SHOW POSTPONED

Following the Direção-Geral da Saúde [Portuguese Public Health Authority] recommendations devised to contain the spread of the new Coronavirus (COVID-19), and according to the contingency plan in place, Culturgest informs it will be closed from January 15 until the end of the lockdown.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Gavin Bryars challenged the visual artist Juan Muñoz to collaborate in creating a series of pieces for the radio. The idea of creating a work with a sculptor for an exclusively sound-based medium gave rise to a number of stimulating conversations about the invisibility of the project and the potentialities of the listeners’ imagination when faced with something that is immaterial and linked to the description of actions. Ten pieces were created, each lasting five minutes, describing the manipulation of playing cards, with Muñoz narrating excerpts from the book The Expert at the Card Table — a kind of essential guide for illusionists and tricksters ever since its first publication in 1902 — while Bryars played a sinuous soundtrack that sensually embraced the words, the silences and the technical instructions of the Spanish artist’s voice, creating, in his description, an “imaginary space” – a soundtrack, according to the artist, for the nocturnal listener.

Marking the end of The Invisible Show, where the work has spent the last few months, we bring you the original version, composed solely for a string quartet, which will be played outside the galleries, where the Quarteto Lopes-Graça and the voice of Juan Munõz will bring life and substance to one of the rare concert performances of this musical piece.