maat Mode – Prototyping the Museum

June – November 2020

“Institutions of culture should be catalyst platforms to render discourse actionable and empower audiences to own their choices through the articulation of debate, the sharing of positions, and the formulation of knowledge. This is the museum as An Open Forum – A Stage – A School.” (Beatrice Leanza, Executive Director, maat)

maat 2020 program began with an open-ended exercise in prototyping this kind of museum — maat Mode was a 6-month long experimental participatory public program of talks and events interrogating the role of cultural institutions in society and collectively envisioning the future museum. Co-developed with a variety of international and locally-based practitioners, institutions and community groups, alongside the curators and creatives involved in maat’s future planning from February 2021, maat Mode is a transformative gesture that temporarily repurposes the museum into a poly-functional civic arena, where public life is debated, probed, challenged and possibly inspired towards a more inclusive and equitable construction of the future.

maat Mode featured 86 Guest Curated Projects, with 223 Contributors and 13 Partner Institutions in a strand of concurrent narratives running over 6 months, whose topics, contents and modes of public engagement are both tests and a prelude to future programming. Among many others, research areas include climate action, with a specific focus on the seas and marine culture, including collaborations with Portuguese and international institutions of culture and education. Also featured are workshops, screenings, talks and “schools”, which discuss and explore various issues concerning the politics of sustainability, scientific knowledge, urban and social transformations resonating across and beyond the Portuguese context.

Specific projects also address the EDP Foundation Portuguese Art Collection, the EDP Foundation Energy Heritage Collection with newly created sound projects presented in dedicated audio stations located inside the museum and dubbed Sound Capsules.

You can download the introductory pamphlet here.

Beeline – A Museum-wide Architectural Intervention designed by SO – IL

Beeline is an unprecedented architectural intervention commissioned to the New York based studio SO – IL that occupies the entirety of maat’s building. So – IL’s largest piece of ephemeral architecture to date, Beeline was designed to host maat Mode.

The intervention extends the city into the museum, transforming it into a landscape of encounters and conversations, taking audiences through elevated pathways, stage areas, sound capsules, video rooms and workshop zones. Furthermore a set of other design strategies have been developed that will become permanent assets of the museum, namely an open storage system that lends itself to multiple reconfigurations and placement upon need, and a mobile staging structure that similarly can be deployed according to programs in various areas.

In the words of the architects, “Beeline might trigger insight into our perception of space as well as time. An additional pathway dissects the maat building both in plan and section. This shortcut connects the entrance from the quayside directly with a new access point facing the city. This gesture not only transforms the way visitors enter and experience the museum, but it also links the formal entry to a new, ‘clandestine’ entrance through the loading dock. As such, this transformation not only opens up the building to new perspectives, but it also challenges the implied hierarchies of spaces in a traditional museum and provide flexibility for an ever-evolving organisation.”

SO – IL | Beeline Design Team: Florian Idenburg, Martina Baratta, Summer Liu

Beeline is realized in partnership with Artworks – a leading Portuguese organization dedicated to the production of artistic works and the support of arts and culture.

[Beeline photos by Iwan Baan]

These videos were realized as wrap-up episodes of all the events, investigations, encounters and experiences that maat MODE generated, they are clustered in 4 main thematic chapters. They can also be viewed on maat Youtube channel.

Episode 1: Of Lands, Seas and the Human Factor

Episode 2: Community and History in Music and Sound

Episode 3: Freedom Practices – Visions of a world in various states of emergency

Episode 4: Digital Reels: The museum on a keyboard and other stories