Dumping: The Work of Art in the Age of the Digital Economy, 2023/2024

Dumping: The Work of Art in the Age of the Digital Economy is an exhibition-installation by RitaGT, continuing a series of works developed in recent years, including Museu Duty Free and the video piece Unearthing. 

Since the 19th century, ceramics have served as a symbolic medium for expressing a distinct Portuguese cultural identity. Rooted in domestic and rural labor, women have long been central to its industrial production and the ideological narratives surrounding it. 

RitaGT’s artistic practice has unfolded across Portugal, Angola, and England. She currently lives and works in Viana do Castelo, a city where the ceramics industry flourished during the 1950s and 1960s. Today, its abandoned factories stand as silent witnesses to a specific historical and economic era. 

In this work, the artist reclaims the symbolism and iconography of the past—an intangible heritage—through research that manifests in newly created ceramic works, video, and performative presentations. 

“The figure of the artisan precedes that of the worker and the artist. She lays the foundations for transforming occupations (the things that occupy us) into professions (institutionalized roles within an economy). She mediates the transfiguration of people into skills, of lives into working lives, into variable capital. The artisan is the vehicle that has carried us all into the contemporary world. She is the patient midwife of our notion of an autonomous, creative, and reflective self—awaiting stillbirths, tending to the premature, weighing the newborns, and cutting the cords that tie them to an older heritage. It is the artisan who makes us who we are.” 
— Raqs Media Collective 

Paulo Mendes 

Olívia,
2023

Video 4k, sound, color, 6’13’’