Instituto Cervantes de Lisboa

R. de Santa Marta 43F R/C, 1169-119 Lisboa

Inauguration → 24 . 09 . 2026 → 06:30 pm

24 . 09 . 2026 → 06 . 11 . 2026

monday - thursday → 09:00 am – 07:00 pm
friday → 09:00 am – 03:00 pm

Artist

Antonio Guerra

The extractive paradigm is currently undergoing a process of reconfiguration marked by decarbonization, the search for new minerals, and the transition to renewable energy. In this context, Umbral Mineral (Mineral Threshold) shifts the landscape into an unstable territory where extraction, image, and matter converge, drawing an analogy between anthropogenic transformations in the mining environments of Fabero and Riotinto in Spain, and Covas do Barroso in Portugal, and the very processes of image production, conceived as surfaces crisscrossed by multiple temporalities and tensions.

These territories appear as spaces of friction, where the footprint of extraction persists in the form of waste, ruins, and post-natural materialities. Guerra collects and reactivates these remains — originating from spoil heaps and tailings ponds — to integrate them into photo-sculptural devices that overflow their own limits, questioning the very notion of representation.

From this point, the mining landscape ceases to be a backdrop and becomes an active agent, operating through a visuality that dissolves the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the documentary and the constructed. The project thus destabilizes inherited ways of seeing, situating itself in a space where the geological, the historical, and the social intertwine. Within these territories, the possibility of regeneration emerges as a critical gesture: not only to rehabilitate, but to reread and reimagine.

Umbral Mineral takes shape as a writing of the remainder, where ruin does not signal an end, but the opening of new forms of perception. From there, the images compel us to see beyond their surface, activating a gaze capable of holding the complexity of a world in transformation.