With Bob Bloomfield, author and writer, Gonçalo D. Santos, anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies, Paulo Magalhães, jurist and researcher at the Centre for Legal and Economic Research (CIJE) at University of Porto, and moderation by Philippe Vergne, Director of Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art.

In a perspective of a joint reflection of the exhibition “Ai Weiwei: Intertwine”, Science and Art come together to dialogue in the Museum and in the Park.

Bob Bloomfield, author and writer, will approach the issues from a natural history/environmental change perspective. Drawing on the chapter in his book ‘Wake of the Endeavour’ when in 2002 he made a short visit to the Brazilian Mata Atlântica as he retraced the 1st Voyage of the British explorer Captain James Cook in 1770. Bob will explore the changes witnessed by the early European Voyagers, contrasting the places with the environmental realities of the locations today and the future implications for nature and people.

Gonçalo D. Santos, anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies,  will share his perception of Ai Weiwei in the Anthropocene. In the last two decades Ai Weiwei has become a global cultural icon and one of the most famous living artists around the world. This was a very unlikely turn of events for a boy who was born in Beijing in 1957 and who spent much of his childhood living under harsh conditions in remote areas in Northeast China and Northwest China due to his father’s political exile. Ai learned a lot about the intricate connections between art and politics during this formative period, and his tremendous success as a globetrotting artist many decades later owes much to these earlier Maoist experiences, which inspired him to develop very close linkages between his artistic practice and his work as an activist and a fervent supporter of the values of democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech. It is this link between artistic practice and political intervention that makes it quite difficult to remain indifferent to Ai’s work, regardless of whether he is dealing with issues concerning his home country, China, or issues that are more global in scope. Ai has used his artistic practice to investigate government corruption and cover-ups in China in the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake of 2008, just as he has used his artistic practice to draw attention to the plight and the suffering of refugees and forced migrants worldwide. These are only two examples, but they help capture the wide-ranging nature of Ai’s work.

With Intertwine, Ai seems to be leaving the realm of the national and the global and moving in the direction of a new frontier of artistic-political intervention: that of the Anthropocene, the current age of anthropogenic environmental uncertainties. The two pieces included in this exhibition are iron-cast models of life forms that were once subject to processes of ecological ruination resulting from the barbaric predatory behavior of modern civilization. Ai is making the case that the current environmental crisis is rooted in a flawed modernist conception of humanity that assumes—wrongly—that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are thus justified in exploiting nature as they please. To stop environmental disaster, Ai argues, we must reject this arrogant anthropocentric perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that requires paying a little bit more attention to the life histories and perspectives of other life forms around us, including the monumental Pequi tree in the exhibition. The current environmental crisis compels a reimagining of humanity’s place in the world, and an urgent rethinking of the dominant forces threatening the ecological balance of the planet. The work of artists like Ai Weiwei is at the forefront of this effort to create new visions of hope and justice in times of on-going modernist hubris and environmental destruction.

Paulo Magalhães, jurist and researcher at the Centre for Legal and Economic Research at University of Porto, will reflect about an intertwine common destiny -  The way we perceive the human journey on this planet can be explained by a relationship history between two distinct entities, in which the human assertion evolved in the belief of the domain, control, and understanding about the about the natural environment around us. Through the principles of disjunction, reduction, and abstraction, we mutilate more than we explain, we produce more confusion than enlightenment. For all intents and purposes, we try to divide what is a single whole, deeply interconnected, interdependent, and intertwined... We are part of the Earth System, we belong to the system and only in a deep harmony with its way of functioning, can we be a successful species in the time.