MANY: Lisbon Calling

Last month, following a successful rebranding and the introduction of a new projects programme, MANY Studios sent a troupe of artists and designers to Portugal to participate in Guimarães Noc Noc, an annual arts festival that takes over the streets, cafés, flats and alternative spaces in the vibrant city of Guimarães.

Each year the curators champion artists from another country, and – thanks to a fateful meeting between Dele Adeyemo (Innovation Director at MANY) and Jorge Matos (one of the festival’s directors) on the sunny shores of Lisbon – this year it was Scotland's turn. MANY selected a cohort of fresh Scottish talent including Gordon Douglas, Phoebe Amis, Conor Baird and Hardwear Glasgow, and shipped them off to warmer climes to represent, and make a name for, our creative little jewel of a country alongside hundreds of other performers, painters, photographers, illustrators, video artists and musicians.

The crowning of Guimarães as European City of Culture 2012 informed the collaborative work presented by Gordon Douglas and Phoebe Amis. Their performance in the historic main square of the city responded to the challenges of creating a cultural identity for a city as a whole and reflected on their own roles in this as cultural tourists, invited to undertake the bewildering task of offering up some diagnostic dialogue. Drawings of cultural icons, gathered throughout their week-long residency in the city, appeared on 26 cut-out shields representing an alternative alphabet that Douglas and Amis taught to their audience as plates smashed and pace accelerated, to the pleasure of coffee-sipping onlookers.

Conor Baird also presented a performance work, split into two parts. The first was a cathartic two-hour piece in which he used strings to slowly shed 20 pieces of underwear from his body, each separated by a layer of pink powder that dispersed across the floor of a pristine gallery space in the Extensão do Museu Alberto Sampaio. For the second – this time staged in a small bedroom within his Guimarães guesthouse – he again cast off the 20 smalls to a recorded audio piece recounting virtual romances, in a more stripped-back, intimate version of the first.

Meanwhile, Hardwear Glasgow were hard at work designing and creating the signage for the festival’s 66 venues. After a long discussion process spanning three countries, the final signs were completed on-site in rhythmic patterns inspired by kites, sponge marking and a Portuguese king.

Now back on home soil, they’re all straight back to work on their next projects. Baird and Douglas recently participated in the first of The Pipe Factory’s Performance Nights. We saw a 20-second sketch from Douglas in which, reclining on an imaginary chaise-longue, he indulged the audience in a recent dream where he was simultaneously both Chandler AND Monica. Baird’s was a heart- wrenching, nail-biting ritual whose outcome was a Victoriana-style lock of body hair gifted to (and hesitantly accepted by) each audience member.

Baird is now developing ideas for his RSA New Contemporaries show in February, with other performances on the horizon, while Hardwear are gearing up for a fashion show and a new line of clothing that riffs on their bespoke festival print. Douglas is pursuing further collaborations and is orchestrating an ongoing project entitled ‘Gordon’s House’ in which he invites artist couples to use his living room as a platform to generate discussion on the meaning of shared identity. MANY hope to continue their exchange with Guimarães Noc Noc by inviting the organisers to Glasgow sometime next year, as well as supporting a new generation of artists by returning to Portugal for the 2014 festival.