Fogo Fátuo 26
Fogo Fátuo (will-o’-the-wisp) is a day dedicated to art in motion. Bringing together artists from diverse geographies, it intertwines folk traditions with contemporary expressions. Taking place across different locations in and around Galeria Municipal do Porto, Fogo Fátuo offers a dynamic programme that ranges from intimate acoustic performances to immersive audiovisual experiences, showcasing the breadth and richness of performative and sound-based practices. For the first time, the fourth edition of Fogo Fátuo divides its programme between installed works and live art performances.
This year’s edition features live performances by Adam Christensen, Bombos de Lavacolhos, Julmud x Haykal, KIK, Lina Lapelytė, Odete, the Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra and Planningtorock.
Fogo Fátuo also presents installations by Diego Delas, Eames Office, Jacopo Belloni, Maria Ventura e Rafik Greiss.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Bombos de Lavacolhos: Moda do Bombo
With origins dating back to the early nineteenth century and hailing from the village of Lavacolhos in Fundão country, the Bombos of Lavacolhos are among the oldest and most emblematic ensembles working within the Portuguese folk music tradition. Their repertoire preserves the historic Moda do Bombo, as recorded by Michel Giacometti, keeping this form of cultural expression alive through the power of bombos (larger bass drums), caixas (smaller drums) and pífaro (piccolos). Essentially performing as street musicians, the group appears regularly across Portugal and abroad. In partnership with Casa do Bombo, a cultural centre based in the former village primary school, the group conducts important work conserving and promoting Portuguese traditional music.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos: Compositores Portugueses
The Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos (OJM), a pioneering group in a largely unexplored field, works as a national jazz orchestra that promotes composition, research, distribution and training within this musical genre. When the orchestra performed in the closing concert of the jazz programme for Porto 2001 – European Capital of Culture, something shifted in the landscape of Portuguese jazz. The programme consisted entirely of composers from the country and featured the premieres of several newly commissioned works. Since then, the OJM has cemented its fundamental role in building a Portuguese repertoire for jazz orchestra. Over the years, Pedro Guedes and Carlos Azevedo’s steady musical output has been complemented by works that show off the creativity and immense stylistic diversity of composers including Bernardo Sassetti, Mário Laginha and Luís Tinoco.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Lina Lapelytė: Selection of Songs
Selection of Songs brings together excerpts from over a decade of Lina Lapelytė’s artistic practice, combining voice, sound and movement into a performance format. The songs address recurring themes within her work, such as memory, labour, rituals, resistance and silenced voices. Adapting each performance to its setting, the artist uses humour, repetition and gentle sonic dissonance to conjure moments of togetherness and collective listening.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Adam Christensen: What’s the hurry, honey? Gotta be some place?
English multidisciplinary artist Adam Christensen’s return to Portugal echoes his visit in 2019, when he contributed to the exhibition “Máscaras/Masks” at the Galeria Municipal do Porto and began recording accordion pieces for a new album. With the arrival of the pandemic, those recordings gave way to raw, spontaneous improvisations, which Christensen later developed in collaboration with other musicians, adding new sonic layers from a range of instruments. In this performance, the artist returns these compositions to their essence, stripping their layers to reveal the solo accordion. The concert brings together material from his original recording sessions in Portugal and fresh improvisations and themes from a new album, to be released by purge.xxx.
Fogo Fátuo - Ao vivo
Lina Lapelytė: Pirouette
Written in 2017, Pirouette is an intimate performance exploring physical endurance, bodily memory and fragility. Conceived for a duo of retired ballerina and saxophonist, the work establishes a dialogue between the repetitive movements of the dancer’s body and the musician’s continuous circular breathing techniques, revealing the boundaries between control, vulnerability and exhaustion. With her subtle, meditative approach, Lina Lapelytė questions ideas around virtuosity and performance, offering a poetic reflection on time, ageing and the persistence of gesture. Lapelytė, who lives between London and Vilnius, represented Lithuania at the 2019 Venice Biennale with Sun & Sea (Marina), winner of the Golden Lion.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Odete: Sobre os Lobisomens
Adopting the format of a musical conference, Odete explores the performative and queer dimensions of werewolves throughout their history. Although it follows a thread of rational thinking, the “conference” plays out amid snorts, melodies and transformations, with the audience being invited to follow the artist’s mysterious trains of thought. Is it possible to run a conference without speaking? And what might monsters make us feel in today’s world? Odete is the alias of Lévi Gabriel, whose practice moves between performance, text, visual arts and music. Their work reveals an obsession with historiographic writing, and uses erotica and paranoia as two embodied forms of relating to archive material.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Julmud x Haykal: Live performance
From Ramallah, Palestine, to the world, Julmud and Haykal have been building a singular artistic dialogue for over a decade. Interdisciplinary musician Julmud develops his musical language through sampling and combining sounds from diverse geographies, creating a distinctive sonic universe that challenges conventions and categories. Writer, vocalist, and sound artist Haykal is known for his lyrical approach and fluidly movement through multiple musical styles. His practice spans music composition and production, sound works for radio theatre, sound installations, and published writing. In this live act, the pair navigate a wide range of genres and atmospheres, presenting a performance that reflects a shared trajectory shaped by sonic exploration and collaborative creation. Their artistic dialogue continues to evolve.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
Planningtorock
Planningtorock — a.k.a. Jam Rostron — is a musician, composer, producer, DJ and director. Originally from Bolton (England) and resident in Tallinn (Estonia), they have released four critically acclaimed studio albums of dance music. Self-taught, transgender, non-binary and working class, they have been exploring queer identity through their sound for over a decade. They recently released the protest song “Get Your Fking Laws
Off My Body”. As a remixer, their list of collaborations includes Lady Gaga, Robyn, Christine And The Queens and Romy, alongside The Knife, Peaches and, more recently, Arca. Their past work includes compositions for dance, such as the soundtrack for “On The Cusp” by the Cullberg Ballet (Stockholm), and music for haute couture runway shows by Chanel, Kenzo and Comme des Garçons, produced alongside the renowned sound director Michel Gaubert.
Fogo Fátuo - Live
KIK: NIGHTSHIFT
KIK is the new project by Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and João Pais Filipe, central figures in the sonic world of HHY & The Macumbas. Replacing acoustic instruments with drum machines and intricate sound design, the duo explores the territory between deconstructed club music, polyrhythms and electronic abstraction. Their debut album, NIGHTSHIFT, features immersive soundscapes inspired by industrial grit, hypnotic repetition and the ghostly energy of nightlife spaces. Between beats and silence, KIK conjure intense sonic environments that are at once physical, cinematic and experimental.
Fogo Fátuo - Installation
Rafik Greiss: The Longest Sleep
A film about mawlids, or gatherings dedicated to local Sufi saints, The Longest Sleep explores the human pursuit of transcendence through collective rituals and altered states of consciousness. Using immersive sound and bewitching visual rhythms — drums, ululations, breathing and bodies in trance — the work investigates how repetition, movement and devotion dissolve the boundaries of the ego. Rafik Greiss, who lives between Paris and Cairo, develops a practice using photography, sculpture, moving image and collage, exploring the relationship between individual consciousness and collective experience, and creating immersive environments in which images and objects become vehicles for sensation and transformation.
Fogo Fátuo - Installation
Diego Delas: 19 backdrops
Diego Delas’s artistic practice centres on the home as a place of memory, ritual and vernacular transmission. Using reclaimed textiles and structural fragments, he builds scenarios that evoke both domestic and theatrical worlds. His work mixes archaeology, tradition and pictorial gestures, exploring the tension between cultural conservation and extinction. Delas was born in rural Castil, Spain, and his work can be found the collections of spaces including TBA21, MUSAC and Fundação Botín.
Fogo Fátuo - Installation
Eames Office: Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe
This 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames of the Eames Office investigates the idea of an exponential series. With original music score by Elmer Bernstein, the film illustrates scale and the significance of adding a zero to a number. Among the most influential designers of the twentieth century, Charles and Ray Eames, partners in life and work, have been internationally recognized at the forefront of the design, architecture, filmmaking, and furniture communities. They founded a multidisciplinary design studio, the Eames Office, in Venice, California, in the early 1940s, which remains dedicated to communicating, preserving, and extending their legacy.
Fogo Fátuo - Installation
Jacopo Belloni: Nenia III
Nenia III, by Jacopo Belloni, is part of Dormancy, a research project into sleep, latency and transformation inspired by seed dormancy. The work consists of copper sculptures operating as distillation devices to extract hydrolates and essential oils from plants that have calming, soporific properties, such as esteva, which grows across the Porto region. Released drop by drop, the perfume fills the space, inducing a suspended, contemplative state in the audience. Belloni, who lives and works between Rome and Geneva, has exhibited at international institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo and MAXXI in Rome.
Fogo Fátuo - Installation
Maria Ventura: Girls on Rails
Girls on Rails, de Maria Ventura, é um vídeo em loop construído a partir de imagens geradas por inteligência artificial, realizado num momento inicial de expansão destas tecnologias. A obra parte do imaginário recorrente de jovens mulheres fotografadas em linhas de comboio, entre desejo, nostalgia e vulnerabilidade, para questionar os códigos visuais associados ao risco e à romantização da figura feminina. Ao longo da sequência, a narrativa desloca-se da ameaça implícita para uma presença feminina autónoma e afirmativa. Sediada em Lisboa, Ventura trabalha entre vídeo, instalação, performance e desenho, explorando identidade, memória e os códigos simbólicos do quotidiano através da ironia e da vulnerabilidade.