On 20 September, under late summer light that seemed to dissolve the boundaries between the natural and the built, Pluto celebrated the closing of the second edition of Portal, its residency programme focused on the creation of permanent infrastructures. Throughout the day, the space was transformed into a living ecosystem where art, architecture, design, and the body intersected without hierarchies: a communion between thought and experience, between matter and gesture.
Photos: Salvador Lorente
Portal does not function as a typical residence, but rather as an exchange system. It is a framework where artists, designers and architects experiment with possible forms of coexistence with the environment, working through observation, dialogue and sensitive intervention. In this edition, Parafeno, Laia Amigó, Carla Alcalá, Apolo Pablo and Joan Martí proposed works that expand Pluto’s infrastructures and, with them, the ways in which it can be inhabited. Each project introduces a new layer of use, an opening towards the collective, towards the idea of permanence understood not as a monument, but as a relationship.
The event unfolded across the different spaces of the venue—the garden, the terrace, the warehouses—composing a journey that invited visitors to move without a fixed direction. The first firing of the oven and the collective paella served as welcome rituals; the colloquium with the resident artists, as a moment of shared reflection; the guided tour, as a journey through the traces of the process. Everything unfolded continuously, without interruption, until nightfall, when words gave way to sound and the space became a rave.
Music, an essential element in Pluto’s grammar, once again became the medium for thinking about collectivity from the body. Performances by TRS, Aloque, Yugen Kala and Mun Sing (UK) traced a narrative that moved from the local soundscape to the global impulse, weaving connections between diverse scenes and geographies. At Pluto, the rave does not appear as a conclusion, but as an extension of thought: a form of knowledge that manifests itself through rhythm, movement and shared presence.
Since its foundation in 2019 by Rita Delgado, José Martí and Carlos Sáez, Pluto has evolved as a space halfway between an industrial warehouse and a living laboratory. In the southern orchards of Valencia, it has consolidated a community that thinks of cultural production as a situated act, conscious of time, territory and its affections. Portal, with the support of PICE and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), crystallises this vision: a programme that does not seek results, but relationships; that understands construction not as a technique, but as a language.
What happens at Pluto is neither an exhibition nor a party, but something in between. A point where art merges with everyday life and the rural becomes a territory for experimentation. A place that, rather than displaying, proposes ways of being: staying, listening, building and, finally, celebrating.
The universe of Lolo and Sosaku merges with Carlos Sáez’s imagination in Pluto.
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