Willem de Rooij’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, Hut Hut, presents the outcomes of his research during his residency in the Maumaus program, with a site-specific installation and two rarely exhibited works from the early 1990s.

De Rooij continues his exploration of exhibitionary systems, museological practices and politics of representation, in this case building on his detailed study of two shepherds’ shelters, one in the collections of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon and one at the Museo del Pastor in Villaralto, Spain. His practice critically engages global art histories, visual anthropology and ethnography, relating objects and considering the relation between institutional contexts and contemporary forms of mediation.

Since the fragile shelters cannot be removed from their places of preservation, the artist opted for ‘digital loans’, presenting them at Lumiar Cité by way of live streams from the two museums. Using security cameras, De Rooij establishes a real-time dialogue between the objects and their museum contexts, the modern architecture of the Lumiar Cité exhibition space and the urban environment of Alta de Lisboa, where the gallery is situated. While drawing parallels with contemporary notions of surveillance and protection—the latter being the original function of these vernacular structures—here the work specifically zooms in on tensions between urban planning, mobility, artisanal construction and the institutionalization of cultural memory.

Learn more