There is no future without relearning how to cultivate relationship...

This exhibition proposes a garden that does not confine itself to the white cube of the gallery, but extends across the city as an expanded field.

R. Gritto’s works are dispersed like seeds within a relational territory, activating a map–circuit of possibilities.

To see becomes to move.
To walk becomes to think.

The starting point is Serpente - Galeria de Arte Contemporânea, on Rua Miguel Bombarda — an artery where galleries, studios, and storefronts construct a singular cultural ecosystem. Here, the garden is a tension between inside and outside, between organism and technical device. The serpent becomes a metaphor of continuity: that which moves, connects, and never ends at a boundary.

From within the gallery, the map invites expansion. The route leads to the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal. There, the historic garden — designed as a contemplative landscape — becomes a counterpoint. The view over the Douro reminds us that every landscape is a cultural construction, as W. J. T. Mitchell taught us: to see is to frame.

The garden is not pure nature; it is mediation.

Continuing along the circuit, the visitor encounters the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis.

Inside the museum, tradition echoes Rosalind Krauss’s reflection on the “expanded field”: the work no longer belongs solely to the pedestal. It extends into territory, infiltrates the city, dissolves disciplinary boundaries.

A few minutes away, the grotto at Rua da Maternidade 86 emerges as an urban heterotopia—an unexpected interval within everyday flows. Here, Michel Foucault’s thought resonates: there are other spaces, fissures in the regular fabric of the city. The grotto is one of these places—a mineral womb, a geological fold, a subterranean garden.

The path also crosses the Jardim da Maternidade, where the idea acquires symbolic dimension. To generate, to care, to accompany growth—the garden as biopolitical and ecological metaphor. As Henri Lefebvre wrote, space is produced by the relations that traverse it. Each bench, each tree, each shadow is a social inscription.

Between these points, Rua Miguel Bombarda functions as a rhizome: an axis that connects, distributes, multiplies entries. The circuit is not linear. It is serpentine. The visitor chooses order, time, rhythm. Each trajectory creates a distinct exhibition.

R. Gritto’s works — dispersed, dialogical, interdependent — behave like organisms within an urban ecosystem. Some approach technology; others evoke raw, mineral, or vegetal matter.

All insist on a shared question: where does the natural end and the artificial begin?

Here, Timothy Morton echoes: there is no nature external to us. The expanded garden assumes this hybrid condition. Cables, roots, sensors, stones, light, breath — everything participates in the same field.

The map–circuit presented on this sheet is not merely a guide. It is a conceptual device. It proposes a spatial choreography where, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty might say, space is constituted through bodily experience. The visitor does not simply observe works; they activate relations.

TECHNORGANKRAFT 3 thus inscribes itself within a tradition that stretches from the first walled gardens of Mesopotamia to contemporary practices that intersect art, ecology, and technology. Yet it relocates that tradition within the urban present of Porto, where museum, garden, street, and grotto cease to be isolated categories.

Everything is field.

Everything is a potential garden.

Everything is relation under cultivation.

The future does not exist as abstract projection. It exists only in what we are capable of connecting, caring for, and transforming. And perhaps, by traversing this circuit, we may understand that the city is not the opposite of the garden. It is its critical extension.

For in the end, the conviction that guides this exhibition remains:

There is no future without relearning how to cultivate relationship.

—

Konsolidarte Internacional 2026 for Expanded Garden

R. Gritto

International Cooperation and Interdisciplinary Projects Consultant
PhD Junior Researcher in Urban Science at TRPP (Territory, Risk & Public Policy),
Universities of Coimbra (III-CES), Aveiro (DAO), and Lisbon (IGOT)
Junior Researcher at OSIRIS-CES – Centre for Social Studies

PhD Student 202411857, FBAUP
Intermedia Artist & Author, Archive R. Gritto Art & Science Studio
Founder of Konsolidarte Internacional Action
Regenerative Transformation for Culture & Education Programs