Power Plants

The exhibition Power Plants by Portuguese artist Beatriz Manteigas grows out of the landscape in which she lives and works, around Albergaria-a-Velha in the Aveiro region, where eucalyptus monoculture covers roughly 80% of the territory and locals simply call it “the forest”. Pines grew here before the eucalyptus, but none of the people living today remembers an older forest. The heart of the installation is three silent videos on loop. The first shows a species-rich forest at Quinta das Relvas, where the artist lives and works. The second shows a nearby eucalyptus plantation. The third presents the “forest” of solar panels, the “power plants” of the title, which refers to the Portuguese government document Mapa Verde from June 2026. It designates areas suitable for solar and wind power plants and in Albergaria-a-Velha alone proposes almost 30% of the area for solar projects. The artist sees in this another chapter of the same story: after pine and eucalyptus comes a monoculture of metal panels, and the “energy transition” quietly turns into “energy expansion”. The videos are accompanied by a selection of older and newer works in various media, from ceramics through drawing to painting.

At the entrance to the gallery we encounter a precarious little house of cards made of porcelain. The work serves as a metaphor for power relations around the world. From the extensive exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of the planet to human rights and the rights of nature, the most important cards are held by only a few key players. They play with poker faces, and the fragile stability of our environment is increasingly disturbed. The porcelain cards themselves react to their environment and, as a result, warp or crack.

This instability is also evoked by a new work from a long-running series of thermoprints begun during an artist residency at Cycladic Arts (Paros, Greece, 2023). In this series Beatriz multiplies the famous sculptures of the Italian Baroque architect and artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini using a technique through which these classical symbols of Western culture disappear under the influence of light, symbolizing the inevitable power of nature over culture, which always ultimately overtakes all human creations. The columnar form is therefore also symbolically skewed.

The motif we chose for the exhibition is Apollo and Daphne (a sculpture created by Bernini in 1622–1625), a scene with a strong ecofeminist reading. The nymph Daphne is pursued by Apollo, who wants to rape her. In her despair she asks her father, a river god, to save her, and he transforms her into a laurel tree. Here, at the heart of Western culture, we can see a strong symbol of extractivist tendencies, in which, according to many activists and academics, nature is violated by human insatiability. Yet, and we must not forget this, the resources of our planet are not distributed evenly.

In the first room of the gallery we see works made during the artist’s travels around the world. As Beatriz explains, the series After the Storm was created in 2016 during a trip to Myanmar (formerly Burma), inspired both by George Orwell’s Animal Farm (Orwell served there as a colonial police officer during the British occupation) and by the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, first a political prisoner, then a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and finally a state counsellor. In this position her decisions proved hostile to minorities in the country and to freedom of expression, which enabled massacres and internal conflicts that ultimately led to her removal from office in 2021 by a military coup. The paintings depict storm clouds and leave open the question of whether the storm is clearing or gathering strength. Recently the series was stripped of its frames and reworked with new layers of oil paint and pastel. This revision was prompted by events in Venezuela and by the similarly contested Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Corina Machado. The series asks, very indirectly, about the ethical principles of our society and about who or which institutions can guarantee them.

Self-Portrait on the Amazon also reflects the sky, so that the artist’s face is paradoxically invisible. The almost golden colour of the sand and the brilliant blue on the figure may recall the icon of the Madonna, again a Western symbol, but here…