As Quetzal Art Center celebrates its tenth anniversary, Pedro Barateiro's Truvadors unfolds its first chapter in the Alentejo, where the project itself takes root.
Conceived around ideas of travel, encounter, transmission and dialogue, Truvadors explores how stories, knowledge and memory circulate between people, places and generations. The project takes inspiration from Vicente Lusitano (c. 1520 - 1561), the composer, music theorist and traveller born in Olivença, whose life and work crossed borders, languages and cultures. Considered the first published Black composer in Europe, Lusitano occupies a singular place in music history, despite having remained largely absent from dominant historical narratives. Renowned in his time for his sophisticated polyphonic compositions and influential theoretical writings, Lusitano challenged many of the musical conventions of his era while contributing significantly to Renaissance debates on composition and musical pedagogy. Through Lusitano's journeys and legacy, Barateiro reflects on movement as a form of knowledge and on the voices and histories that have remained at the margins of official accounts.
Pedro Barateiro (b. 1979, Almada, Portugal) has developed an interdisciplinary practice spanning drawing, film, sculpture, performance and publishing. His work often investigates how cultural narratives, political imaginaries and historical memory are constructed, transmitted and transformed over time. Through poetic and speculative forms of storytelling, Barateiro creates spaces where personal and collective histories intersect, questioning established systems of knowledge while proposing alternative ways of understanding the past and imagining the future. In Truvadors, these longstanding concerns converge through the figure of the troubadour as a carrier of memory, knowledge and cultural exchange across territories and generations.
The figure of the troubadour is in a state of continual metamorphosis, at times human, animal or vegetal, he moves through landscapes in transformation, traversing both real and imagined geographies. Along the way, stories, sounds and images are gathered and transformed into poetic material. The resulting work takes the form of a sensory atlas in which trees converse, ships sing and territory itself emerges as an interlocutor.
The exhibition presents the opening chapter of Barateiro's new animated film alongside a series of large-scale drawings that resonate with the surrounding landscape. Beginning in the Alentejo, where Lusitano's own story originates, this first chapter introduces a journey that will continue to unfold across different places, voices and communities.
The project also draws on Lusitano's Guidonian Hand, a historical system used to teach and transmit music. For Barateiro, the hand becomes a figure of transmission and connection, a gesture through which knowledge, memory and experience pass from one person to another. It also serves as a point of departure for reflecting on the social and political dimensions of collective action and cultural exchange.
The exhibition is structured around forms of gathering and exchange. A long table, shaped like a river, traverses the space as a place for conversation, hospitality and collective reflection. In this sense, Truvadors does not simply tell a story of travel; it creates the conditions for encounter. Culture emerges here as something shared, transmitted and continually reshaped through dialogue.
Marking both a first chapter and Quetzal Art Center's tenth anniversary, the exhibition celebrates the journeys that have shaped the institution over the past decade while looking towards those still to come. Like the troubadour himself, Truvadors invites us to slow our pace, to listen attentively and to imagine new ways of relating to one another through stories, memory and shared experience. Through the recovery of overlooked histories and voices, the project opens a space for empathy, critical reflection and cultural reconciliation.
The exhibition opens on 5th September 2026 with a performance by Lula Pena at Quetzal Art Center. Lula Pena is one of the voices we hear in the animation of Truvadors.
Curated by Aveline de Bruin.
Truvadors by Pedro Barateiro is supported by Évora_2027, European Capital of Culture.
