Leisure School presents, for the first time in Portugal, an important body of work by the artist Priscila Fernandes (1981) in which she invites us to reflect on leisure. Specifically designed for the CIAJG, the exhibition covers her recent series - Never Touch the Ground (2020), Labour Series (2018-2020) and Free.To do Whatever We (2018).

For the ancient Greeks, scholē (school) meant leisure and practicing leisure was associated to observation and discussion; the term also referred to those who thought in a community, something that the artist now finds to be necessary and urgent. The meaning of the word leisure however has transformed over time, deviating from its original meaning, and migrated towards the ideas of free time vs production especially in the 20th century in the context of the western modern-capitalist project. Given the current algorithmicization of life, in which a new app is developed at every moment in time to maximise and monitor our improving productivity, what space does leisure occupy in our contemporary world.
Different pedagogies for studying leisure are explored across the three rooms of this exhibition. In one a fictional TV presenter tries to prove the relationship between the development of leisure and the emergence of abstract art. In anothergrand artistic gestures are exercised while wearing roller skates. And lastly a room where chains are broken (in a kind of challenge of liberation), are we Free. To do Whatever We?