Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A terracotta-hued villa in labyrinthine gardens sweeps into view as the gates to the Albuquerque Foundation open \u2013 a postcard view one might expect of a quinta in Sintra, the Portuguese town close to Lisbon noted for its romantic architecture. The monolithic glass box wedged into landscaping beside it, however, goes wildly off-script \u2013 its undulating roof soars over the building like a sunhat, almost touching the shoulder of its sun-worn neighbour, which dates back\u00a0to the 1700s. The duality is striking: past and present\u00a0facing the future side by side.\u00a0This visual dichotomy takes on new meaning when\u00a0Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho appears, hand outstretched by way of greeting. The 45-year-old raven-haired Brazilian, a former human rights lawyer, stayed here as a child \u2013 her grandfather Renato de Albuquerque, a civil engineer and entrepreneur, bought the estate as a family holiday home in the \u201980s. Today, the two have spearheaded its transformation into an arts destination dedicated to ceramics. It opens this month, with an inaugural show by Theaster Gates.\u201cCeramics have everything to do with community,\u201d she says of the motivation for the project. \u201cThey are produced for the most convivial moments in life, for shared moments. This house has given us so much joy. Now we can share it with others.\u201dTeixeira de Carvalho lives and breathes art. The sculptural heels of her Dries Van Noten pumps and the splashes of colour on her coat hint at a calling that she\u2019s pursued since 2009, leading her to work as a director at a number of prominent galleries, including Hauser & Wirth. She lives in London with her seven-year-old daughter, Alba, whom she shares with her ex-husband, U2 bass guitarist Adam Clayton, but as the co-founder of the foundation and chair of the board she will be travelling between countries. She chats with easy candour as we take a tour of the grounds, pausing briefly to watch a gardener shuffle between lavender flowerbeds, as the sound of hammering rings out from the surrounding buildings \u2013 a flurry of final preparations.\u00a0It\u2019s been a long haul since construction got underway in 2021. The concept began with the idea of creating a permanent home for Renato\u2019s collection of Chinese ceramics \u2013 a 60-year labour of love that has culminated in the world\u2019s most significant collection of Ming and Qing dynasties export porcelain in private hands. It consists of more than 2,600 pieces, some of which have been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London\u2019s V&A, and includes rare examples of First Orders \u2013 the earliest commissions of Chinese porcelain by the Portuguese featuring European iconography.\u00a0The project \u201ccosting several million\u201d includes a purpose-built subterranean gallery concealed beneath the glass-box reception, envisaged by Brazilian studio Bernardes Arquitetura, which will showcase up to 20 per cent of the hitherto rarely seen works, with the remainder on rotation. \u201cWe will have different shows relating to different aspects of the collection, and tell the many stories attached to it, so people will always have something new to see,\u201d says Teixeira de Carvalho. \u201cBut we\u2019ll also probe the more difficult questions raised by it: it\u00a0represents a period in a history\u00a0of trade between two empires, one with the skills and resources to make porcelain, which fascinated Europeans, the other seafarers who mapped the world but\u00a0also colonised many parts of it.\u201dAnother part of the narrative is how her 97-year-old grandfather came by the artefacts. \u201cHe\u2019s so charismatic, a true storyteller with so many anecdotes,\u201d says Teixeira de Carvalho as we descend a spiral staircase into the wood-lined gallery. Warm, serene and punctured by foliage-filled windows, the space is the opposite of a white cube. \u201cI love his story about how he came across a pair of 18th-century eagles,\u201d she continues. \u201cHe searched for 40 years to find them and bring them back together!\u201d\u00a0Renato, who lives in Brazil, initially had to be \u201cstrongarmed\u201d to take part\u00a0in Teixeira de Carvalho\u2019s grand scheme, fearful it would be seen as an ego project. \u201cIt was always a private passion, something he did for himself, and for years no one knew who owned the collection. It was only when the Met organised a show in 2016 but could not proceed with an anonymous owner that he agreed to be named. Before then, it was simply known as the RA collection.\u201d\u00a0We peer through treasure-filled glass cases that stretch through the mid-section of the building. \u201cOh, there\u2019s the crab,\u201d Teixeira de Carvalho says excitedly, spotting a crustacean-shaped tureen produced c1770 during the Qing dynasty. There are only two other such examples in the world. \u201cAnd these plates,\u201d she says, pulling open a drawer. \u201cThey feature the coats of arms of various European families. The collection is so diverse \u2013 some pieces are super-traditional, others quirky \u2013 but what strikes you most is how these delicate objects have\u00a0survived over decades. The oldest piece in the collection, made of some kind of terracotta, is from the 20th century BC. To finally have everything together in\u00a0Portugal, where many of the pieces were first commissioned, it\u2019s like a homecoming.\u201d\u00a0Teixeira de Carvalho sneaks us into a temperature-controlled unit that is typically out of bounds: a trove filled with objets of all kinds. In one corner is a giant wooden horse brazenly baring its teeth and, in another, a Japanese Namban saddle. But she heads straight to a drawer filled with her favourite pieces. \u201cLook,\u201d she says almost whispering as she holds a hand mirror up to the light, the frame and handle painted with delicate\u00a0flowers. \u201cOh, and this is exquisite,\u201d she says, carefully returning the mirror before lifting the tiny lid of\u00a0an ornate inkwell next to it. \u201cCan you believe, its glass\u00a0container is still intact.\u201d\u00a0Teixeira de Carvalho has inherited her grandfather\u2019s collecting genes, even taking a course at the V&A in Chinese ceramics with a view to helping to safeguard the\u00a0collection. But her own interests are also reflected at\u00a0the foundation, which will show both modern and traditional work. \u201cI live in the contemporary world,\u201d she\u00a0says, as we leave the gallery and head to another new\u00a0building at the far end of the gardens. Here, a changing roster of shows will spotlight emerging and established ceramic artists. \u201cThis entire region is attracting a much more international crowd, and this is what most of them will want to see.\u201d\u00a0Kickstarting the contemporary programme with Gates is a statement of intent \u2013 as is the foundation team\u2019s line-up, which includes Italian-born art critic and curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. \u201cTheaster was already working on his Afro-Mingei exhibition for the Mori Art Museum in\u00a0Japan \u2013 part of what we will show here is coming from\u00a0there,\u201d Visconti says. \u201cIt\u2019s a ceramic floor made from\u00a0black clay where Gates will install a series of his own sculptures and a selection of pieces he personally chose from the Albuquerque Collection. The layered histories that each of those objects carry will meet and clash. It\u2019s about a mingling of cultures, which is all very\u00a0present in his work in general.\u201d\u00a0He gleefully recounts the story of how Gates fooled the world with a fictional Japanese ceramicist called Shoji Yamaguchi, a figure supposedly married to a Black\u00a0civil-rights activist, who he invented to spark conversations about the marginalisation of certain ethnic\u00a0groups and artistic mediums. The ruse was only revealed when Gates turned up at the opening of Yamaguchi\u2019s real-life exhibition and announced it was his work at the end of the evening. \u201cHe\u2019s a very contemporary and extremely urgent artist,\u201d says Visconti. \u201cWe want people to visit the permanent collection and then come down here and make the connection.\u201d\u201cPlus, Gates began with ceramics,\u201d Teixeira de Carvalho chimes in, \u201cand he\u2019s acutely preoccupied with\u00a0community-based projects.\u201d She recalls being influenced by the work of Brazilian artist Anna\u00a0Maria Maiolino at Documenta 13 in 2012; she had filled a former\u00a0gardener\u2019s home with abstract, unfired clay pieces. \u201cI guess that unconsciously sparked the idea\u00a0of doing something with this house, but I was also struck by the juxtaposition of ceramics as both high art and domestic objects. There is a duality to the medium, but also a familiarity that most can relate to. People can\u00a0be\u00a0intimidated by huge canvases, but there\u2019s an ancestral\u00a0memory in ceramics.\u201d\u00a0We enter the old villa where she and her sister shared a bedroom when returning from their studies in Brazil; generations of her family gathered for celebrations here, around a long table in what was the dining area. \u201cMy bedroom was all pink,\u201d she says, \u201cand my mother\u2019s yellow and red. Both have now become part of a residency where we\u2019ve created space for three residents.\u201dDownstairs, the store is set to be a go-to for Portuguese artists such as Beatriz Horta Correia, Vania R Goncalves and design practice Ther, while the hope is that the bar and restaurant will draw families wanting to stay for the day. But despite the excitement at the new, nostalgia creeps in when we enter the old chapel adorned with Portuguese azulejo tiles beneath a frescoed ceiling. Untouched by the renovations, it will be a quiet space to sit and watch presentations about the project. \u201cWe\u2019ve been careful to embrace the past and bring it with us,\u201d Teixeira de Carvalho says. \u201cThe old anchors the new, one\u00a0is not better than the other.\u201dI ask how it feels to hand over the home. \u201cI had\u00a0mixed\u00a0feelings when we closed down the house. All my grandmother\u2019s things were here, and I came with my\u00a0grandfather and my daughter, and we were dealing with the possibility of losing my grandmother [she died in\u00a0January 2023] and the loss of this place; but at\u00a0the same\u00a0time, we were together and\u00a0we knew we were going\u00a0to\u00a0turn this into something amazing. That was a rite\u00a0of passage,\u201d she says looking around the villa. \u201cThe moment\u00a0this stopped being a family home and became something\u00a0bigger than us.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A terracotta-hued villa in labyrinthine gardens sweeps into view as the gates to the Albuquerque Foundation open \u2013 a postcard view one might expect of a quinta in Sintra, the Portuguese town close to Lisbon noted for its romantic architecture. The monolithic glass box<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":189098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-189097","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189099,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189097\/revisions\/189099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}