Transformation (Forest) | Performance
Inhabit the Contradiction, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian
In the context of Bungas’ exhibition at CAM Inhabit the Contradiction, the artist returned after 4 months of the inauguration for a radical and transformative gesture: dismantling, collapsing, reconfiguring, and reorganising Bosque (Forest), his site-specific installation for the exhibition.
Conceived as a choreography between the inside and the outside, the exhibition manifested itself both in the way the works were installed in the space and in the way the public moves through it. For about an hour and a half, Bunga cut and teared Forest, subjecting the forms and composition to chance and the force of gravity. Just as the construction of the work was improvised, its deconstruction also took place under unpredictable conditions.
Largely collapsed, the installation will no longer be what it was: after being cut, folded and knocked to the ground, a new landscape, a new architecture will emerge. The exhibition will thus open up to unexpected perspectives and renewed energies, remaining as a memory of itself.
Over the past twenty-five years, transformation has been not only a theme in Carlos Bunga’s work, but a core aspect of his artistic process. The artist questions the authority of society’s permanent and predictable structures, developing an institutional critique that extends to his own work, from a nomadic perspective. In an exhibition that encompasses both the brutality and the poetry of being alive, it is natural that the project itself should undergo a process of metamorphosis.
This performance marks the culmination of multiple transformations. For Bunga, the exhibition and collection are understood as a living organism, a continuous choreography; the museum, as a permeable place. Since its inauguration on 7 November 2025, when former dancers from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation returned to dance with other bodies and other ages, until the Anniversary of Art, celebrated on 17 January 2026, inspired by Robert Filliou’s idea for the ‘1000011th Anniversary of Art’ (conceived in 1963 and celebrated for the first time in Portugal in 1974), CAM has become a large public house, with events inside and outside its walls. Over the course of these months, the works were altered, moved, removed and reintroduced.
On 14 March, Carlos Bunga returned for a performance open to the public, transforming the space into a participatory event. For the artist, change is a vital principle: something that continually reinvents itself and flows. Its origin is sought in nature, a territory of transit and thought, where life and death coincide and complement each other, functioning simultaneously as a metaphor for life itself.
This action takes the form of a choreography, a dance and a collective orchestra of different bodies, with the participation of Ricardo Pinto (trumpet) and dancers Sylvia Rijmer, Bernardo Gama, Rui Reis, Paula Valle Sabino and Ana Caetano.
2026. Lisbon, Portugal.
