For Lisbon Design Week, ST VINCENTS joins Studio Gameiro to present MINE(ral) — a new body of copper works by Nick Valentijn, developed in dialogue with João Gameiro.

The project began during João Gameiro’s visit to Antwerp, where he first encountered Valentijn’s copper pieces at the gallery. Somewhere between the worked surfaces, the oxidation, and the weight of the material itself, a connection emerged: the copper might once have passed through Portugal.

Portugal has been pulling copper from the ground for thousands of years. Through the Iberian Pyrite Belt, through the mining regions of the Alentejo, through communities built around extraction and transformation. Antwerp, meanwhile, long operated as one of Europe’s major ports for the circulation of raw materials moving across the continent.

João Gameiro’s practice often returns to origin: where materials come from, the histories attached to them, and the people who shape them after extraction. Together with Valentijn, this became the foundation for MINE(ral).

The exhibition presents new works whose forms loosely draw from the visual language of Portugal’s mining industry — lanterns, industrial lighting, protective casings — translated through Valentijn’s sculptural vocabulary. Their surfaces carry scorched markings, abrasions, and mineral-like patinas that evoke geological strata and the gestures of extraction itself.

MINE(ral) holds two readings at once: the mine as place, and the mineral as matter. Between them sits the long process of transformation that turns material into object.

27.05.2026 - 31.05.2026
10AM - 6PM

STUDIO GAMEIRO
TRAVESSA DO ROSARIO 33
LISBON