Knowledge lives beyond books and institutions. It also persists in bodies and everyday practices — in the food we share, in gestures and voices that carry memory. These informal or marginal transmissions circulate outside official circuits, surviving as practices of care, imagination, and collective remembrance. At the Convent — once a place of enclosure and discipline — a field now opens to experiment with these non-normative modes of knowledge. Here, abundance is measured not by accumulation but by bonds: what moves between species, what is preserved and transformed with time, what resists domestication, what lingers in detail and memory.

Such practices remind us that to learn and to teach is not only to reproduce institutional gestures, but to take part in collective, ecological, and imaginative movements. This station invites us to tune into knowledges that flow along the edges and to recognise in them the possibility of rehearsing other ways of living in common.

Works on display

Carlos Carreiro
Untitled (2011)
An important figure in Azorean contemporary art, Carreiro fuses surrealism, social critique, and irony in a dense and dreamlike visual language. In this work, he presents a chaotic and satirical universe where consumption, desire, religion, and nature intersect — a prophetic map of excess and collapse, where the cow emerges as a sacred, economic, and political symbol.

Catarina Branco
Endemic Forms #1 (2011); Luz Surprema (2011)
Catarina Branco works through the delicate gesture of cutting, evoking insular landscapes and botanical forms. In these pieces, paper becomes a sensitive geography, suggesting endemic and imaginary territories. A quiet, attentive, and meticulous work that invites contemplation and celebrates the abundance of almost invisible details.

Inês Coelho da Silva & Kita Rancaño Ward (New Commission, Selected artists – Open Call for Artists)
Gossip and the Commons (2025)
The artists reimagine gossip as a vital form of ecological communication and cultural transmission shared not only among humans, but across species. Working closely with the landscapes and multispecies communities of São Miguel, particularly the Holstein-Friesian cows, Kita and Inês explore gossip as a form of commons, acting as a carrier of local knowledge, regenerative practices, and interconnection.

João Arruda – Museu de Lagoa Collection (Arte Bonecreira, s.d.)
Bonecreira pieces, made of clay, evoke the everyday life and popular imagination of São Miguel. Human figures, animals, and objects of rural labor appear in a register between the playful and the ritual, preserving memories of community practices.

Mirna Bamieh
Sour Cords (2024–ongoing)
In her practice, Bamieh interweaves the politics of disappearance and memory production looking at food and personal history in relation to the collective. In this installation, traditionally fermented or dried ingredients are transformed into suspended objects of memory and care. A silent gesture of resistance, where time, transformation, and preservation intertwine as forms of abundance.

Uhura Bqueer & Soya The Cow (New Commission)
Dedomestication (2025)
Bringing together drag, queer cosmologies, and decolonial thought, the two artists propose dedomestication as a gesture of poetic and political liberation. Through performance and installation, they dismantle boundaries between species and explore the body as a territory of resistance, desire, and reinvention — between the pop cow and the sacred jaguar, between ritual and protest.