What´s for dinner?
(2022)
What’s for dinner? looks at dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins beyond the human body, tracing how these chemicals shape behaviour across species — from optimism in starlings and social bonding in orcas to aggression in honeybees and hibernation in brown bears. Drawing on scientific diagrams and behavioural studies, the exhibition gives visual form to these microscopic processes, unsettling the idea that emotions such as hope, attachment or anticipation belong exclusively to us.
Against a culture increasingly invested in managing mood, productivity and ‘wellness’, these biological mechanisms become a way of questioning how much control we actually exercise over how we feel. Moving between scientific research, humour and speculation, What’s for dinner? approaches the pursuit of feeling better as a recurring biological loop: anticipation, reward, satisfaction, decline — and the inevitable desire for whatever comes next.
Location
Balcony Gallery, Lisbon
Dates
2022
Materials
Mixed fabric, acrylic resin, wool, wood
Curated by Luís Manuel Araújo
Shown during VIA Arts Prize in 2019
Best Foot Backward was conceived in response to the architecture of Sala Brasil at the Embassy of Brazil in London, a former P&O ticketing hall whose decorative programme retains maritime motifs and traces of its history as a space associated with travel and departure. Working with these existing elements rather than treating the gallery as a neutral container, the installation used textile, plaster and sculptural interventions to redirect the architecture, producing a spatial experience in which orientation, reflection and scale became deliberately unstable.
The title loosely echoes the Curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore whose backwards-facing feet are said to leave tracks that lead travellers in the wrong direction. Rather than illustrating the myth, the exhibition takes this gesture of misdirection as a structural device, connecting it to recurring concerns in the work around escapism, uncertainty and the construction of unreliable narratives. The space becomes both route and obstacle: familiar enough to navigate, but continually resisting a clear beginning, ending or direction.
