A heritage site organised around a baroque manor house built in the mid-18th century, Casa de Mateus is part of a 35-hectare area that extends beyond the Historic Gardens into a productive farm. Over the centuries, this farm has been permanently reinvented according to the needs, techniques and tools that each generation has had at its disposal. At the beginning of the 21st century, in addition to the inevitable updating of tools and processes due to the digital transition and the emergence of precision agriculture, there is the need to change our relationship with the planet, to know our environmental heritage in depth and to test ways of preserving and regenerating it. This gave rise in 2021 to the School of Transitions project, a forum for reflection and action on the environmental, digital and energy transitions, trialling concrete possibilities on the way to a just, logical, philosophical and sensitive transition...

Reaffirming the arts and cultural sharing as a way of questioning and building new symbolic heritage, the programme is nourished by the intersection with a group of artists and programmes that reinterpret the landscape and make us look at it and get to know it in unexpected ways that produce new meanings. In a programme that spans the three habitable seasons in the harsh climate of Trás-os-Montes, the FCM joins forces with a unique group of partners, each of them with a singular artistic and project curiosity, to undertake a reinterpretation of the natural dynamics of the landscape and the infinite reinterpretations we can make of it, with our bodies, with our listening, taking for ourselves the elements to reconstruct an aesthetic vision of the world.

The programme begins with the Re-En-Cantos de Mateus project, co-created with Companhia Paulo Ribeiro. In 2023, an ensemble of six dancers and six musicians will create a choreographic journey through the landscape. In 2024, CPR will be joined by filmmaker Edgar Pêra to produce a dance-film that records the interferences created between bodies and landscape.

Between July and November, AnneMarie Maes will develop the project Laboratório da Forma e da Matéria (Laboratory of Form and Matter), an instance of discovering biodiversity and its infinite aesthetic expressions, in a series of residencies that will conclude with the opening of an exhibition spread throughout the Foundation's spaces.In October, already in the autumn, the IP4 project team, developed by the Saco Azul Association, will set up in Mateus to invite a group of artists, curated by Felícia Teixeira and João Brojo, to create sound sculptures, telluric or aerial means of capturing and making heard the vibrations emanating from the landscape. From 2022 onwards, a visual artist selected by the Porto Photography Biennial, with whom we have co-created, will accompany the work of the School of Transitions and create an exhibition/installation that will transport the landscape to the halls of the Biennial in Porto in 2025. In order to interfere with the reinterpretation work carried out by the visual artist, FCM will invite a performer to create a form of relationship with the installation. In 2024, the installation will be presented in Mateus, accompanied by the performance.