ground. **

 

Virgínio Moutinho - Na Oficina do Arquitecto brings together a vast and eclectic collection of works created from the early 1980s until the eve of this exhibition. The pieces exhibited here do not belong to traditional architectural practice, but often start from there - or dialogue - to expand into the most diverse artistic universes, some of which are difficult to classify. Covering the multiple fields of the author's production, and without drawing boundaries between linguistic, thematic or technical territories or seeking a rigid organisation by typology or chronological sequence, this exhibition organises the pieces into neighbouring areas, grouped by formal, conceptual or material affinities. This arrangement makes it possible to show the constellations of meaning that connect very different pieces, even if they come from different eras or different languages. 

 

This variety reflects a deeply experimental activity, marked by compulsive production and a constant alternation of themes and techniques - as if organised in a continuous cycle of reinvention. The workshop - as a physical space, but also as a mental and poetic place - is at the centre of this practice. A functional but dirty and noisy place, Virgínio Moutinho's workshop has Renaissance roots, where art and craft merge with science and technology.  

 

Architecture, Virgínio's field of training, serves as a backdrop to his workshop work and provides him with his main creative tool - drawing - and, more broadly, the practice of representation as a method of analysis, invention and transformation. The permeable disciplinary boundaries of architecture allow for constant incursions and excursions to and from other fields, through processes contaminated by a necessary playfulness that manifests itself in the forms and movements, the materials selected and the themes evoked - often with irony and even sarcasm.

 

The exhibition offers a reading of Virgínio Moutinho's work that is accessible and understandable to a wide audience. Regardless of background or age, it is possible for everyone to understand the narratives explored by the author, from those closest to the ready-made (which are never a pure objet trouvé) to the most complex mechanisms - both intellectual and technological. 

It is in this sense that Virgínio Moutinho - Na Oficina do Arquitecto is an educational device: an invitation to rediscover the world from a new, primitive, unarmed perspective, free of formal or functional prejudices and the excess value proclaimed by an extremely intellectualised society. It will reactivate the sensory and affective memories of pleasures that have already been dulled. Youngsters will also have the chance to discover old-fashioned ways of building toys or reinventing everyday objects using simple gestures. In short, it's an opportunity to be amazed, because Virgínio Moutinho's work is, above all, close and accessible, by everyone and for everyone. Marco Ginoulhiac