As a project, this show proposes an encounter of two subjective pathways. The first arises from the experience of each artist and the second from a sharing with the landscape defined by the garden surrounding the exhibition space. The architecture that embodies the exhibition rooms and the Jardim das Sereias are like containers/screens where we see ourselves as part of these organic spaces that extend in a concurrent relationship. The challenge proposed to the two artists, Ana Pérez-Quiroga and Helena Valsecchi, emerged from a personal reading of the text «A Cinemagoer’s Autobiography» from Italo Calvino’s The Road to San Giovanni. In this challenge, how the author sees himself as a viewer during the second half of the 20th century period of Italian history, questions his passion for the screen narratives and describes in detail the different stories and histories of this expression form in a close relationship with its everyday contemporaneity.

This intersection between art and life integrates procedures such as repérage and editing and reconfigures the place of the viewer into a field of possibilities that proposes, through artistic experience, to re-equate our own experience, even if for brief moments, in the exhibition rooms Sharing the feeling of loss, or of passion, the fragility of a path, and of a body and spirit memory, several questions arise about the forms and modalities that these can assume. Whether in the denouement of an event or in another way of breathing, transparent like an alveolus, the artists propose a correspondence that resonates in the garden through the amplitude of the windows and echoes in the rooms while transforming them into screens. In this transmutation, we can imagine a meadow and a picnic under a painted sky that envelops us, like the drawings of paths and luminous words, a seemingly interrupted, suspended landscape. The place of the viewer is the space of reconfiguration of memory, of the gaze of undetermined corporeality that returns in the works of the exhibition.

João Silvério