From the surrounds, we build the present

Curated by Cindy Sissokho
In collaboration with Galerias Municipais de Lisboa

July 4th, 2025 - November 2nd, 2025
Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional (1st floor)
Lisbon, Portugal

Abdoulaye Konaté, António Ole, Délio Jasse, Edson Chagas, Ernest Mancoba, Felix Shumba, Frida Orupabo, Gabriel Chaile, Grada Kilomba, Hank Willis Thomas, Hicham Benohoud, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Kiripi Katembo, Mónica de Miranda, Moshekwa Langa, Pascoal Viegas Vilhete (Sum Canarim), René Tavares, Sandra Poulson, Teresa Kutala Firmino, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare and Zoulikha Bouabdellah.

PROGRAM

July 3rd, 6pm

Opening
Tuesday to Sunday
10am – 1pm and 2pm – 6pm

Free entrance

Production and Communication

Carolina Pelletier Fontes / FAS – Forward Art Stories
Galerias Municipais de Lisboa / EGEAC
Mediation

Galerias Municipais de Lisboa / EGEAC

From the surrounds, we build the present explores everyday realities and moments of freedom that people generate within the environments they inhabit. Thinking from the concept of the surrounds by scholar and urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone, the exhibition focuses on what he refers to as the spaces in an ongoing process of reconstruction, preservation, fugitivity and transformation by their inhabitants, whether human or non-human. In this context, the surrounds are not only physical margins. They are generative forces of life, often invisible in dominant narratives. They are fundamental to imagining new social and spatial formations.

The exhibition blurs the boundaries between myths and reality, myths and ancestry, to construct and preserve everyday knowledge that exist from within and outside of the colonial epistemologies and foundations of the spaces we inhabit. These artistic practices function as insurgent cartographies, mapping the intangible and bringing possibilities for being otherwise tracing how people live in and through the unseen. Through these acts, the artists reveal how through the mythic and marginal reimagines the surrounds as a method of survival, a mode of knowing and theorising the everyday, and a tool to reassemble fragmented lineages across time and place.

From the surrounds, we build the present is a site for witnessing, reimagining, and enacting transformative futures with the present. These stories are an homage to the “collective lives of continuous remaking” as a possibility to inhabit our environments with the liberating agency to socialise, to improvise and to thrive. Through raw materials, textures, patterns, imagery, and archives as critical forms, the artists depict moments that oscillates between resistance and existence, tension and joy, acting as a driving force to continue thriving in and with the present.

Cindy Sissokho, 2025

From the surrounds, we build the present

PROGRAM

PRESS RELEASE