Corrente de Ar — Volume V
On the last hours of setup, before the doors opened, my co-founder and I were still running. Labels on the wall, final adjustments, an artist arriving early, a technical problem, a phone call. At some point we stopped. Not for long. Just long enough to stand in the middle of the room and try to absorb what we had built. More than a hundred works on the walls. Ninety-three artists. Six hundred and sixty-three submissions evaluated to get there. We stood there for about thirty seconds before someone pulled us back.
A thousand people would walk through in the next four days.
It started with a feeling rather than a plan. In Budapest, during our Erasmus exchange, we stumbled into a flat turned gallery run by a German couple. They had cleared their living room, put out an open call to the city's art universities, and let people bring food, drinks, and work. The whole thing was warm and unpretentious in a way that most exhibitions are not. People were talking. Not in hushed tones, not with the careful reverence that contemporary art sometimes demands, but talking about the work, about the strange act of showing something you have made to strangers.
We thought: what if we took this back to Lisbon? What if we made it bigger?
We did. And then it kept getting bigger.
Watch the full aftermovie on YouTube ↗
By Volume V, it had become something that mattered to people in ways we hadn't anticipated. Artists who had shown with us in the first two editions were following the open call religiously, coming back with new experimental works. Collectors came back every year. Visitors who had wandered in not knowing what to expect found themselves in conversation with an artist for an hour. People who are not, by self-definition, art people came because they had seen one of the hundred advertising panels across Lisbon that year, and something in them was curious enough to show up.
This is what carinho looks like when you step back far enough to see it. The Portuguese word does not translate cleanly; it sits somewhere between care and tenderness and the warmth of sustained attention. Across five editions, Corrente de Ar has exhibited over three hundred artists. The project gave them a room, a context, and a public.
Every edition teaches us something different. The early ones taught us production: the physical reality of hanging seventy works in a space not built for it, of coordinating artists arriving from across the country with crates and rolled canvases. Later editions taught us curation: how to hold a consistent line across a body of work that is deliberately diverse, how to give each artist a context without flattening everyone into a theme.
Volume V taught us something harder. As a project grows, the quality of care you extend to every person it touches must grow with it.
When Corrente de Ar took place in a collection of apartments, care felt easier. We knew everyone. We could respond immediately. When it becomes six hundred and sixty-three submissions and a thousand visitors, care has to become a system. Not a cold one, but an intentional one. One where no one falls through a gap. Where an artist who is not selected receives feedback rather than silence. Where a visitor with a question finds an answer. Where the warmth that was always the point does not get diluted by scale.
This is the pressure that growth puts on anything built on intimacy. The answer, we are slowly learning, is not to pretend the scale has not changed. It is to build structures that protect the spirit, structures that remain responsive and human even when the numbers no longer make informality possible.
Portugal has extraordinary artistic talent. It is not short of people making urgent, rigorous, beautiful work. What it has historically been shorter on is the infrastructure to support that work in its earliest stages — the moment between finishing your studies and figuring out whether a practice is sustainable, the moment when what an artist needs is not just a wall to hang work on but a context, a community, a first professional encounter with the public.
Corrente de Ar was built to live in that gap. A point of entry. A first framing, a first situating of the work within a larger conversation.
Five years in, with more than 300 artists and thousands of visitors and one very memorable exhibition space, that gap is still there, and we are still trying to be useful in it. Volume VI is already in motion.
Volume V | 4 — 7 September 2025
Mitra, Marvila