– 19.09.2021
Through a body of work that includes recent works presented for the first time in Portugal and a piece developed specifically for Medieval Bodies, Pedro Neves Marques traces a simultaneously emotional, reflexive, and speculative narrative on the gendering of bodies and science and on the construction of the natural-artificial binary. Intersecting strategies of autofiction with codes of soft science fiction, the exhibited works echo a set of issues that are central to contemporary thought, including queer reproduction and gestation, fears of artificiality, and fluidity between human and non-human bodies.
If in other works by Neves Marques the ecological question is essential, here the focus is placed on the fundamental violence that brings these problematics together and in which capital constructs, legitimates, and reproduces the nature vs. culture binary. This violence is transversal to their work, as it is felt directly in our bodies, shaping them, defining them, and simultaneously limiting and expanding them. It is this process, however, which also enables the imaginative development of parallel narratives about near futures that are practically indistinguishable from our present. Neves Marques is well aware of the critical possibilities and blind spots of science fiction, allowing them to talk about emotions, biology, reproduction, technology, and politics from both a biographical and a fictional point of view, producing an anthropology of futures already here in the present or soon to come and imagining and narrating divergent ways of being in the world.
– 19.09.2021