By the time we first launched What’s Next? in the early months of the pandemic in 2020 we were reflecting about freedom and how it deeply weaves together with art: “Art is freedom, even if just freedom for expressing freedom. But what else can art do for us (and us for it) in a time of crisis?”. Now that we are finally getting back to normal travelling and finding new connections in a physical way, we wanted to know what people in the field of art think about the future again — Is the future what we expected? How are we getting back to normal? Did the isolation during the pandemic impacted our work or the way we see things? Are we returning to what we had before? What’s next in music, galleries, photography and art communities?

Throughout the year of 2021, we went to Tremor in Azores, we visited Amsterdam during Unseen Photo Fair and Brussels during We are europe’s European Lab & Nuits Sonores and organized 180 Media Lab in our hometown Porto. Our travels are always opportunities to meet new people and expand our network, so those trips resulted in a set of thoughts about what’s next in this new beginning.

What’s Next: a new beginning is the result of who we have been listening to, of our travels and of the way we do things. Two years later we gather the perspectives of 8 artists, gallerists and musicians in a video portraying a new beginning.

Alice van den Abeele runs Alice gallery in Brussels with her husband and it was recommended to us by our designer friend Lourenço Providência. Erik Kessels, whom we occasionally met selling his books at Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam, still remembered us from when we first met during Element Talks back in 2017. Khyam Allami was a suggestion of We are Europe and we got interested to get know him better after reading this Pitchfork article. Sofia Carolina Botelho and Rúben Monfort represent Vaga, a new space to think about arts and knowledge we got the chance to visit while in Azores. Mira Calix was one of curator Joana Seguro's invitations for the 1st edition of 180 Media Lab, a week of concerts, artistic circuits and broadcast happening in Porto and online last November. Roderick van der Lee is the director of Unseen Photo Fair, with whom we have collaborated as media partner for Unseen's new section, Unbound (highlighting out of format photography) from which we created the series Filling the Cracks. And finally, Angelica Salvi, a figure that in the last few years has becoming important in Porto's music scene, the city we're based in.