Margarida Mendes
Sonic Guidance and Researcher on Natural Contract Lab
Margarida Mendes research explores the overlap between infrastructure, ecology, experimental film, and sound practices, investigating environmental transformations and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She is interested in exploring alternative modes of education and political resilience through her curatorial practice and activism. She was part of the curatorial team of the 11th Gwangju Biennale "The 8th Climate (What Does Art Do?)", 4th Istanbul Design Biennial "A School of Schools", and 11th Liverpool Biennale "The Stomach and the Port". In 2019 she launched the exhibition series Plant Revolution! which explores different narratives of technological mediation of the interspecies encounter, and in 2016 she curated Matter Fictions, publishing a joint reader with Sternberg Press. She is consultant for environmental NGOs working on marine policy and deep sea mining and has directed several educational platforms, such as escuelita, an informal school at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo - CA2M, Madrid; The Barber Shop project space in Lisbon dedicated to transdisciplinar research; and the ecological inquiry curatorial research platform The World In Which We Occur/Matter in Flux. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and a frequent collaborator of the online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting Inhabitants-tv.org