There is no future without relearning how to cultivate relationships…

This exhibition proposes a garden that does not end within the white cube of the gallery but extends throughout the city as an expanded field.

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

Seeing becomes moving.
Walking becomes thinking.

The starting point is Serpente – Contemporary Art Gallery, on Rua Miguel Bombarda, an artery where galleries, studios, and shop windows construct a singular cultural ecosystem. Here, the garden becomes a tension between interior and exterior, between organism and technical device. The serpent is a metaphor of continuity: that which moves, connects, and never truly ends at a border.

From inside the gallery, the map invites expansion. The path leads toward the **Gardens of 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.

Following the circuit, the visitor encounters the National Museum 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 appears as an urban heterotopia, an unexpected interval within everyday flows. Here, Michel Foucault’s thought resonates: there exist other spaces, fissures within the regular fabric of the city. The grotto is one of those places — a mineral womb, a geological fold, an underground garden.

The route also crosses the Jardim da Maternidade, where the idea gains symbolic dimension. To generate, to care, to accompany growth — the garden as a 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, and multiplies entrances. The circuit is not linear. It is serpentine. Visitors choose the order, the time, the rhythm. Each path creates a different exhibition.

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

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 relationships.

TECHNORGANKRAFT 3 thus inscribes itself in a tradition that extends from the first walled gardens of Mesopotamia to contemporary practices that intersect art, ecology, and technology. Yet it shifts this lineage into the present urban context of Porto, where museum, garden, street, and grotto cease to be isolated categories.

Everything is field.

Everything is a potential garden.

Everything is a relationship under cultivation.

There is no future as an abstract projection. There is only what we are capable of connecting, caring for, and transforming. And perhaps, by walking this circuit, we may understand that the city is not the opposite of the garden. It is its critical continuation.

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

There is no future without relearning how to cultivate relationships.

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Konsolidarte Internacional 2026 – for the Expanded Garden


R. Gritto

Consultant in International Cooperation
and Interdisciplinary Projects
PhD Junior Researcher in Urban Science at
TRPP (Territory, Risk & Public Policy)
Universities of Coimbra – III-CES / Aveiro – DAO / 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