tt centralt tema är relationen mellan konst och ritual, där ritual inte ses som symbolisk representation utan som en verksam och transformativ praktik. Detta öppnar för en omprövning av hur kunskap uppstår genom kroppslig och situerad erfarenhet, snarare än genom distanserad observation. I installationen blir bild och ljud inte objekt att betrakta, utan ett rum att träda in i. Uppmärksamhet, perception och mening formas genom deltagande snarare än tolkning. I detta fält upplöses fasta roller mellan konstnär och publik, och verket tar form genom interaktion.

Projektet växer ur en långvarig forskningsprocess mellan Europa och Amazonas, där mötet med olika kunskapstraditioner används för att utmana västerländska uppdelningar mellan natur och kultur, subjekt och värld. Genom att föra samman konst, antropologi, filosofi och ursprungliga epistemologier undersöker verket hur olika sätt att veta kan samexistera utan att reduceras till varandra. Arbetet föreslår därmed en förståelse av transformation som något som inte representeras, utan som uppstår i själva relationen mellan de närvarande..

Om konstnären:

Rui Mourão är baserad i Lissabon, Portugal, och arbetar i gränslandet mellan videokonst och installation, performance, dans, skrivande och poetiska bildvärldar. Hans praktik kännetecknas av en sammanflätning av audiovisuell antropologi och samtida kritisk konst, där olika uttrycksformer möts och omförhandlas.

Han bedriver för närvarande doktorandstudier i konstnärlig forskning i Lissabon, efter tidigare studier i Barcelona och Malmö. Mourão har en påbyggnadsexamen i digital visuell kultur samt en masterexamen i antropologi, vilket präglar hans tvärdisciplinära arbetssätt.

Hans verk har visats internationellt på festivaler, utställningar och museer i 17 länder, och har tilldelats flera priser, bland annat vid FUSO i Lissabon och Make Art Not Fear (2022). Han har även deltagit i större evenemang som LOOP Barcelona och GIBCA Extended. Parallellt med sin konstnärliga praktik är han verksam inom forskning, skrivande och samarbeten, och arbetar som kulturförmedlare vid Nationalmuseet för teater och dans.

Aspekter som verket vidrör: 

Ett centralt tema är relationen mellan konst och ritual: kan ritual förstås inte som symbolisk representation, utan som en verksam praktik som faktiskt producerar effekter? Och hur kan samtidskonst närma sig detta utan att reproducera eller appropriera specifika kulturella uttryck? Vidare ifrågasätts upphov och struktur: vad innebär det att skapa ett verk utan fast form, där gränsen mellan konstnär och publik löses upp och där strukturen växer fram genom interaktion? Slutligen formuleras en etisk och kunskapsteoretisk fråga: hur kan man förhålla sig till icke-västerländska kunskapssystem—som de som möts i Amazonas—utan att reducera dem till modeller eller referenser, och istället låta dem utmana etablerade sätt att förstå världen?

Konstnärens webbplats: https://sites.google.com/view/ruimourao/en/
Projektets webbplats: https://walkingaspractice.org/rm/

Walking With: Presence, Entanglement, and Situated Planetarities as Methodology
By Anna Viola Hallberg, artist/curator

Introduction
Portuguese artist Rui Mourão and I have been walking with each other’s practices for more than a decade. What began as a professional relationship between curator and artist gradually became a friendship. Although our practices differ in both subject matter and formal articulation, they share a commitment to relational, processual, and embodied modes of inquiry. Our practices are entangled, yet they stem from situated positions.  

This text elaborates on Segredo do Artesão,  presented in Stockholm, Sweden (May 2026). I will begin with an introduction to where I am coming from, then unpack Mourão’s work and finally bring forward some synthesizing aspects in relation to knowledges presented as artworks within public contexts. Rather than treating theory as an external framework applied to practice, I understand theory here as something continuously generated through practice itself—through encounter, friction, duration, fatigue, trust, and situated exposure to others, materials, and institutions. The writing therefore moves between embodied description and conceptual reflection, refusing a strict separation between analytical distance and experiential proximity.

As a video installation artist, I work within an extended documentary practice rather than within the disciplinary framing of visual anthropology. My practice is not oriented toward the extraction or representation of cultural others but toward conditions of co-presence, relational constitution, and situated perception. Over time, this practice has moved away from earlier concerns with “in-betweenness,” including those shaped by my own geopolitical location, toward a focus on coexistence as a condition in which multiple temporalities, subjectivities, and positionalities do not resolve into synthesis but persist simultaneously, often in tension and sometimes in contradiction. This shift is also a shift away from identity as explanatory framework and toward relation as primary ontological condition. Emmanuel Levinas’s proposition that; responsibility is only fully understood when it includes responsibility for the responsibility of the other, remains foundational for my thinking. This introduces a recursive ethical structure that displaces simple reciprocity. Equally important is Hannah Arendt’s conception of human existence as fundamentally plural, relational, and political rather than autonomous or self-contained. Together, these positions shift attention from individual agency to relational constitution, from interiority to interdependence, and from identity to plurality as ontological condition.

My artistic practice has undergone several methodological shifts: from early video installations in which individuals often functioned as representatives of collective positions, to embodied video works that minimized or eliminated verbal language, and later toward walking as both an artistic and epistemic method. Walking here is not simply locomotion but a form of attentional redistribution—an embodied method of reading terrain, atmosphere, temporality, and relation as co-constituted fields. It is a practice of slowing down epistemic extraction in favor of situated perception. Across these shifts, one element has remained constant: trust. Trust between artist and participant, between camera and filmed subject, and between situated bodies within shared environments of attention, exposure, and vulnerability. Trust here is not affective surplus but methodological condition; it determines what can appear, persist, or be withheld.

Contemporary conditions marked by ecological collapse, authoritarian resurgence, epistemic fragmentation, digital acceleration, and intensified nationalism make questions of agency and relationality increasingly urgent. Rather than asking who possesses agency, I am interested in how agency is distributed, composed, and transformed through relations, infrastructures, environments, and historical formations. This shift challenges dominant assumptions of autonomy, mastery, possession, and epistemic sovereignty. My work instead foregrounds embodied, site-responsive, and relational practices in which knowledge is not extracted but co-produced. It resonates with Mourão’s engagement with Indigenous epistemologies and with my own experience of long-duration documentary processes in which meaning does not stabilize but shifts over time, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes abruptly. In such contexts, knowledge does not precede encounter but emerges through it, often retrospectively, and always partially.

A key formative influence was my collaboration with A. Karlsson Rixon (2005–2012) within the Beatrice Bain Research Group at UC Berkeley under the direction of Paola Bacchetta (2009). Bacchetta’s work on decolonial feminism demonstrated how power is co-constituted across intersecting axes of race, gender, nationalism, coloniality, and capitalism, and how these formations operate simultaneously at epistemic, institutional, and affective levels. Importantly, this work also emphasized that power is not located in one site but distributed across relational fields that include knowledge production itself. This period also coincided with my studies in museum theory, focusing on museums as global, political, and cultural institutions, where questions of representation, authority, classification, and institutional framing became central. Museums are not neutral containers but epistemic machines that organize visibility, value, and historical legibility.

This trajectory eventually led me toward practices positioned at the threshold between artist and curator. Within this space, I have worked with frameworks such as Critical Imagination and Radical Care as methodological and ethical orientations. It is within this broader field that “Walking With” emerges: not as a method for producing certainty or stabilizing knowledge, but as a commitment to remaining within relations and their inherent complexity over time. It is an invitation to inhabit uncertainty without resolution, and to understand knowledge as something generated through participation in a shared, uneven, and contested world that exceeds any individual position. “Walking With” aligns with new materialist and posthumanist thought, particularly Karen Barad’s concepts of diffraction and intra-action.

My engagement with Mourão’s practice began in 2016 through an artist residency I curated for Skövde Art Museum. This was followed by further projects exploring socially engaged artistic practices and public institutional contexts for Region Jönköpings län, both in Sweden. Across these encounters, Mourão’s work for these to contexts consistently destabilized distinctions between observer and observed, subject and object, documentation and performance, representation and participation, and even between fieldwork and exhibition space. When he returned to present Segredo do Artesão in Sweden, in May 2026 I deliberately chose a venue outside both conventional visual arts institutions and ethnographic frameworks. This curatorial decision was informed by a desire to situate the work within a field where perception, movement, sound, and relational intensity could operate without disciplinary containment or interpretative pre-definition.

Unpacking Segredo do ArtesãoWeld is an experimental and progressive institution in central Stockholm, Sweden, with a space designed primarily for choreographic and performance-based practices. Architecturally, the venue is defined by raw concrete walls, a black dance floor, and a highly refined acoustic environment. The black-box theater itself is located in a former boiler room approximately seven meters below ground, functioning as a progressive space for dance and performance. Upon arrival, visitors were welcomed by the curator and provided with practical instructions. The descent into the underground space functioned as a perceptual threshold, producing an atmospheric transition before entering the work itself. Once inside the theater, verbal communication ceased. No predetermined viewing positions were assigned. Mats and chairs were distributed through a minimal gesture, allowing visitors to negotiate their own spatial relation to the installation. This absence of fixed spectatorship displaced conventional frontal viewing and generated a fluid perceptual ecology in which experience became contingent upon movement, duration, bodily orientation, and proximity. The work unfolded through an entanglement of moving image, ritualized performance, environmental sound, autobiographical fragments, and geographically situated imagery drawn from Sweden and Amazonia. Oscillating between the intimate and the archetypal, it opened multiple interpretive trajectories shaped by each visitor’s own experiences, memories, and cultural assumptions.

Mourão performed continuously for approximately four hours, gradually entering what might be described as a trance-like or altered state. The performance did not unfold according to a fixed theatrical rhythm. Instead, its tempo shifted continuously in relation to the conditions emerging within the space itself. At moments, movement slowed almost toward stillness, while at others gestures intensified through repetition and duration. Tempo therefore emerged relationally rather than according to a predetermined structure. Time was not merely chronological but negotiated between performer, spectators, projections, sound, and space itself. These fluctuations can be understood not as autonomous expressive decisions authored solely by the performer but as responses to audience movement, acoustic reverberations, silence, exhaustion, bodily density, overlapping projections, and the unstable sensory atmosphere produced collectively through architecture, technology, and presence.

The installation was organized around eight simultaneous video projections: six projected from floor-based positions, one occupying the main wall, and one mobile projection traversing the space. With the exception of a projection looping the installation’s three chapters, the projections partially overlapped, producing perceptual interference rather than visual autonomy. The sonic environment shifted according to the chapter currently screened, continuously reorganizing relations between image, temporality, and immersion.

The projections on the side walls alternated between short video loops from Amazonia and Gnosjö/Skaraborg, while the central wall displayed the installation’s three dual-projection chapters. Approximately thirty minutes into the performance, the eighth mobile projection—showing the artist’s walking legs alongside a close-up of a keyhole—was introduced and handed to the performer almost ceremonially. For the remainder of the performance, the projection hovered near the corner adjacent to the central screen.

The performance ritual was concluded by the curator, who entered the space and approached the performer. Standing closely together, Mourão and I exchanged a prolonged gaze before embracing. Afterwards, a collective discussion circle formed involving the audience, the artist Rui Mourão, musicologist and artist Sue Carlson, documentary filmmaker Sven Blume, curator and art historian Bruno Marques, and myself as moderator lasting for one hour. Followed by an informal conversation in the loby and during this time those who wanted could return to the video installation.

Synthesizing Aspects
What emerged throughout the work was not a stable screening but a shifting field of relations in which perception unfolded through movement, duration, and attentiveness rather than through a singular point of focus. The presence of the artists with the performance ritual took away attention from the three video chapters in 16:9 format at the central wall and instead brought attention to the artist and the skewed projections he engaged with. There for I will not go into detail in unpacking the three dual projection but continue to address predominantly that which emerged at Weld where spectatorship as detached observation was displaced in favor of a mode of presence grounded in immersion, negotiation, and co-existence. Meaning remained contingent upon the relations established. In this sense, Segredo do Artesão did not simply present content to be interpreted. Rather, it generated conditions through which perception itself became the subject of inquiry.  The layered and skewed projections presented imagery of locations, buildings, nature, group of friends, the artist, a child, Huni Kuni community members, and cranes dancing in a mating ritual from Hornborgarsjön in Skaraborg. 

The installation transformed the exhibition space into a relational environment in which temporalities overlapped, distinctions between observer and participant became unstable, and knowledge emerged through situated encounters rather than predetermined meanings. What became meaningful was not the individual image or gesture but the relations generated among them. This was particularly evident in the interplay between duration, spatial immersion, and sensory instability. Rather than directing attention toward a singular visual center, Segredo do Artesão foregrounds the conditions of perception themselves. Echoes, shadows, vibrations, interruptions, overlaps, and temporal delays become constitutive rather than atmospheric. The installation invites entry into a durational and relational logic of experience in which knowledge remains partial, situated, and distributed. What emerges is not a relation between pre-existing entities but a process through which bodies, images, sounds, technologies, and spatial arrangements continually shape one another. Meaning and materiality emerge together through these entangled conditions. Mourão approaches these relations from the position of an artist who does not fully belong to any of these spheres, yet who has been entrusted to engage with them. The work therefore resists fixed identity categories and instead foregrounds situated but relational modes of existence. 

Here the complexity of the installation becomes particularly apparent. The boundary between what is present and what remains present through absence grows increasingly difficult to discern. This is not necessarily evident upon first encounter. It unfolds gradually through attention, duration, and perhaps most productively through shared acts of interpretation. One such complexity concerns forms of existence historically situated outside dominant structures of power. The work does not establish equivalence between the Huni Kuin of Amazonia and Indigenous Sámi communities in northern Sweden, nor does it address their distinct histories of colonial violence. Instead, the Swedish material is drawn from Småland and, more specifically, from Gnosjö, a town historically associated with Gnosjöandan—the so-called “spirit of Gnosjö”—characterized by decentralized small-scale industry, mutual cooperation, artisanal knowledge, and collective economic resilience. Emerging through dense local networks of labor, machinery, and vernacular forms of exchange, this social formation developed in relation to Lutheran work ethics, limited natural resources, craft traditions, and collaborative survival strategies. At the same time, contemporary critiques have highlighted its exclusions and the romanticization of rural labor cultures. Placed alongside Amazonian image-worlds, these materials open questions concerning land relations, labor, inheritance, vernacular cosmologies, and the authority through which subjects claim the right to govern others. Neither geography functions illustratively, nor is either granted epistemological primacy. Meaning emerges through coexistence, proximity, and the tensions generated between different histories and ways of knowing. The question remains  how does one read the installation/performance with out a pre-understanding of the reference points of the images? Is this important? Can the imagery in Mourãos work produce meaning and knowledges without referential context of the three video chapters. Perhaps the interplay between the performer and the imagery were archetypical enough to guide responses beyond cultural specificity and allow for attention on especially what presence suggests as a mode of knowledge.

What we know is that Segredo do Artesão resists interpretation as a stable object or self-contained artistic statement. Instead, it operates as a relational ecology in which bodies, sounds, projections, technologies, gestures, architecture, and spectators continuously co-produce one another. The installation does not merely represent entanglement; it materially performs it. Layered and misaligned projections destabilize one another rather than functioning as autonomous visual elements. The work remains in a constant state of transformation, producing a perceptual environment in which no single perspective can claim authority over the whole. Mourão’s simultaneous bodily presence within the projected material further complicates distinctions between documentation and immediacy, memory and presence, representation and enactment. The work asks how we might remain attentive to worlds we enter without claiming mastery over them; how artistic practice might create conditions for coexistence rather than resolution; and how knowledge might emerge through relation rather than possession. 

For me, the key to this form of knowledge production begins with trust: trust in the people with whom one works, in the time required for understanding to emerge, and in the possibility that knowledge is created not through distance but through proximity. Under contemporary conditions of ecological, political, and epistemic instability, such commitments are not merely aesthetic concerns but ethical and planetary ones. What is encountered is not a stable representation of reality but a situated effect of ongoing intra-action. The work renders perceptible how worlds are continuously co-produced through relations that remain dynamic and unfinished.

Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction and intra-action offers a productive framework for understanding the operation of Segredo do Artesão. Diffraction emphasizes patterns of difference produced through interference rather than reproduction of sameness, while intra-action challenges the assumption that entities pre-exist their relations. Instead, entities emerge through relations. From this perspective, meaning is not located in subjects or objects but in the relational field itself as an ongoing material-discursive process. Thus knowledge is not produced by a detached subject contemplating an external object but through participation within material-discursive processes of becoming. From this perspective, artworks such as Segredo do Artesão may be understood as diffractive fields rather than representational objects. A diffractive field is a relational configuration in which meaning emerges through the encounter of multiple entangled elements—bodies, technologies, spatial arrangements, temporalities, affects, and forms of attention. Rather than communicating predefined content, such a field produces conditions through which perception itself becomes generative.

Ethology enters this discussion in similarly important ways. Traditionally associated with the study of animal behavior, ethology has been reconfigured within posthumanist philosophy as the study of capacities, affects, and relations. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, shifted the emphasis from what bodies are to what bodies can do: how they affect and become affected, how they enter into assemblages, and how they acquire capacities through encounters. Such an approach moves away from fixed identity categories and toward an understanding of existence as fundamentally relational. This perspective resonates strongly with Mourão’s installation. The work does not primarily ask what it represents but what relations it produces, what affects circulate through it, and what capacities emerge within it. The installation functions less as an object of contemplation than as an environment of forces through which bodies negotiate sensory, affective, and material relations. Meaning is generated not through representation alone but through the dynamic interplay of perception, movement, and encounter. In this sense, the methodology of “Walking With”—which I would argue is also present within Mourão’s practice—constitutes a commitment to ongoing relation rather than definitive knowledge.

If we place this relational framework alongside Paola Bacchetta’s notion of situated planetarities and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s conception of the planetary, the work acquires an additional political and ethical dimension. Both thinkers challenge universalizing frameworks that erase difference while simultaneously rejecting narrowly bounded notions of identity and belonging. The planetary does not refer to a global sameness but to an awareness of shared yet asymmetrical conditions of existence. Situated planetarities foreground the fact that relations are always historically, materially, and politically located. Within this context, the position of the artist cannot be understood as one of neutral observation or cultural mediation from an abstract “in-between” space. Rather, it is a situated and constructed position from within relations themselves. Mourão’s engagement with Amazonia and Sweden does not seek synthesis or equivalence. Instead, it remains attentive to difference, contingency, and the ethical responsibilities that emerge through encounters across distinct histories and lifeworlds. What remains is therefore not a singular interpretation but an invitation: to remain with uncertainty, to stay attentive to complexity, and to recognize that meaning, like responsibility, emerges through our entanglements with others.

This perspective is politically significant because authoritarian and colonial systems depend upon rigid separations: self and other, citizen and foreigner, human and nonhuman, culture and nature, subject and object. Such distinctions sustain extractive economies, border regimes, and exclusionary forms of belonging. Relational and intra-active approaches, by contrast, foreground interdependence, vulnerability, and shared material conditions. They insist that existence is always constituted through relations and that no position exists outside the worlds in which it participates. At a moment when reactionary politics increasingly seek to reinforce borders, hierarchies, and systems of domination, artistic practices that render entanglement perceptible assume particular importance. Mourão’s work challenges not only aesthetic conventions but also the ontological assumptions that continue to underpin colonial modernity. By foregrounding relationality without erasing difference, the installation invites us to consider how knowledge, responsibility, and coexistence might be reimagined under contemporary planetary conditions.

Conclusion
Works developed within artistic research and adjacent environments constitute one important condition through which such alternative forms of knowledge production can emerge and sustain themselves over time. Artistic research connected to doctoral programs often enables forms of inquiry that exceed the temporal and economic constraints of exhibition-driven cultural production. These environments create space for methodological experimentation, durational investigation, situated reflection, and the development of practices that do not necessarily conform to immediate demands for visibility, circulation, or institutional legibility. In this sense, artistic research can function as a site through which embodied, relational, and materially situated knowledges are articulated, tested, and revisited outside the accelerated logics of contemporary cultural economies. At the same time, responsibility for sustaining such practices cannot remain confined to academic infrastructures alone. Foundations, museums, and publicly funded cultural institutions must also assume an active role in supporting long-term artistic inquiry. Such support becomes particularly important at a moment when artistic labor is increasingly precarious and cultural programming is frequently governed by metrics of audience consumption, rapid circulation, and event-based visibility. On that note I had the privilege of engaging in extended and venerable conversations with the art historian and curator Bruno Marques during the preparation and installation of  Segredo do Artesão. These exchanges were characterized by careful listening, intellectual generosity, and a willingness to enter vulnerable positions of inquiry. Perhaps the three of us will engage in future collaborations and continued dialogue.

Viewed through the broader framework, Segredo do Artesão invites us to imagine institutions—and futures—organized not around possession, separation, and hierarchy, but around relation, co-constitution, and collective responsibility within a shared planetary condition. Through a Baradian lens, intra-action is understood not as agency belonging to an autonomous subject but as a dynamic process through which bodies, materials, technologies, histories, and environments continuously affect and constitute one another. Agency is not possessed but enacted relationally. Matter itself becomes active, responsive, and co-constitutive. Such a framework simultaneously challenges classical notions of objectivity by recognizing that apparatuses—whether technological, architectural, conceptual, or sensory—are not neutral instruments observing reality from the outside but active participants in the production of phenomena. To engage with Mourão’s work is not simply to interpret an artwork but to participate in an event of becoming—or, more precisely, co-becoming. The installation foregrounds the fact that we are never detached observers standing outside the worlds we seek to understand. We are always already implicated in the phenomena we encounter. This may be one of the most profound implications of Barad’s concept of intra-action, and one that Mourão’s practice articulates with particular clarity: reality is not composed of separate entities interacting from a distance but of entangled processes through which bodies, technologies, materials, histories, and meanings continuously emerge together.

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Note: Text was presented as a video appearance. introduction and first chapter in by the author in English then the the remaining text was read in Portuguese by Rui Mourão..

Caminhar com: Presença, entrelaçamento e planetaridades situadas como metodologia
Por Anna Viola Hallberg, artista/curadora

text to be added in Po

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Note: Text was presented as a video appearance. introduction and first chapter in by the author in English then the the remaining text was read in Portuguese by Rui Mourão..