The Cultural Alchemy of ANOZERO: How a University City Became Portugal's Contemporary Art Laboratory

In the early hours of an October morning in 2015, a small team of curators, artists, and local volunteers gathered in the silent cloisters of the Santa Clara-a-Nova Monastery in Coimbra. They were preparing to transform this 17th-century religious complex into something its Baroque architects could never have envisioned: a showcase for radical contemporary art. What began that morning would evolve into ANOZERO, a biennial that has since become one of Portugal's most intellectually ambitious and critically respected art events, despite emerging outside the established cultural centers of Lisbon and Porto.

The idea for a contemporary art biennial in Coimbra had been gestating for years within the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC), an institution that had long served as an outpost for experimental art in central Portugal. When Carlos Antunes, the director of CAPC, first proposed the concept to city officials and university administrators, he faced considerable skepticism. "They wondered why Coimbra needed another cultural event," recalls Antunes. "But our vision wasn't for just any event—it was for a different model of biennial, one that would engage directly with the city's unique intellectual legacy while challenging its conventions."

What distinguished ANOZERO from its inception was its ambitious conceptual framework. Named after the concept of "year zero"—suggesting both a fresh beginning and a critical revisiting of history—the biennial positioned itself as a space for radical reimagining. The inaugural edition, subtitled "A Throw of the Dice" after Stéphane Mallarmé's experimental poem, laid the groundwork for what would become the biennial's distinctive approach: using contemporary art as a lens to examine the tensions between tradition and innovation, memory and futurity, local identity and global concerns.

Central to this vision was Coimbra itself—a city whose identity has been shaped by its university, founded in 1290 and one of the oldest continuously operating universities in the world. In 2013, the University of Coimbra—Alta and Sofia was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, a recognition that catalyzed a new awareness of the city's cultural significance. Yet this prestigious designation also raised questions about how to balance preservation with evolution, heritage with contemporary relevance. ANOZERO emerged in this context as a platform for reimagining the relationship between historical spaces and contemporary artistic practices.

"We were interested in creating conversations between the weight of history and the speculative possibilities of art," explains Delfim Sardo, who curated the biennial's second edition in 2017. "The UNESCO designation gave us both an opportunity and a challenge: to demonstrate how contemporary art could activate historical spaces in ways that were neither reverential nor dismissive, but genuinely dialogical."

This approach is evident in the biennial's use of venues throughout the city. From the formal galleries of the Machado de Castro National Museum to the post-industrial spaces of the Coimbra Innovation Park, from university buildings steeped in academic tradition to unexpected public interventions, ANOZERO creates a distributed exhibition that invites visitors to experience Coimbra anew. This spatial strategy reflects a core philosophical principle: that contemporary art can function as a form of critical spatial practice, reconfiguring how we inhabit and interpret the built environment.

Over successive editions, ANOZERO has evolved in response to changing artistic and social contexts while maintaining its commitment to rigorous conceptual frameworks. The 2019 edition, titled "The Third Bank" after João Guimarães Rosa's enigmatic short story, explored notions of liminality and alternative modes of existence. The 2021-22 edition, "Midnight," curated by Elfi Turpin and Filipa Oliveira, took inspiration from the colony of bats that inhabit the university's Baroque Joanine Library—nocturnal creatures that protect the books from insects—to explore fluid spaces, norm-breaking, and alternative forms of knowledge production.

What has remained consistent throughout these iterations is an emphasis on commissioning new works that respond directly to Coimbra's context. Unlike biennials that function primarily as surveys of existing global art trends, ANOZERO prioritizes site-specific production. This approach has yielded some of the biennial's most memorable moments: Carlos Bunga's cardboard installation "Decolonizing Thought" transforming the City Room in 2021; a sound installation by Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri that reactivated the acoustics of the Old Cathedral in 2019; or Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro's intervention in the university's botanical garden in 2017.

Beyond its artistic program, ANOZERO has cultivated a distinctive approach to audience engagement. Recognizing that contemporary art can sometimes appear esoteric or inaccessible, particularly in a city without a large preexisting contemporary art audience, the biennial has developed robust mediation strategies. These include guided tours, workshops, and an "activation program" that encourages different communities to engage with the exhibitions on their own terms. Particularly notable is the biennial's collaboration with students from the University of Coimbra's Master's in Curatorial Studies program, who develop parallel programming that extends the biennial's reach.

As ANOZERO prepares for its upcoming edition in 2026, themed "Holding, Giving, Receiving" and curated by Hans Ibelings and John Zeppetelli, it does so in a changing cultural landscape. The recent announcement that Coimbra will host Manifesta 17 in 2028—the first time this nomadic European biennial will come to Portugal—affirms the city's growing significance as a center for contemporary art. This recognition is due in no small part to ANOZERO's role in demonstrating how a small city with a rich intellectual tradition can function as a laboratory for artistic innovation.

The cultural alchemy that ANOZERO has performed—transforming historical spaces into sites of contemporary relevance, local specificities into matters of global concern, and academic traditions into platforms for experimental thinking—offers a model for how biennials can meaningfully engage with their contexts. In a global art world often criticized for its homogenizing tendencies, ANOZERO stands as an example of how the most compelling contemporary art emerges not from anywhere, but from somewhere in particular—in this case, from the storied streets and cloisters of a university city where the past and future continue their complex dialogue.