The theme of the Anozero biennial “Healing and Repairing” (Curar e Reparar) is a proposition with many possible points of entry.

Healing refers to care, to the possibility of practising the kind of care that restores; it necessarily implies a condition of fragility, one’s own or another’s. There is disease implicit in the word heal, but mostly restorative practice, the exercise of restoration, or the restitution of an organism to its rightful condition.

Repairing, on the other hand, has myriad possible connotations: in Portuguese it means mend, improve, recompose. It also means use, compensate, and restore, all economical procedures which imply a certain conservation.

But the Portuguese word for repair has yet another set of meanings which imply paying attention, watching with acuity, observing, focusing; ultimately, the availability towards the world which arises from the chance to focus on what is before us, slowing down time and not imposing our views.

This web of echoes was the map that has allowed us to find artists who, in various ways, seek the impurity inherent in the repairing of anything that already exists. Whether an engram, a problem, a possibility of redemption, or a deformation, it needs to be sewn, sutured, mended. Basically, repaired.

The biennial, therefore, does not assume that art heals. In itself, art does not cure anything. It also does not revolutionize, nor break, nor sever, even if it pretends to do so: in many ways, it stages these procedures and, at best, it suggests we notice them.

Therefore, the proposition of the biennial is set in the antithesis of radical thought, of a proposition which claims to be from the root, origin or erasure, cleanliness or a kind of purism. A radical nature entails mould, the point from which this proposition envisaged its redirection by basing itself on the artist’s work about memory – their own, the collective, and the fiction of collectivity. The proposition we’ve constructed has this as its starting point: there is something that can still be fixed, even by exposing a wound.

The second starting point of the biennale was the city and its spaces – to define an exhibition that touched on several places, while remaining one exhibition. A circuit was drawn up that would start downtown (Baixa), climb up to the University (Universidade) and pass along a route of heritage, the two buildings of the CAP – Círculo de Artes Plásticas – and then cross the river and ascend to Santa Clara. And there, the revelation of the Santa Clara-a-Nova Monastery constituted a challenge and a fascination that could not be refused, with its architectonic and patrimonial quality, and the way it turns one’s gaze over the city, again, noticing it at a distance.

The Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art is an initiative from the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, organised in partnership with Coimbra City Council and the University of Coimbra. Its main objective is to engage reflection on the recent classification of the University of Coimbra – Alta and Sofia as World Heritage by UNESCO.

An attempt to understand the symbolic and actual meaning of the city’s new circumstances – being classified as World Heritage – the biennial establishes a confrontation between contemporary art and heritage, exploring the risks and multiple possibilities associated with this cultural heritage, which is now also of all Humanity.

Anozero is a programme of action for the city which systematically questions the territory in which it is installed. Thus, it may contribute to building an active and transformative cultural era, both in Coimbra and in the Central Region.