Gestures

There is something uplifting when, from a certain periphery, a symbolic center is
constructed. This is the case of the Walk&Talk Association, through the vision of Jesse James,
who, over fourteen years of activity, has developed a plan to promote contemporary art in the
Azores. Walk&Talk, with its Biennial – Gestures of Abundance, is committed to this mission of
enhancing artistic creation, fostering meetings, reflections, and practices that expand the region’s
cultural horizons and place the Azores on the map of contemporary art. Fonseca Macedo Gallery
is pleased to collaborate with this initiative, recognizing in the Biennial an essential space for
dialogue, experimentation, and the appreciation of art’s role in the present and future of the
Azores.
In this exhibition, which includes works by José Pedro Cortes and Joana Albuquerque,
the body emerges as a suspended territory – a surface where habits, gestures and ways of being
are inscribed, but also a place of projection, silence and listening. Through photography and
sculpture, the works presented here outline a relational cartography: images and forms that
intertwine, suggesting connections between bodies, infrastructures and landscapes from the
Azores and other Atlantic archipelagos. They are fragments of the same investigation into
presence and impermanence, into how we inscribe ourselves in territories of water, stone and
light.

Ocean Rain (2025)
Drawing from images collected over time across different Atlantic archipelagos, José Pedro Cortes
explores impermanence, immersion, and silent observation. Through photography, he traces
bodies and infrastructures in dialogue with a subterranean and volcanic cartography, where
documentary recording meets the poetic potency of an attentive gaze. His landscapes, portraits,
and still lifes become visual maps of contemporary life — open, transitory, and unfinished.

Grandes Podões (2024)
Joana Albuquerque’s sculptures are part of a series in which the artist extends the relationship
between body and territory. Inspired by a double semantic meaning – pruning tools and the
“Micaelense” expression used to describe someone clumsy or unfit for a certain task – the pieces
evoke the shadows of resting bodies, lying on the “Pesqueiro”, sprawled in the sun and water.
Observed in a state of non-productivity, the body-tool is reclaimed here not as a work instrument,
but as an inscription of collective, routine and therapeutic practices.

Artist Biographies

José Pedro Cortes (Porto, Portugal, 1976) is a visual artist who works mainly with photography.
His photographs – landscapes, portraits or still lifes – function as a map of visual possibilities that
observe contemporary life. Through a personal poetic and documentary register, his work reflects
a time of constant doubt in the construction of social relationships. Impulse or fabrication,
vulnerability or strength, surface or something more.
Joana Albuquerque (Ponta Delgada, 1993) is a visual artist who lives between Ponta Delgada
and Munich. In her practice, through sculpture, objects and performances, she observes and
analyzes everyday gestures and social practices around her. She is interested in the relationship
and interaction between the body and objects, in power dynamics and in the subversion of
functionality. In her work, there is an admiration for the useless and for things at rest.