The launch of the publication Matos em Festa 2022 marks and celebrates the 10 years of existence of this project, in an edition that brings together an archive of images and plastic interventions of the last edition of this independent event, which took place at Cais da Ribeira de Ovar, curated by the artists Xavier Almeida, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Afonso Marmelo, Inês Tartaruga Água and Xavier Paes, in collaboration with Associação Cenário. The book includes photographic records of the artistic proposals that composed the programme in dialogue with the surrounding spaces, as well as moments linked to the processes of assembly and production of the event, in a compilation of over 200 images taken by the authors of the project.
Matos em Festa is a project of cultural dynamization, with a program that aims the multidisciplinary crossing, experimentation, and the trans-generational meeting, in dialogue with the specificities of the territory of Ovar, where it covers a plurality of actions such as exhibition of visual arts, concerts, performances, stalls of independent editions, conversation and film cycles, and that has with this edition a kind of milestone of 10 years of the project’s existence.
The artistic collective Estrela Decadente territorializes the centre of Lisbon since 2016 with artistic practices inscribed by independent culture, self-organization and activism. The artistic locations of the collective seek divergence with the homogeneous and financialized city, they constitute a medial apparatus marked by the urban aesthetics of do it yourself and lo-fi, raising for that reason a provisional and underground topography. Their coordinates are bunker-spaces and their lexicon is warlike and communitarian. They are temporary locations and difficult to access, but which are pronounced with occasional calls to their communal participation. They circulate in specific spaces of cultural and political associativism, and signal their own territory bringing together street art strategies such as posters and bombing, with periodic independent publications that keep up to date with the artistic, cultural and political issues underway in society. Ensemble Decadente is the sound exploration section.
– Rita Barreira
haxix
A collective formed by multidisciplinary artists Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Afonso Marmelo, Xavier Paes, Inês Tartaruga Água and Xavier Almeida. Founded from a happening at the 2022 edition of Matos em Festa, haxix is a hypnotic bass line distorted by sound exploration and free improvisation. Their musical experimentalism is guided by the diy punk ethic.
Ändlös Otukt
Black-noise-deconstructed solo project created in 2017. Using melodic walls of noise and pulsating, calculated beats, Ändlös Otukt will explore genres such as atmospheric black metal, noisegaze and industrial, trying as main goal to create dark and unsettling soundscapes. Besides their nihilistic instrumental aesthetics, this project also ends up exploring the story of female serial killers as the main theme of their concept albums, having already released two, in 2019 and 2020
Danger Zone
DJ collective hailing from the infamous Regedoura neighbourhood in Válega, also known as Zona Perigosa. So they are to the dancefloors as their neighbourhood is to the world.
Astrea
Tata Seixo Garrucho’s nom de guerre for her artistic side. The DJ and producer from Mira and resident in Lisbon released her debut mixtape Saudade Não Se Sente, Evita-se. She participated in the PosCarbon Collective compilation with the track “Hybrid Core” and also in an EP of remixes by the Arcana collective.
Garrucho also has the independent label Mãe Solteira Records, co-founded with Kássia Laureano, a label that aims to promote and empower female and LGBTQIA artists, thus joining a flourishing of initiatives that seek to put the representativeness of sexual and gender minorities on the cultural map of the Portuguese capital.
