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
To Fill in a Gap, To Plug in a Hole or How to Postpone an Imminent Problem begins with a fabricated premise: that a 3.9 km tunnel once connected MUDAS.MACM and Galeria dos Prazeres, with the wood-fired ovens found in both spaces presented as its surviving entrances. Textile panels and sculptural elements extend this fiction, treating an unverified narrative as if it were archaeological fact and testing how easily absence can be filled by a convincing structure.
The sculptures are made from wood marked by disease, its damaged surfaces concealed while the material continues to change internally. This tension between appearance and instability runs throughout the exhibition, where repair, omission and fabrication become ways of negotiating what cannot be fully resolved. By collapsing real and invented histories, the work asks when filling a gap becomes a necessary act of connection, and when it becomes a way of postponing a problem that remains unresolved beneath the surface.
