Belmonte Cultural Club
Workshops / Artists Residence / Conferences / ProjectsOur Club
Located in Palácio Belmonte’s front patio, where millions of tourist cross through every year for the connection it’s location establishes between the S.Jorge Castle entrance and the Alfama bairro, you find the most exquisite and unique corner, a cafe and restaurant emerged within a cultural concept where you find music, contemporary art and history.
Here you’ll be invited to events and happenings that will lead you to a sensorial awareness, magical experiences among art, nature and an urban/historical character, as the Cultural Club seeks to share timeless approaches from authors that underline simplicity and pure existence through unimaginable perspectives and creations.
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Timeline of Events 2019>2016
“As a light snow keeps falling” book launch
2019.01.27 / by Howard Altmann
Lightcraft Festival 2019 / “Bez tytulu”
2019.01.25 > 2019.03.31 / by Joachim Slugocki
Lightcraft Festival 2019 / “Spectral”
2019.01.25 > 2019.03.31 / by Katarzyna Malejka
You do not belong to this world
2018.10.11 > 2018.12.11 / by Zoya Mohajeri Aval
Lightcraft Festival 2017 / Daydream
2017.08.03 > 2017.12.31 / by Gisoo Kim
Lightcraft Festival 2017 / Alchemy of a Day
2017.07.16 > 2017.12.31 / by Anita Ackermann
Lightcraft Festival 2017 / Wings
2017.01.10 / by Jana Matejkova-Middleton and Rory Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2017 / Outside over There
2017.01.10 / by Jana Matejkova-Middleton and Rory Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2017 / Night Rider
2017.01.10 / by Jana Matejkova-Middleton and Rory Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2016 / His Silent Dance (permanent installation)
2016.12.15 / by Rory Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2016 / Her Silent Sonata (permanent installation)
2016.12.15 / by Jana Matejkova-Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2016 / Cut by Light (permanent installation)
2016.07.15 / by Jana Matejkova-Middleton and Rory Middleton
Lightcraft Festival 2016 / Antiego Mirror (permanent installation)
2016.07.15 / by Alessandro Lupi
Lightcraft Festival 2016 / Things to Come
2016.07.01 / by Stefan Kornacki
Timeline of Events 2015>2011
Two from Many
2015.06.28 / by Marja des Vries & Simon James Phillips
Jutta Matthess Exhibition
2015.06.15 > 2015.09.15 / by Jutta Matthess
Idea of South
2014.12.14 / by Simon James Phillips
Pavilion
2014.07.04 > 2014.10.04 / by Camila Cañeque
Insectology
2014.01.10 > 2014.01.31 / by Sebastião Lobo and Daniela Padilla
Jaap Borgers Exhibition
2013.11.15 > 2013.12.15 / by Jaap Borgers
Pierre Pratt Exhibition
2012.02.02 > 2012.02.08 / by Pierre Pratt
Leila Photo Competition
From September 2011 to December 2015
Clarear as Nuvens Densas Acumuladas
2011.11.30 > 2011.10.31 / by Maria Pia de Oliveira
Elisha Abas Live Performance
2011.07.20 / by Elisha Abas
Soundwalk Live Performance
2011.06.03 / by Soundwalk Collective
As a Light Snow keeps falling
About the Event
Theme: Book launch
Date: January 27th 2019
Author: Howard Altmann
Location: Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe [at Palácio Belmonte]
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ events@palaciobelmonte.com
About the Artist
Howard Altmann lives in New York City but he was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where he graduated from McGill University. He received his MBA from Stanford University and worked as senior vice president of a real estate investment company. He has taught poetry at a women’s prison in Manhattan, and he has written children’s stories and plays. He is the author ofThe Johnsons and The Thompsons, which was published by Playscripts, Inc., in 2008. Poems fromIn This House have appeared inPoetry,Ploughshares,New England Review, andOpen City.
“Howard Altmann interrogates the sky, the light, the world, about their intentions. If he seldom finds reassuring answers, he finds something better: ‘When all that consoled consoles no longer / loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows.’ These poems are as essential as a glass of water.” – John Ashbery
“Though not exactly a nature poet, Howard Altmann is a poet of his own mysterious kingdom, ‘a house’ in which he has built a house, whose walls are open to the inspiration of air. (‘Frightened of the next life / being exactly like this life / he asked to be a bird’ or ‘Let it not be words / you reach for you say – / where the trees stand / far from men’). To have discovered this kingdom and inhabited it (like Keats’ Imagination, as monk to monastery) – to have found words for what isnearlyunsayable – is a measure of this poet’s uncanny transformational gift. Enter the house of these poems and stay on, a grateful tenant in this remarkable state of wonder.” – Carol Muske-Dukes
“Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines – ‘you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ‘ Without a trace of rhetoric,In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It’s a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.” – Dennis Nurkse
You do not belong to this world…
About the Event
Date: October 11th to December 11th 2018
Artist: Zoya Mohajeri Aval
Location: The Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe [at Palácio Belmonte]
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ events@palaciobelmonte.com
About the Artist
Born in 1974 in a western province of Iran. Zoya started studying art in Cube Atelye in 1992.
She studied fine arts at Art and Architecture Azad University in Terhran. And graduated with a Master degree in 2001.
She presented herself as a painter with “ The movement of order in disorder” collection and interviewed with over 30 prominent Iranian painters in her bachelor book.
Later started studying and touching the poetry of paintings. Therefore, the thesis as a post graduate came out as” A painter a poet”. And it was when for the first time, she tried painting on black papers.,,,,,,,,,,,,,
As an artist, Zoya became a permanent member of the Association of Iranian painters in 2000, worked in the Board Management for 4 years, and had three solo exhibitions and fifteen group exhibitions, between 2000 and 2009, in Iran and abroad.
She then moved to Sweden to study Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Umea, feeling “pulled” to southwest Europe later in 2011, as Zoya felt more a more in touch with her art as she started to settle in Portugal.
“I am only a painter, and I have nothing more to tell you. But you tell me if you have something to tell me. Tell me, you might open a door.” Zoya Mohajeri Aval
Two from Many
About the Event
Date: Presenting June 28th
Location: The Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe [at Palácio Belmonte]
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
About Marja de Vries:
www.vriesfilm.com
About Simon James Phillips:
www.simonjamesphillips.com
“The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience”. – Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Perhaps the most elusive quality of a place such as Palácio Belmonte is the cumulative human experience that it holds. Its walls have borne witness to the experience of countless visitors for two millennia, as surely and secretively as a trusted and loyal friend – cradling them close to its chest, as the wisest and caring of parents. Tradesmen and women, nobility, travellers, poets, artists, children – all full of love, joy, sadness, wonder, frustration and the full spectrum of the human condition. Visitors of all ages, from all corners of the world and since many hundreds of years leave a residue of their individual experience that lingers, carefully hidden. This is the part of this wonderful palace that is perhaps the most elusive, although its most worthy, gift to each visitor.
Marja de Vries, a Dutch filmmaker, and Simon James Phillips, an Australian musician/composer living in Berlin, met as a result of the initiative of Frederic Coustols – the current custodian of the palace. Marja and Simon, using their respective mediums, have together created an impression of their own experience of time and of place. Impressions by two of the many visitors to the extraordinary Palácio Belmonte.
Jutta Matthess Exhibition
About the Event
Date: Opened since June 15th 2015
Location: The Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe [at Palácio Belmonte]
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
About the Artist
Jutta Matthness spent part of her youth on an island in Lake of Constance.
Always amazed by the beauty of her surroundings, she started to take pictures at the age of 14 and visited later a photografic school in Berlin.
1963 she went to Paris at a time, where it was still difficult to get a work permit.
She was very attracted by the originality of people and their surroundings. That was something she was not so used to see in Berlin and so she took photos of the Flee Market, Les Halles, Montmartres, the Pantheon, the Quartier Latin the way it looked those days.
Jutta Matthess is very happy to share these views with the kind people of Lisboa.
Idea of South
About the Event
Date: December 14th 2014
Schedule: 7pm
Location: Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Simon James Phillips
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts
Sponsors: CML-Agenda Cultural de Lisboa, Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
THE IDEA OF SOUTH is a performance of live improvised solo piano by Simon James Phillips alongside the Frank Hurley film SOUTH (1916), which is a chronicle of Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic. 2014 marks the centenary of the beginning of the expedition.
The story of Shackleton’s attempt to cross Antarctica is awe inspiring. I often think about the extreme characteristics of the Antarctic – its vastness, isolation, climate, and in particular the behaviour of the ice and land itself. To travel there in 1914, and to be marooned for two years, with very primitive technology (by our standards) to me is almost unimaginable. The film SOUTH itself seems to me to portray very modestly the struggle that these men must have undergone.
I get almost no hint of the fear, loneliness, and absolute isolation they must have experienced. I particularly miss a sense of time – I wonder how it must have felt to be stuck for months on end in the endless cold and endless white of that land. Whilst practicing with the film for the first performance, I also found myself thinking of the incredibly slow but immense movement and energy of the Antarctic.
“Although I do not intend to accompany the film as such, I chose to work with SOUTH because I believe that my aesthetic can provide the sense of time, isolation and the struggle (both in internal and external) that the film only hints at.”
About the Artist
Simon is a Berlin based pianist from Australia – he trained as a classical pianist in Australia and Sweden but now works primarily as an experimental improvising pianist.
Musically, he constructs an open sonic atmosphere that provides the audience with time to reflect upon and explore the sound. By controlling the pace of a piece’s development, his intention is to affect the perception of time through music. Simon is influenced by electronic music, and is particularly interested in trying to replicate the mechanical and repetitive sounds that surround us. He is also attracted to the tension between trying to recreate inorganic sound with the piano and the limitations of the instrument and his own physical mechanism.
Insectology
About the Event
Date: January 10th – January 31st 2014
Schedule: 10am – 20pm
Location: The Belmonte Cultural Club Art Room
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Sebastião Lobo + Daniela Padilla
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners/Sponsors: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts, Ar.Co
Parecem vir de um passado tão distante quanto a origem do Universo. Reproduzem-se no interior da terra e irrompem num frenesim voraz por vida. Desenham trilhos que não são mais que linhas de memória.
Essa fome de insecto contaminou os artistas que, inteligentemente, a saciaram na criação. Como ilusionistas, escapam-se por delicadas frinchas do saber e manipularam os materiais que deixam impressões na nossa sensibilidade.
About the Artists
Sebastião Lobo é um artista joalheiro Português de vinte anos, que desde os dezasseis já deu nome a mais de trinta peças únicas, em cinco colecções temáticas. Entre a realidade e a fantasia.o seu atelier é um ser vivo, respirando imaginação sem limites.
Daniela Padilla, de vinte e seis anos mostra-nos momentos de profunda inspiração que não se contiveram sob a pele da artista. Intimamente, dissolveram-se no seu sangue e inflamaram o imaginário. Perscrutando as emoções fundiram-se com a sua feminilidade e materializaram-se em páginas que gritavam por vida.
Jaap Borgers Exhibition
About the Event
Date: November 15th – December 15th 2013
Schedule: 10am – 20pm
Location: Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Jaap Borgers
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts
Sponsors: CML-Agenda Cultural de Lisboa, Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
For twenty days, starting november 15th you can visit the exhibition of Dutch artist Jaap Borgers, at the Cultural Club of Palácio Belmonte at Páteo Dom Fradique, 14 in the city of Lisbon.
In april this year Borgers was on holiday in the city, walking down the hill from the Castelo and decided to have a drink at a lovely little terrace next to the ancient walls of this tourist attraction. There was a curious cloud hanging in the yard, made of rusty steel wool, that caught his attention. Inside the café adjoining the terrace he found a whole collection of art displayed and was introduced to the owners of the place Frederic Coustols and his wife Maria Mendonca, also an artist.
Borgers had seen a variety of Lisbon’s art treasures at Museu do Chiado, Gulbenkian, Colecão Berardo, Palácio Pombal, Casa da Achada and several art galleries and artists workshops, and he became convinced that Portuguese people have a warm heart towards art, so he pronounced his wish to be able one day to show his own work to these art lovers. That is when Frederic and Maria offered him the possibility to have this exhibition at the Cultural Club of Palácio Belmonte.
Recent exhibitions where Jaap Borgers’ works were shown, were held at Chateau de Sully in France, Kulturhuset Brønden in Denmark, Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, the Netherlands and at ABC-Treehouse in Amsterdam. The work you will see consists of sculptural pieces, drawings and an installation. You are very welcome to come and see Jaap’s vision on live in it’s many aspects.
About the Artist
Jaap Borgers (Netherlands 1947) was educated in the 60’s and 70’s as a painter, sculptor and glasblower at the Art Academy in Utrecht and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Denmark and England.
Lately his work is getting more conceptual.
After meeting his wife, Pike Räsänen, Finnish ceramist, he got in touch with the Japanese firing method ‘Raku’. This finally resulted in sculptures constructed with thin Raku fired clay-slabs and glazes with metal effects. In his work he integrates imprints of portraits. At the moment he combines this way of working in clay, with parts of old, rusty iron. They depict the metamorphoses of life, caused by time.
Besides his work as an artist he is very proactive in his community. He managed a cultural centre and organized for the last fifteen years an Art-Biennale in which over a hundred artists of all disciplines participate. There he also has a platform to make installations and performances in coöperation with other artists, like for instance a performance with 20 actors and dancers and a windmill or a live concert for 6 motorcars and a Harley Davidson. Also several installations based on the rusty carcass of a Citroën DS, once the symbol of modern design and man’s technical achievements, now an object slowly changing in form and colour.
Recent exhibitions where Jaap Borgers’ work was shown, were held at Chateau de Sully in Burgondy France, Kulturhuset Brønden in Copenhagen Denmark, Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen the Netherlands and at the gallery of the American Book Center in Amsterdam.
Pierre Pratt Exhibition
About the Event
Date: February 2nd – February 8th 2012
Schedule: 10am – 5pm
Location: Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Pierre Pratt
Title: Paisagens de Lisboa: Os Postais que Não Enviei
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts
Sponsors: CML-Agenda Cultural de Lisboa, Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
About the Artist
Being born in 1962 isn’t easy, but that’s exactly what Pierre Pratt did, on a February 8th. Little by little, he began to grow. Like any growing artist, he drew the objects around him, the people he met, in the quiet atmosphere of his little room, his face a mask of perfect concentration. He still retains that expression. He studied graphic design at Ahuntsic College in Montreal. At the beginning of the 1980s, he began drawing small comic strips. Then he turned to illustration. He did his apprenticeship with several different magazines in Quebec. Since 1990, he has been illustrating (and also writing) books for children, some 50 by now. He has won several prizes, including the Governor-General’s Award of Canada three times, a Golden Apple and a Golden Platein Bratislava, a Totem at the Montreuil Salon du Livre in France, a UNICEF Prize in Bologna, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, the Elizabeth Cleaver Prize, the Mr. Christie Book Award, and the TD Children’s Literature Award. In 2008 he represented Canada for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award.
Leila Photo Competition
About the Competition
After hosting the “Maria Pia de Oliveira Exhibition” in September/October 2011, The Belmonte Cultural Club launched the “Leila Photographic Competition”, inviting all those who pass through the Belmonte’s front patio to take a creative picture of the “Leila” iron cloud sculpture.
To participate, all you have to do is take a picture at or with the sculpture and either post it directly on Palácio Belmonte’s Facebook and/or Instagramaccounts, or just tag us after adding them to your personal account. Palácio Belmonte will be sure to see it and feature it as well as to communicate the winner at the beginning of each year.
As the winning prize, winners will have the pleasure to stay 2 nights in one of Palácio Belmonte suites, under the Belmonte’s availability.
To know more about the competition and/or other events that take place at The Belmonte Cultural Club, contact us at office@palaciobelmonte.com or +351 218816600.
Competition Winners
2015 _ Johnathan Gustafson [from Chicago]
2014 _ Monica Changer Grossi [from Rome/Cagliari]
2013 _ Marc Vaz [from Rio de Janeiro]
2012 _ Takashi Utamaro [from Osaka]
2011 _ Alice Jovovich [from London]
Clarear as Nuvens Densas Acumuladas
About the Event
Date: September 30th – October 31st 2011
Schedule: 10am – 20pm
Location: Palácio Belmonte
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Maria Pia de Oliveira
Co-Artist/Author: Isabel Caldeira
Title: Clarear as Nuvens Densas Acumuladas
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts, RH Positivo
Sponsors: CML-Agenda Cultural de Lisboa, Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
About the Artist
Born and currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, Maria Pia studied Plastic Arts at Ar.Co, in Lisbon, and at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, USA.
Maria has developed a series of exhibitions since the 90’s, among which we underline Viagens (at Galeria Diferença, in Lisbon, 1999), How I Became a Cloud (at Galeria Pedro Oliveira, in Oporto, 2001), On White Air (at Museu da Cidade, in Lisbon, 2003), Bum… (at Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Oporto, 2005), (E)merge (at Museu da Água, Coimbra, 2007), Clothilde + Celeste (at Casa da Cerca, 2009) and Gravidade (at Ermida de Belém, 2010).
At the moment Maria is represented through a series of public collections, in Portugal and abroad.
Elisha Abas Live Performance
About the Event
Date: 20th July 2011
Schedule: 9pm
Location: Belmonte Cultural Club Cafe
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Elisha Abas
Curated by: Maria and Frederic Coustols / Belmonte Cultural Club
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts
Sponsors: CML-Agenda Cultural de Lisboa, Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
About the Artist
Elisha Abas, Israeli born Concert Pianist, was the lifelong student of Pnina Salzman, (herself a student of Alfred Cortot) and mentee of Artur Rubinstein. La Roma, National Italian Newspaper, commented on a performance in Naples, Italy saying, “he is the most refined and interesting pianists of our generation … his “playing is the perfect marriage of exuberant musicality restrained with the right dose of rationalism that is rich with colors and shades.
His palette shines in all his splendor with a captivating performance of Chopin and Schumann”. He is the great great grandson of legendary Russian Composer, Alexander Scriabin.
Abas was a child prodigy who started performing at the age of six and has since shared the stage with Isaac Stern, Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. Abas achieved many accolades throughout his career. Those most notable were achieved when he was a young prodigy – winning first place in the America Israel Cultural Foundationmusic competition for eight consecutive years and first place in the Claremont Piano Competition.
He continues to perform throughout the world, most recently in the North America, Europe, Cuba, Russia, Israel, and China. Elisha Abas is also a composer. He rarely performs his original compositions in public; however, in 2009, Elisha performed his original music in St. Petersburg’s Smonlny Cathedral, United Nations Assembly Hall, and in Teatro Amadeo Roldán in Havana, Cuba.
In December 2009, Elisha Abas performed and recorded live the Brahms First Piano Concerto in Havana, Cuba with The National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba conducted by Yoel Gamzou. In 2010, he recorded and released a live recording of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 K488 with The International Mahler Orchestra live in Berlin. He is the Co-Founder of The Concert Meister Series in New York City.
Soundwalk Live Performance
About the Event
Date: June 3rd 2011 – 1 Night Performance
Schedule: starting at 00:00
Location: Palácio Belmonte
Address: Pateo Dom Fradique, 14 – 1100-624 Lisboa
Contacts: +351 218816600 _ office@palaciobelmonte.com
Artist/Author: Soundwalk Collective
Partners: DaST, WOA-Way of Arts
Sponsors: Palacio Belmonte Lisboa lda
June 3rd, kicking off the 2011 Summer tour, Soundwalk Collective performed a midnight set of Ulysses Syndrome at Palacio Belmonte in Lisbon, Portugal. For full tour dates, check soundwalkcollective.com.
Photos by Darren Keith, audio extract from live performance of Ulysses Syndrome.
About the Artists
SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE is an international art collective based in New York City.
Since 2000 they have been sonic nomads, embarking on never ending journeys from the desolate land of Bessarabia to the desert of Rub al Khali. By exploring and documenting the world around us through its sounds, the Collective abstracts and re-composes narrative sound pieces through fragments of reality to form distinct audible journeys.
The Collective’s live performances are diverse and often site and venue specific. They use a combination of custom-cut vinyl records with multiple turntables, laptops and various FX processing pedals and mixers. Although sound and music are the primary forces in the live setting, projection of video specific to each performance piece creates an environment that is unescapable and unique.
Live performances can also be transformed into temporary or permanent installations, post-performance, through custom-made turntables that are programmed to move automatically based on a musical score. Aesthetic refinement and conceptual narrative is paired with a performative impulse, making Soundwalk Collective’s shows intimate and powerful.
Created by Stephan Crasneanscki who lives and works in New York, the Collective’s recent installations and performances were shown at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); MADRe Museum of Contemporary Art (Napoli); New Museum (New York); National Museum of Singapore NMS (Singapore); Abu Dhabi: Art, Talks and Senstions (Abu Dhabi); Mobile Art by Zaha Hadid (Hong kong, Tokyo, New York); EXIT Festival at Maison des Arts de Creteils (Paris); Villa de Noailles – Centre d’Art et de Culture Contemporain (Hyères); Gare Saint Saveur (Lille); Palacio Belmonte (Lisbon); KaZantip Republic 2011; Florence Gould Hall (New York); ARMA 17 (Moscow).
SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE comprises five members:
Stephan Crasneanscki (France)
Dug Winningham (USA)
Simone Merli (Italy)
Kamran Sadeghi (Iran-USA)
