José De Guimarães International Arts Centre - CIAJG

In 1967, I left for Angola, on military duty, during the colonial war (...). When I was confronted with the realities of that new continent, the shockwave could not have been greater.

However, after the initial culture clash, a deep interest in this new culture surfaced, although so distant from my own, both in their ways of acting and concepts.(José de Guimarães)

José de Guimarães recounts the myths of our western culture like a child. Namely Portuguese culture, although he deviates them from their epic or tragic use.

Stories are proposed to us, converted into codes full of humour that invite us to think about the games of the world. The great stories are dead. There is no reason to mourn them. So thinks José de Guimarães or his paintings. From what is forever inaccessible or scattered, he keeps a sense of the stories whose fragments remained in our memory. 
(Eduardo Lourenço, philosopher)

Portuguese history takes on an iconoclastic and critical dimension in José de Guimarães' collection of reliquaries. These are limited and confined spaces, where José de Guimarães' experimental and devouring drive deposits rubbish and war trophies as if they were paintings.

Inspired by European and African devotional cults, the reliquaries contain a heterogeneous ensemble of objects, exposing the absurdity of war and the emptiness of conquests.

After completing the Carnide metro project (Lisbon), José de Guimarães incorporated neon into his work.

This element, with the vibrating and sensuous lines of its lighting design and the faerie-like appeal of mass culture, is integrated into the artist's vocabulary, highlighting its colours and forms, and used extensively in public art.

Unlike scientific or anthropology museums, the choice of objects in the CIAJG collection corresponds to José de Guimarães' sensibility as an "artist-collector" or "artist-ethnologist". These associations simultaneously elicit empathy and fetishism.

More than a heritage repository, subject to the immobility of historiographic catalogues, CIAJG seeks to establish cross and critical perspectives on its collection and make visible the links that were broken between objects, narratives and people.

One of its missions is to study the collections in the context of their communities and histories, situating them more broadly within the history of the circulation of ethnographic objects between Europe and Africa in general, and especially in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.