Sete Feiras

The project emerges from research and fieldwork developed by the artist across seven flea markets and traditional second-hand markets from the north to the south of Portugal (Monção, Serpa, Barcelos, Tavira, Boliqueime, Viana do Alentejo, and Vila Nova de Cerveira). Taking these spaces as authentic cultural laboratories, Arturo Comas reflects on the life cycle of objects, their obsolescence, and the transition between utility and memory. In 'Sete Feiras', artistic practice intersects with ethnographic observation. The works on display use acquired objects as raw material for new sculptural compositions. Far from mere accumulation, the artist promotes a symbolic preservation of the pieces, saving them from oblivion and material extinction. By being detached from their original utility and integrated into the artistic field, these objects gain autonomy and transform into devices of resistance and poetic reflection. The exhibition continues Arturo Comas’s distinctive line of research into uselessness, the absurd, and the speculative potential of the common and the discarded, challenging the public to question the regimes of value that structure our everyday relationship with things.