Art direction and visual identity for the exhibition COMPULSIVE DESIRES: The Extraction of Lithium and Rebellious Mountains,Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto, March—May 2023.

The exhibition, curated by Marina Otero Verzier, featured works by Amável Antão, Anastasia Kubrak, Carlos Irijalba, Giuliana Rosso, Grupo de Investigação Territorial (Antonio del Giudice, Godofredo Enes Pereira, Jacob Bolton, Mingxin Li, Tiago Patatas), Heitor Cramez, Isidro Rodrigues, Jonas Staal & Radha D’Souza, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Lara Almarcegui, Leanne Wijnsma, Lithium Triangle Research Studio + Nicolas Jaar, Maarten Vanden Eynde & Edmond Musasa, Medios Libres con la Gira Zapatista, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Natalia de la Rubia Kozlowska, Orlando Vieira Francisco, Povo de Covas do Barroso & Paulo Carneiro, Susana Caló, Susana Soares Pinto, Tanguy Pitavy, Tomás Saraceno & Aerocene Foundation.

The exhibition took as starting point the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the North of Portugal and the struggles sustained by local communities for their lives and rights, exploring the interconnections between social, mental, and environmental ecologies.

The design identity addresses the toxicity linked to lithium extraction and its implication in the discipline, technology and territories. The electric-green-red landscape was digitally sculpted by gestures that reference typographical carving and the removal and extraction of material from the earth. It represents the initial transformation of a soon to become inverted mountain.

The 3D illustration of a rock then used to create the landscape imagery of the identity was developed by Daniel Martins.

Print and digital assets were produced
for this project. A book of the exhibition was produced being framed within an existing collection of Dafne, with design guidelines that were adapted to accomodate parts of this exhibition language.

The exhibition design was developed by Diogo Passarinho Studio (Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds).

Photography by Alexandre Delmar, João Octávio Peixoto and Renato Cruz Santos.