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
There is a Gorilla on Mars takes as its starting point a widely circulated image from NASA’s Spirit rover in which a small rock formation was read as the figure of a gorilla. The image became convincing precisely through its poor quality: magnification, compression and distance stripped the object of definition, allowing perception to fill in what the image could no longer clearly describe.
The work extends this logic through found digital images, isolating and enlarging fragments until their original subjects become unstable or abstract. These fragments are then translated back into drawings and sculptures, moving from object to image and back to object again. Rather than reconstructing a lost original, the process produces a new one: a physical form generated through error, projection and misrecognition. The work approaches looking as an almost forensic act — searching images for clues, building narratives from incomplete evidence, and testing the point at which perception slips between recognition and invention.