NEG (New Galician Sculpture), founded in 2018, is a collective formed by artists Misha Bies Golas (Lalín, Spain, 1977), Alejandra Pombo Su (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1979), Jorge Varela (Allariz, Spain, 1971), and Diego Vites (O Grove, Spain, 1986). It came about from the exchange of materials, documents and images between its members — which later resulted in collaborative creative processes around the creation of a common archive. NEG is an acronym that refers to revolutionary aesthetic and political utopias and aims to build counter-cyclopaedic knowledge, focusing on an undisciplined view of history.

Centred on aesthetic specificities linked to local traditions, peripheral and plural modernities (especially Galician, but also from Eastern European countries), NEG’s action unfolds in different assemblage exercises and installations, which establish rhizomatic relationships between the objects and images stored in the group’s archive. When brought together and reworked, they challenge hegemonic narratives, giving way to new readings that are more open, less hierarchical and overflowing beyond themselves, giving a certain delirium and fiction to the artistic experience of history.

Plan Coimbra -1924-1974-2024-, 2024

Installation, mixed media, variable dimensions

Courtesy of the artists.

The installation Plan Coimbra -1924-1974-2024-, by the collective NEG (Nova Escultura Galega), commissioned by the Biennial, takes as its starting point a period that covers the hundred years between 1924, the date of publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, 1974, the date of the Carnation Revolution, and the current year. Through research, collection and assembly, objects from different sources are compiled, such as stones, souvenirs, posters, books and images, articulated in a kind of timeline that cancels itself out in its rhizomatic delirium.

Inside the Colégio das Artes, this amalgam of objects of different authorship and nature creates a kind of occupation that, by cohabiting the space, derives a new non-linear time. Irony and playful criticism manipulate and dismantle the objects from a foreign perspective, deconstructing idealisations, playing with clichés and distancing them from their original contexts. This exercise also rethinks the possible meanings of what is understood by “sculpture”. Coordinated by artist Vanda Madureira, the University’s students Inês Santos, Ana Almeida, Carolina Esteves, Joana Encantado, Maryna Khrypun, Thaíssa Dillÿ, Victoria Lacerda, Jennifer de Sousa, Michelle Brito, Mariana Quinteira, Mariah Raposo, Rebecca Battisti, Carla Ferreira, Sónia Honório, Tiago Sobral, Mariachiara Ceccato, Mariana Andrade, and Lea De Nardo contributed to the elaboration of Plan Coimbra -1924-1974-2024-.