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Takeover at Monte Ovil
Coordination: Pedro da Silva, Inês Moreira, Beatriz Duarte
Participants: Ana Rocha, Cristianne Melo, Flora Paim, Martín Hernández Molín, Paulo Gonçalves, César Guedes, Flora Paim, Inês Azevedo, Inês Moreira, João Gago, Pedro da Silva
Location: Castro do Ovil (Espinho, Portugal)
2022
spatial practices; mediation; curating
The Takeover at Monte Ovil unfolded as a situated curatorial and artistic experiment within an archaeological site, developed in collaboration with artists, archaeologists, and researchers. Rather than reinforcing the site’s patrimonial framing, the project approached Ovil as a field of experimentation, where artistic and curatorial methods could reengage its spatial, material, and narrative dimensions.
Participants were invited to collectively occupy the site for a day, following a shared contextual framework that combined archaeological information with open curatorial propositions. This initial framing both acknowledged and unsettled the explanatory logic often associated with archaeology, creating space for other forms of engagement that move beyond documentation and verification.
Through walking, listening, and making, the site was activated by a range of practices, including frottage, sound recording, optical distortions, and performative gestures. These interventions shifted attention from interpretation toward experience, foregrounding texture, atmosphere, and embodied perception.
Moments of collective presence, such as resting among the ruins, sharing food, or moving toward the river, introduced another layer of engagement. The site was no longer approached as an object to be observed, but as a space to inhabit. Sound, temperature, and material contact became mediators of a temporal continuity, allowing the past to emerge not as something distant, but as something co-present.
In this context, the Takeover displaced the logic of archaeological decoding in favor of activation. The resulting traces, recordings, gestures, and ephemeral actions became, themselves, a new layer of artifacts: not evidence of a distant past, but inscriptions of a contemporary encounter.
By shifting attention from depth to surface, and from explanation to relation, the Takeover at Monte Ovil proposed another way of engaging with archaeological sites, one that opens space for sensory, speculative, and situated forms of knowledge. This curatorial research was latter published in the article Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity at TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation
Intervenção de Flora Paim
Fotos de Beatriz Duarte, Cristianne Melo, Flora Paim e Paulo Gonçalves